Having a favorite subject can make or break a school day for you.
And then a teacher goes and ruins it.
Reddit user, u/mochibebe_, wanted to hear which teacher ruined things for you when they asked:
What was a subject you loved in school, but a teacher ruined it for you?
It takes a lot of effort to be a bad teacher. Most of the time, students are there to try and get something from you.
Anything. Literally, anything.
So when you show up to work every day, unprepared, ready to be a roadblock between a child and their education, you must be exerting extra effort to slow things down.
Point Out What A Student Considers Their Flaws
"wanted to like PE/gym like my peers, but the teacher actively made fun of me for being short/small/slow. i ended up with a lifelong fear of exercise, especially in public."
"the good news is, just a few years ago, i finally moved past my fear (therapy is awesome) and started going to the gym daily. eventually i not only enjoyed it, but it became a source of stress/anxiety relief. i would still be there every day, but pandemic restrictions..."
Refusing To Give The Help You Need
"Math and Chemistry."
"Mrs. White. Math teacher was condescending and annoying. I had been in advanced honor-roll math up until this one lesson in high school that I didn't quite catch. Instead of explaining it clearly or finding a different way to explain it - she just kept demanding I finish the work. She finally explained it differently in the most obvious way possible and I remember standing next the to board in Extra Help - which I had never needed in my life - and I just said "Why on earth didn't you explain it like that months ago?"."
"By that time I was too far behind in the class and I've never been interested enough to get back into it as I'm now decades behind."
"Chemisty. I thought chemistry was so bloody awesome when I went into it. To this day: decades later, I've never had a teacher that was simply such an unfathomable bore as that guy. I couldn't stand it."
"I literally dropped the class because the level of boredom was actually making me angry."
A Bore's Bore
"Physics. My teacher is just really lazy she reads the PowerPoint, tells us to write things down then gives us a worksheet."
"If your always tired, either find a solution or don't become a teacher."
And who could have ever predicted that actors are dramatic?
Choosing Future Stars And Starlets
"Theater."
"Teacher had favorites and it showed. She also sang over me in our class play because other students forgot their lines... so she just started singing the whole thing."
Not As Important As You Think
"I loved theater. Or drama as we called it. Then one day the asst principal walked in and said "the school no longer has a drama department due to budget concerns, this is now study hall."
"So that kinda ruined it for me I guess. The football team had new uniforms and a scoreboard the following month too."
Fighting Back Against The Line-Reading Man!
"Our grade school music teacher did this. I wasn't into acting but we had a couple of kids who were already pretty good by 6th grade."
"She would speak out every line to "help" everyone on stage. A friend and I were given a brief scene in 8th grade where we were supposed to have one line each because every 8th grader was required to be in the play."
"After the first dress rehearsal we decided we'd improvise our lines so she couldn't talk over us."
"Performance for the school we get a few chuckles and teacher gets mad we didn't use the lines in the script."
"Performance for parents and family we amped it up to 11 and get the whole audience laughing at our two lines that turned into four (which were supposed to be funny in the original script) and teacher is so frustrated she stops narrating the rest of the script."
"Didn't ruin it for me, but I always wonder if she put a few of the others off performing."
You want a teacher to be exciting, engaging, and overall, interesting with the material they're teaching you.
Less time spent listening to boring lectures and more time spent interacting with your classmates about the topic, synthesizing projects from the material, and actually try to learn something.
These teachers might have taken it too far.
Flipping The Script
"A Psychology teacher in high school that told the whole class we were pathetic and that not one of us would pass exams. She said that she was leaving teaching the following year because our class had completely ruined the job for her."
"She routinely told us she hated us, and that we were all going nowhere in life."
"We all banded together out of sheer mutual hatred with a pact to prove her wrong, studied our @sses off and no one in the class got below an A."
"The next year, she showed up to work smiling and laughing like none of it ever happened. The b-tch reverse-psychologied us."
RubyJadeDiamondBullied By Parents?
"French. We used to have such a great french teacher but parents didn't seem to like her and she had to leave because the parents actually bullied her."
"Then we got a different teacher who I didn't get along with at all and my grades dropped so badly, I never recovered."
"Another subject was art. However it was just temporary."
"I was always somewhat good in drawing and I was creative and had good grades in art. But our next teacher was... weird and tend to give big chested girls better grades on top of that."
"Needless to say, grades dropped from A's to D's"
"And last subject that was ruined forever was Religion. I never really believed in god but this teacher shoved religion so much down our throats that I began to hate religion and everyone who is religious."
"I had terrible prejudices against religious people and really HATED anything that had to do with god. It took me years after school to accept that religious people aren't all like my teacher..."
Maybe The Worse Thing You Can Say To A Student
"I use to love creative writing and would always get great feedback from previous teachers....until my 6th grade ultra conservative teacher gave me bad marks for "writing too much" and "having a wild imagination".
"I completely lost my passion for writing after that. FTB!"
Teaching is hard. That's never been the issue.
It's finding the right person who can do it well, and not kill a student's passion, that's always been the trouble.
Want to "know" more? Never miss another big, odd, funny, or heartbreaking moment again. Sign up for the Knowable newsletter here.
