Bad Teachers

I’ve experienced some really “bad” teachers throughout my school career, and I’m assuming that’s not going to end until I graduate from college. I don’t know what caused these teachers to not do their one job, teach, but I seemed to always have at least one teacher who was just terrible. When I say terrible, I’m not putting all of these teachers in the same category. Surely they were bad teachers for different reasons. And maybe they weren’t actually bad teachers per say, but they either taught me very little because of their methods of teaching, or not teaching in some cases, or they were just overly strict and set the class up for us to fail.

Bad teachers aren’t always mean teachers. In my senior year of high school I took economics. Going into the class I was excited because it was something that I was very interested in and I figured the teacher would lecture and I would grasp everything, I was mistaken. The class was basically what I’ve noticed my college classes are like. He would put up slide shows and give us information, but the majority of the tests would be from our homework. Essentially, we were teaching ourselves economics. The worst part of the class wasn’t that we were teaching ourselves; the worst part of the class was undoubtedly that I’m not entirely convinced that he even read through our tests when he graded them. I should probably note that this teachers eyesight was absolutely horrendous and I kind of came to the idea of him not reading the tests for that reason. Honestly, I cheated on some of the tests and ended up receiving the same grade as if I hadn’t cheated. This gave me another suspicion because I would write the explanation he gave us word for word the day before and write that same exact thing on the test and get it wrong. I felt like he just had a set grade range for everyone and the majority of the time he just stayed in that grade range. This probably sounds actually ridiculous, but that’s just what it seemed like.

Now I should probably mention that I liked this teacher a lot despite his teaching methods. Yes he told jokes that were very corny and usually not very funny, but he had his moments. I guess I liked him because of all the baseball references he made, especially to Joe Mauer because he was from Minnesota. He would always ask how the baseball team is going to look in the spring and just loved to have a conversation about anything that interested him. He showed a bunch of British movies in class, which I saw as a big relief from all of the lectures. The movies were related to economics, kind of, but they were more for comedy than anything. When it came time to write our research paper he told me to write about baseball, and of course I did. I actually enjoyed writing that paper, which was about the economic effects of building a baseball stadium. Looking back on the class I definitely learned a lot, but his teaching style just wasn’t ideal for me.

What does a student do when the teacher is basically setting them up to fail? The other type of bad teacher that I have experienced is by far the worse of the two. I remember in one of my math classes, which I was taking at college placement level, not honors; the teacher decided it would be a good idea to give us all honors tests. Of course the majority of the students, including me, totally disagreed with it, but there was nothing we could do about it. So we did the best we could, which wasn’t always great but it averaged out pretty well. Honestly, if I wanted to takes honors tests I would’ve just taken the honors class.

I have always been opposed to teachers like this. I thought that the point of a class was to teach you the information needed to do well and challenge you once in a while, not challenge you so much that the class is essentially set up for failure. And again we revisit the fact that I could’ve taught myself the material and do just as well on the quizzes and tests. Of course it is much more effective for the teachers to provide you with the materials you need to succeed, but teachers rarely do this. Although I didn’t enjoy the challenges of teaching myself the material and working harder than I wanted to while it was happening, I look back on it with a sense of relief. It’s beginning to seem to me that college classes more often than not take this shape. I can’t tell you how many times I heard that you have to be “self-driven” in the first week of classes.

Becoming self-driven, to an extent, in high school definitely helped me prepare for college. Of course, I doubt that this is what the teachers were trying to do. Whether they were or not, they did. If it weren’t for the teachers that I have had in the past I think that it would have been a much greater struggle for me to get used to college classes. Now, here I am almost two months in and self- motivating myself rather successfully.  

Did I have bad teachers in my schooling career? Of course, everyone does. But even though these teachers were bad in my opinion, they weren’t bad in every aspect of teaching. They were just bad for me at that specific time in my learning. These teachers did teach me lessons beyond the curriculum, and they did prepare me for my future. Personally, I would rather be prepared for my personal future than simply for the tests in a class. Teachers don’t always have the most fitting teaching methods for you personally, but it is these teachers that teach you to become independent, to push yourself harder, and essentially become the person you are supposed to be.

-Eric Proulx