Lousy Teachers

In the process of a long crawl through the educational system, I've had many great teachers.

They are worthy of much discussion and praise, but not today. Nor will we get into the subject of lousy students who squander opportunity after opportunity to learn.

Let's pause instead to remember the terrible teachers: the egomaniacs, the thoroughly inept, the time-servers, and loons. Truth be told, those poor examples of the teaching profession can brand far more memories than the marvelous ones. Some examples that I've encountered are:

• The history professor who read his colorless lectures in a monotone and then got upset when students fell asleep.


• A professor who sat behind a desk for his monologues, showed no enthusiasm at all for the topic, and who, on one memorable occasion, actually got up and wrote something on the board.


• Law professors (note the plural) who had not mastered the Socratic Method but were brilliant practitioners of the Sarcastic Method.


• An elementary school teacher who routinely dealt with the misbehavior of one student by punishing the entire class.


• The many instructors who used test questions that were better suited for Trivial Pursuit than for a serious assessment of the student's knowledge.


• The closet sociopaths who saw their role vis-a-vis the students as an adversarial relationship.

One lesson all of the above left with me: To strive never to be like them.