When you're a student, it feels like your teachers are these mythical, perfect authority figures who don't have lives of their own. They definitely don't have pasts. When you get older and find out the truth, it can be shocking.
The people in the following stories found out the real-life secrets of teachers they had, and what they found will stay with them forever.
(Content has been edited for clarity.)
A Failed System
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“My high school taught from age 11 to age 18. You had six years of high school, taking a two-year course in years three and four that led to a basic qualification in the subject, then there were two further one-year courses that led to more advanced qualifications, with the year six course being for those considering studying the subject at university.
My English teacher in years three and four was one of those teachers who liked to be friends with his students. He would be in his mid-40s at the time. He seemed to be keen to encourage me to read all sorts of weird novels. Then a new girl joined the class and he transferred his attention to her. I have mild autism, so I didn’t pick up on stuff that happened between them at the time.
About a year after he was no longer my teacher, I found out that he’d slept with the other girl after grooming her. The school just told him not to do it again. Then a few years after I left school, my mother told me he’d killed himself, after he’d been caught having a relationship with another underage pupil and he’d propositioned several more. There was a different principal by that time so he was reported to the police and killed himself after he’d been questioned and bailed.
The worst part was finding out that he’d been employed at my state school after being sacked from a private school because he’d had a relationship with a pupil in her senior year. The school I went to thought the best solution to that problem was to only allow him to teach pupils up to the age of 15! We’d always wondered why he didn’t teach the top two years because he had a Ph.D. and would’ve been an obvious choice to teach those taking the most advanced English courses. I still feel sick over what happened to the other girl and about what could easily have happened to me. Both of us were vulnerable and had she not joined the class, I could have been his victim because I was so naive.”
Rumors Can Be Just Rumors
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“There was this one gym teacher we had called Mr. H, and he was known all around as a pervert. He would flirt with bigger girls, stand near their changing rooms, have girls demonstrate exercise moves standing beside him, stuff like that. Everyone hated him. Period.
A few years ago, he became my gym teacher. I was petrified. My friends were petrified. We would watch him almost creepily to note his behaviors, then after class, we’d talk about the perverted stuff we’d seen, blowing it way out of proportion.
Rumors were relentlessly spread; I’m sure teachers even knew about this teacher’s reputation. Then the day came where my views were questioned. When things were never quite the same again.
I saw him at a restaurant with his family; wife, two daughters in their teens, and a little boy. At first, I was shocked. I didn’t know a creepy weirdo like Mr. H could have a family. She must’ve been desperate. Then I knew in that instance that it was my duty to spy on him and observe his behaviors out of class. His daughters were probably traumatized wrecks, his wife sullen and dejected, his family life in shambles like his school life. I knew my friends would want to know. So I spied on him. I sat in the booth in front them and listened to everything. I tuned out my family and had both ears trained on Mr. H’s table.
I couldn’t hear much except when they got loud, but I could SEE a happy family, I could see little hearts flowing all around their tables, and I could see two girls who loved their father. I knew it wasn’t an act in the little things they did. I remember he said, ‘You’ve got a little ketchup on your cheek, buddy, let me get that,’ and before his little son could respond with a ‘where?’ Mr. H grabbed a fry and wiped off the ketchup and ate it. Their whole table burst into laughter. A giant heart burst into little heart sparkles all over their table, and I felt a horrible rock manifesting in my gut.
Perhaps a perverted man has boundaries. But I choose to believe otherwise.
I could not see Mr. H the way I’d seen him before; a creepy, perverted man with personal space issues. Every time I saw him, I also saw the father I’d seen that night.
Believe it or not, I now had two lenses. The pervert and the normal father. I found over time that everything my classmates gushed about was blown way out of proportion.
I saw that when I approached him, he was normal. He was not overly nice or overly rude, he was a gym teacher, respectful and helpful. He never did anything perverted – because I wasn’t acting like a you-know-what. He listened to my suggestions for ideas, he picked me to teach the day’s exercises when I volunteered. I stopped thinking of him as a pervert. He was a good gym teacher, and I loved gym that year! I told my friends about the day in the restaurant. They did not have a reason not to believe me.
We found other stuff to talk about.
I do hope he wasn’t (and isn’t) affected by the rumors. I hope he was oblivious to them all. He didn’t deserve to be outed like that. He didn’t deserve to have girls being strange around him and pull their necklines up to their chins, guys giving him the evil eye, stuff like that. It’s a good thing I never knew his daughters, so they probably went to another school. In reality, I’m sure their approval mattered so much more to him. That’s why he never cared about his notoriously (false) reputation in school.”
Everybody’s Got A Sad Past
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“While I was in school, I had a subject called Hindi taught by a man who was in his late-50s.
He used to act funny in class, and the most disturbing thing was he used to kind of flirt with other married teachers. He used to laugh and dance away shaking his body at silly things towards mainly his female colleagues. I used to feel pity for his wife. Though I had never met her, the way he used to behave in school made me feel that way.
He also had a bad habit of eating paan all the time. His mouth used to stink.
But one day, our English teacher told us something about him which he had told her a few years back. She told us because we didn’t take him seriously most of the time.
It turns out his wife had died many years ago. He felt lonely all the time. He also started eating addictive unhealthy paan so as to make the time pass by chewing something to reduce the loneliness.
After hearing this, I was shocked at how he was able to act funny in the class and with other teachers suffering from such a trauma.
So he didn’t flirt with teachers. Maybe he just understood the value of a woman in a man’s life and took them seriously. Maybe that’s why he used to talk in a happy mood with female colleagues. He never misbehaved with any teacher. I just assumed bad things about him. Every teacher respected him. Now things started making sense about his behavior after knowing that fact. He retired a few years ago.
He taught me many life lessons. It was a wonderful experience altogether.”
Getting All The Sad Facts
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“This last summer, about 10 years after the fact, I discovered that the reason for my father’s failed suicide, which caused me a year of emotional hardship and depression, was finding my mother in bed with the eighth-grade science teacher.
It was a snowy winter, and we were stranded on our hilly street. My father, who normally turned in for the night around 9 p.m., awoke to the sound of my mother moaning downstairs. He figured she was probably just helping herself and went down to assist her, only to discover her with another man.
Seeing my father, my former science teacher, ran outside into the snow and hid in the bushes. A half-hour later (during which I have no idea what took place), my mother asked my father to return the man’s clothes.
Instead of handing the man back his shirt and pants, my father threw them into a thicket of thorny blackberry bushes.
Three hours later, he went sledding into ongoing traffic, which resulted in a permanent brain injury and him needing to be hospitalized for over a year. Little did my father know, I was outside to bear witness.
Thanks a lot, Mr. Lapin. You were a great teacher, but a horrible human being.”
Love Is Cruel
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“One of my pharmacology teachers had an affair with one of the students in my school. This is not the shocking part, every student knew about the inappropriate affair. It was one of those times when the gossip spread like wildfire.
She (the teacher) and he (the student) were doing many unmentionable things. Study rooms in school would be found suspiciously locked from the inside. Lunch dates and gift exchanges were taking place. He was getting easy A’s.
However, what she was unaware of was that he had many such opportunistic arrangements with many other girls in school, albeit she was the only teacher in the flock. Until one day she caught up to his tomfoolery. And she lost it.
She yelled and screamed and cursed. She slapped and pushed him. She cried. The authorities had to be called in, but she wouldn’t calm down. They had to lock her in the dean’s office for a while to have her pull herself together. It was horrible. It was unbelievable.
She was lucky, they did not fire her. Rather they gave her a chance to voluntarily resign.
Her complete disregard for the risk it posed to her career and how love drives away every ounce of common sense was shocking.”
Aaron’s Jacket
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“Our class was horrible. We were notorious for being loud, crazy, disruptive, and generally doing no work. This poor teacher had our class two years in a row. She was maybe 75 years old. I remember one student counting all the wrinkles on her arm. Every other week, this teacher would put her head in her arms on the table while we would run amok. Other teachers were much more stern with our class, but she was gentle and would sometimes laugh at our stupid antics. Our nickname for our teacher was ‘Aaron’s Jacket’ because she would frequently wear a jacket with a random phrase sewn onto it that said something like ‘Aaron is going there. What a beautiful day.’
So when we found out that Aaron’s Jacket had been in beauty pageants when she was (much) younger, we were shocked. She even showed us black-and-white photos of her pageant days. Of course, she was beautiful and almost unrecognizable as she was old at the time.
Did we start behaving in class and acting respectfully towards her? You bet we didn’t. No teacher was exempt from our madness. I doubt, in her young and beautiful years, that she would have ever imagined herself, in the future, trying to teach Japanese to a set of undisciplined monkeys. Looking back, I feel so sorry for her. We probably aged her by 10 years.
I have a class photo from that year – we took a normal serious photo, then asked if we could take a funny unofficial one. In the front center is the principal and Aaron’s Jacket, sitting upright and stoic, not smiling. Then to their sides and behind them is us, the crazy wild students doing random poses and faces.”
Sometimes Being The Cool Teacher Isn’t A Good Thing
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“My Classical Civilization Class was heading up to London in November 2014 on the first trip of the new school year. We were a class of just six students, so we all had a close-knit relationship with each other and with our teacher. After this trip, I could never look at Ms. L in the same way.
Our lessons were fun readings and discussions on ancient Grecian texts, and we all enjoyed them. Now, our teacher (Ms. L – for short) was a fun and quirky 30-something divorcee. She’d left and returned to the school several times in just the past few years, and had a well-documented horrible divorce, followed by a string of bad relationships.
By the end of the second week in her class (the first time since I’d had her for Latin a few years prior), I’d learned that when she was still married, she had found her husband cheating on her with her best friend. He then left her. She was eight months pregnant. Her next three boyfriends were ‘troubled.’ Then, her most recent boyfriend had also had issues and had burned a hand-made replica of her childhood home that her grandfather had built her. She then proudly proclaimed that she was looking for a new man, and did any of us (16-year-olds) know any suitable men? Now, I thought she was joking on this last point, but boy was I wrong. Over the coming weeks before our trip, she was entirely too happy to divulge information about her past that I would have rather not known. Each time this happened, the whole class would look uneasily at each other, but hey, she was fun. She would also say things that shocked me; about how she hated teaching my class when we were young, and how she hated the year below us. She crossed a line when talking about which teachers she had known at the school that had slept with students, which ones were bullies, and retelling the story of the teacher that she had met on the nudist beach! With every lesson, we found out more and more about her.
About two weeks after asking if we knew any good men for her, she announced she’d met someone.
Three weeks before the trip, she announces her engagement and spends the entire double lesson showing us her expensive engagement ring. She had known the guy only a couple of weeks.
By now, we kind of knew what kind of person she was, and couldn’t have imagined that it would get worse.
It came to a head when we went away. The trip was a disaster.
We were late for the play that we’d gone up to see and she’d nearly killed a cyclist. We found out we were staying at her fiance’s church. her fiance was not CRB/DBS checked, and could have been a murdering criminal for all our parents knew. That first night, everyone fell asleep quite quickly, except for me. That was when I heard it, at 1 a.m., the soft moans emanating from the next room. The room belonging to my teacher and her London-based fiance.
I had known that they hadn’t seen each other in weeks, but surely she couldn’t? She wouldn’t? I closed my eyes and ignored the noise.
The next evening, we got back from dinner. We were all still up, chatting and laughing when Ms. L and her fiance left to go to their room, the vestry of the church. She claimed to be a devout Christian, although she was liberal.
Within minutes, we heard screams and moans of ‘Oh God!’ It went on for so long. This was bad enough, but the fact that she’d previously asked to borrow a student’s blow-up bed (they’d had to leave early), made it incredibly uncomfortable.
The next morning, unbeknownst to us, she locked us all in the church while she went back to her fiance’s house. She returned in pajamas.
The rest of the trip was spent avoiding eye-contact with her, and she even took us shopping for wedding dresses AND invited us all to the wedding.
Truly, she was the most narcissistic teacher, and I was shocked to learn just how much she had no interest in our education and was more interested in gaining our approval of her, and of using our education to sneak off with her partner.”
Not A Great Teacher, But A Smart Saver
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“One of my math teachers in high school was a millionaire. He wasn’t the greatest teacher nor the smartest, so discovering it was quite a surprise.
Teachers in Alberta, Canada, earned no more than $60,000 per year back then, which was the highest provincial educator salary in Canada. He had a family with two kids, for which he was the sole provider. This was a crappy public high school which is still ranked third from the bottom in the entire city (and 11th from the bottom in the province, out of 270 high schools).
So where did his wealth come from?
He bought a house a few years or so prior to teaching me. After a few years, Alberta economy boomed due to the astronomically rising price of oil. His home went from $400,000 to around $2 million due to ridiculous demand. Suddenly he was a millionaire (on paper).
In addition, being a math teacher, he was aware of the basics of compound interest, so over the years, he accumulated nearly a $1 million in a nest egg. He was in his mid-40s at the time.”
Living A Lie
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“I went to a strict Catholic high school. My history and morality teacher was my inspiration to become a teacher. Later in life, I found out he was dying from AIDS. I then found out he was active in the LGBT community. I had never known, and he taught vehemently along Catholic dogma about the evils of being gay despite being gay himself.
I think that was when I saw the true nature of religion. One of the greatest teachers in my entire life, the reason I became a teacher, had to live a lie.”
Laffy Taffy Isn’t THAT Good!
“My teacher from the first to third grade was my hero. He was a strong tall, proud black man. He was active in the national guard, and anytime he lead us around, he had us perform fun chanting drills so that everyone on campus knew who was coming. He had a beautiful wife and child, and while he was physically intimidating, he had one of the softest hearts. Everyone around campus loved and respected him.
He left the school suddenly a couple years later. He was there one day, gone the next. Everyone was distraught and confused. We were told he found another job at another school, and everyone moved on.
One day, the subject came up with one of my friends, and I got the full story. Another teacher had been fired at the same time, but no one took notice. My friend, Dillon, took classes with a personal tutor who assisted kids who were struggling with ADD/ADHD at the school. They had their own classrooms in more secluded areas of the school. Dillon’s teacher kept a bowl of Laffy Taffys to reward the kids for solving problems. Some was going missing and she took notice. So with the help of Dillon, she set up a motion-activated hunting camera to see if anyone was sneaking into her classroom.
One day, when reviewing the footage, they found two people enter the classroom. They stripped down, went to town, took a Laffy Taffy, and returned to class. Putting the puzzle pieces together – these were the two teachers who got fired. Both were married to someone else and both had kids of their own. They risked their careers, personal lives, and reputations for a few good moments and some Laffy Taffys.”
So Cool He Even Got The Teacher
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“This was ages ago, back before the internet. When I was a young lad in high school, I was too big a geek to get a girlfriend. I was way too ‘book smart’ for my own good, and wasn’t tough enough to hang out with the jocks. I had the usual teenage hormones, but no girl would get within 10 feet of me if she could avoid it.
I tried to improve my luck with girls by getting a ‘cool friend’ who was effortlessly able to chat up girls. I hoped I could learn from him. I was hoping his confidence would rub off on me. He was a juvenile delinquent; he seldom went to class, showed little respect for the teachers, and didn’t care if they called his parents to complain.
He told me of his bedroom adventures too, name-dropping here and there. He never went a weekend without getting lucky. I would regularly see him chatting up girls that were not his regular girlfriend.
Now, I should mention, it wasn’t just hot young girls in my classes that caught my eye at school. There were three female teachers in their mid-to-late-20s who were attractive. They tried to relate to us kids because they remembered being teenagers and didn’t want to be old battle-axes like some of the older women on the faculty.
It goes without saying that these three lovely teachers were the objects of many male fantasies, and not just for me.
It turns out, one of my beautiful 20-something teachers found my ‘cool friend’ attractive, too. To protect her privacy, I’ll call her ‘Jennifer X.’ In retrospect, I have to wonder how he managed it because he seldom went to classes, especially English class, which is what Jennifer X taught.
A few years after we graduated high school, we met for coffee and donuts and were talking about an upcoming school reunion. The subject turned to the females that were going, and he thought it would be fun to run into some of his old ‘conquests’ again.
He started name-dropping again, ‘Janet, Kelley R, Tina, maybe Jennifer X will be there.’
My heart froze in my chest. My mouth dropped open. Perhaps I was a little too naive for my own good, even in my 20s, but I somehow thought it impossible that a teacher would show any interest in a high school kid.
Why do I think he was not lying? Because he had that ‘bad boy’ appeal, and chicks often noticed it. Also, his disrespectful attitude towards authority figures suggested that he wasn’t worried about getting in trouble for sneaking into a teacher’s bed.
Moreover, there were times when, even though he had a half-dozen girlfriends in their early 20s, he would muse out loud, when we were driving around, about ‘What it would be like to bang a woman who’s in her 30s.’
Also, the way he called her by name was a big tip-off. When I talked about teachers, I almost always used the honorific: I have to go see Mr. A. Have you finished Mrs. B’s assignment? Miss C was sick today. I wish Mr. D would drop dead! Even when I didn’t like them, I never discussed them by their first name. I might have discussed them by their LAST name, but I would never say, ‘That Jim Smith is such a loser!’ I never used teachers’ first names in high school.
But he referred to her as Jennifer X. And the way he described it, it seemed like she came onto him. ‘Right in the classroom!’ He exclaimed with disbelief. I could just picture him and her in an empty classroom, after school, with the door locked.”