From belittling a student in front of the whole class for his essay writing skills to teaching class that Jupiter is bigger than the sun and disregarding one student's objection, people share the worst thing a teacher has ever said to them.
(Content has been edited for clarity.)
No Sense Of Understanding For This Condition
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“I have a blood sugar condition called reactive hypoglycemia. It is easily managed with food. I had a doctor’s note on file with the school nurse, which allowed me to eat at specific times to regulate my sugar levels.
My fifth-grade teacher decided that I didn’t have a blood sugar condition, I was just dramatic. The one time I forgot my snack, (I was 10 years old, and that was the first time in four year’s I’d forgotten it,) she didn’t let me call my mom to get food. I had the blood sugar meltdown I warned her would happen, which at that age was just uncontrollable shaking and crying. She dragged me to the front of the class and demanded somebody else give me their food because even though it wasn’t fair, I was a drama queen baby and they had to ‘humor’ me.
I ran out of the room, crying harder. She caught me, dragged me to the Special Ed room, and left me there.”
Getting Singled Out In Reading Class
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“I was in the third grade. I had (wrongly) been put into a slow reading group since first grade. I was in groups with kids that could barely read and causing trouble because I was bored. Finally, my mom went to my third-grade teacher and asked for me to be moved into a more advanced group so I would stop getting in trouble.
My first day in the new group, the teacher announced to everybody that I was moving up from the slower group because my mom had raised a ruckus and that I’d better prove that I belonged in the advanced group. The teacher further singled me out by making read aloud, but instead of just reading a paragraph or two like the other kids, she made me read the entire story aloud by myself.
When I finished, I asked if she wanted me to read the next one to the class too.”
Not A Useless Field Anymore
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“I once had a surveying instructor tell me that environmental engineering was a useless field and that the only career I could ever hope to get with a degree in it was installing septic tanks for a living.
I came to learn from a friend of his at the state Department of Transportation office a few years later that the teacher taught not for fun but because he was broke. He installs septic tanks for a living.”
This Third-Grade Teacher Who Is A Space-Case
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“The year I was in third grade was one of the best and worst of my entire educational experience, and both of those extremes were because of the teacher I had. She was beloved by most of her students — the female ones especially — but had a habit of being passive-aggressive and saccharine towards more difficult pupils. She’d find (or invent) reasons to ignore difficult questions, offer vague threats about impending punishments, or make small efforts to turn classmates against one another. She was not an especially likable educator, and she became a truly reprehensible one when she insisted that Jupiter was larger than the sun.
At first, it seemed like a misunderstanding. Our class had just entered into an astronomy unit, and one of our activities was to construct a scale model of the solar system. The reference image we used came from a picture book, and in it, the sun had been reduced in size. The teacher had not noticed this fact and was, therefore, operating under the mistaken assumption that Jupiter was our largest celestial neighbor.
Well, I knew better, and I tried to correct her. She replied to me with a tone of aloof dismissal, stating quite clearly that I was wrong.
‘That’s okay, though,’ she said. ‘After all, you’re in school to learn new things.’ Then she smiled sweetly, and I returned to my seat feeling thoroughly confused and frustrated. In the weeks that followed, I engaged in an all-out war against my teacher’s pseudoscience. My father, having heard everything from me, sent me to school with one of his college textbooks, hoping to turn the tide of the battle. My teacher refused to even look at it.
‘Class,’ she said, rolling her eyes, ‘who can tell Max what the biggest object in the solar system is?’
My face was burning with anger and shame as every other student shouted ‘JUPITER!’
Things only escalated from there. I refused to back down, despite having been labeled as the class dunce. Each time the topic came up, I tried to offer my evidence… and each time, I was steadfastly opposed by everyone within earshot. Finally, after over a month of torment, our astronomy unit culminated in a field trip to the local planetarium. The show was a breathtaking adventure through our galaxy and the universe beyond, and it left me feeling infinitesimally small, yet strangely empowered. As the lights came up, our guide to the cosmos asked if there were any questions.
‘Which is bigger,’ I shouted, jumping to my feet, ‘Jupiter or the sun?!’ My entire class sighed in frustration, my teacher barked at me to sit down, and the astronomer looked thoroughly confused.
‘The sun, of course,’ he scoffed.
A hush fell over the room. After a moment of utter silence, a girl named Melissa spoke up in a condescending tone. ‘Well, sir, we have a chart that says Jupiter is bigger.’
The astronomer looked at her. He looked at my teacher. Then he looked at me with an expression of sympathy.
‘Little girl,’ he said, returning his attention to Melissa, ‘If you look at the picture again, you’ll see that the sun is being shown at a fraction of its actual size. Otherwise, it wouldn’t fit on the page.’ His gaze moved to his next victim, who had slumped down in her chair to be almost as small as her students. ‘Your teacher should have told you that.’
Upon returning to our classroom, all the students crowded around our reference book. Sure enough, a tiny block of text explained that the sun had been scaled down in the illustration. I declared my triumph, having been vindicated. Nobody apologized, my teacher found new reasons to punish me, and I was treated with no small amount of scorn, but I didn’t care. From that day forward, I knew never to be afraid of asking questions, nor of standing up for facts in favor of fiction.”
The Most Evil Teacher
“I’m in my late-20s and the stuff my second-grade teacher did and said to me still sticks with me. She was just an all-around evil lady and even worse was that everyone else liked her, so my concerns fell on deaf ears. I was awkward and didn’t have a lot of friends which I guess she interpreted as a vulnerability.
She would punish me for ‘walking funny,’ or for ‘cheating in class games’ because some bullies told her I cheated without talking about it with me. Her scolding was always in front of everyone, and no one else was treated like me. There was another boy in my class with the same name, and she made the entire class call me either by my last initial, or just ‘number two’ while the other kid just went by our first name. The class did as she said, it doesn’t sound like much now, but at the time it had a negative effect on me and served to outcast me. She once embarrassed me by incorrectly spelling a word on the overhead that I spelled incorrectly on a spelling test, in front of everybody and telling them that’s how I spelled it on my test. She also wouldn’t let me use the restroom, and then once when I was nearly in tears and got up to run to the restroom, I returned for her to sit me down and have a scolding about whining and appropriate classroom behavior in front of the whole class. Again, she never had problems writing hall passes for other people; it was just me. That’s just scratching the surface of that year. This woman still sticks with me.”
Ridiculing A Student In Class
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“In sixth grade, we had to write an essay, and though I can’t remember what exactly it was about, it had something to do with anticipating something sweet happening.
So, in my essay, I described whatever it was as an ‘unopened bag of M&Ms.’
A few days later, as she was about to hand the graded papers back to us, she was going over some of them. She said, laughing, ‘and somebody compared it to an ‘unopened bag of M&Ms!’ I mean seriously, who ever heard of something ridiculous like that? How would you know what an unopened bag of M&Ms is like?’ The whole class laughed.
I was sitting right there, embarrassed, even though nobody knew she was talking about my paper.
This happened over 20 years ago, and it still makes me upset.”
Not Letting Others Hold Him Back
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“I misunderstood some instructions from my PE teacher in the seventh grade. He explained the day before that we would ignore the board, where activities were posted, and instead meet in a classroom.
I didn’t realize this meant do not dress in your PE clothes beforehand. So I changed into my clothes, five minutes, and went to the classroom to see everyone in normal clothes.
My teacher said, ‘wow I said go straight to the classroom. I guess this says everything we need to know about you.’ I never have, nor ever will, forget this. I felt like absolute crap, and it cut me. Still motivates me to keep going despite others wanting to hold me back.”
Too Stupid To Copy The Right Answers
“This is what the teacher said to my class – ‘You are the most incompetent students I have ever taught, and you do not deserve to be called engineers. It is false advertising to call you engineers – you’re like orange juice that’s been diluted with a bunch of water and put inside cartons that say 100-percent orange juice.’
This was after a bunch of students in my class were caught having copied an assignment off each other. He was irritated that not only was it obviously copied and shared, but it was the wrong answer. They were too stupid even to copy the right answer, he said.”
Zero Respect For This Student
“I got my toe caught in a heavy wooden door and split it straight down the middle. I had to wrap it and couldn’t walk on it for weeks. I showed my gym teacher my split toe on ‘Mile Monday’ and asked if I could please sit out from running that day. The teacher told me I had to run since I didn’t present a doctor’s note, and then added ‘besides, you’re not the skinniest girl here. You could use the run.’ I was 13 at the time; I was anorexic for two years after that.
That’s ignoring the science teacher who told me verbatim ‘give up on your dreams. You can’t make them happen.’ But other than that I’ve had plenty of lovely teachers!”
Being Called The Most Irresponsible Student
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“The day after a weekend band competition, my band teacher sent me to the office for leaving early. He said it was because I told a parent chaperone I was leaving and not he himself. He said I was the most irresponsible student he ever had and didn’t deserve to play in his band or be first chair. I was 12 years old.
The principal let me cry in his office.
The whole thing got dropped when the teacher admitted I had brought a note two weeks before the competition, he had signed the note, and that I was going to a different school in a month anyway.”
Becoming A Stronger Writer
“A professor for a literature course handed back papers four weeks after they were due (ones that had ridiculous instructions?) and spent the entire class NOT discussing the text we had to read and instead put up passages from our papers and asked us, students, to critique them. This is a small class of about 10, and we all knew one another and our styles, so we all immediately knew whose was whose.
We would tentatively say things like ‘this could be stronger’ or ‘this intro doesn’t tell us everything,’ and she would see it as her turn and rip it apart. It was brutal, and everyone felt like crap. She got to mine last, and it was my introduction, and she didn’t even let people critique it before pointing and saying, ‘And this is an example of someone who shouldn’t be an English major.’ To say I was distraught was an understatement. I think of myself as good at handling criticism, especially for my writing, and I’ve had quite a few professors specifically compliment me as an accomplished writer, especially with research. I got my paper back at the end, and it just had a 68 on it with a ‘We need to talk.’ After crying on the phone to my grandma, I dropped the one and the only course I’ve ever dropped in college.
She ruined my spirit for weeks, and I did poorly on a lot of papers for the next month because of it. I had a professor for another class finally sit down with me and discuss it all and put things in perspective. Interestingly enough, that professor is one I’m still close with! He’s a history professor, and the class was a mandatory history writing class. I aced my (research) paper for his course and ended up with straight As that semester. I became a stronger person and writer because of the experience, but I am sure I would have without it as well.”
The Hidden Voice Recording
“When I was in the seventh grade, we had an English teacher who was not too great, but not too bad. The kind of lady who’d send people ads about Lularoe or whatever MLM scheme was in style at the time, though.
So, one week, a sub came in, and I was called to the office. A friend of mine had used the recorder on their cellphone and caught her saying something that got her fired. And it turned out that she had said it to me. Apparently, she had been saying all kinds of cruel things to me, and other students and I was just too much of a space case to notice.
Unfortunately (or fortunately?) I didn’t, and I don’t remember any of what she said to me, personally, and they didn’t let me hear the recording, so my mind tends to fill in the blanks.”
When Confrontation Isn’t Worth It
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“The graphics teacher said, ‘Here comes the failure,’ to another teacher as I walked into class to hand in some coursework. I immediately walked out, didn’t feel worth my time to start an argument.
She apparently wasn’t happy with that and told my form tutor who tracked me down at lunch preparing to give me a bollocking. Quickly changed his mind when I told him what she had said, and how if she wanted to discuss the effects of the self-fulfilling prophecy I would happily discuss that another time when I had calmed down. But at that particular moment, I decided the sensible option was to remove myself before I said something stupid and got into more trouble.
Luckily he was a nice guy and had been my form tutor for years so knew that walking out of class was out of character for me. So he confronted her for me, and she decided to apologize and give me one extra day to improve my work.”
The One That Chooses Favors
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“In high school, there was this one Spanish teacher who had clear favorites. She even said at the beginning of the year if she likes you enough at the end you can sign her special podium, and have the honor of her remembering you. I was not a favorite, and I struggled with Spanish class. One day we had some free working time, and I asked her for help with a worksheet. She straight up told me ‘Why should I help you? It’s not like you’re ever going to understand it, so I’m not going to waste my time.’ I spent the rest of that class fighting back tears while trying to work, and she spent it hanging out and chatting with her group of favorite students.”
Belittling The Best Student In Class
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“In high school, I was a huge nerd, to the point of taking two math classes at once because I enjoyed it. One class was technically a prerequisite for the other, but the year before I was able to take a test and enroll in both. To get into the honors/AP class the next level up, your current teacher had to sign a form recommending you.
The teacher of the easier class hated me because I knew most everything she was teaching. It was geometry, and my dad builds things all the time and would make a game of me calculating angles and surface area, etc. then measuring to compare. I had been doing this since I was 7, so 14-year-old me had a 98+ average. I didn’t disrupt the class, didn’t brag about my scores, I just sat in the back and did the homework. She was always telling me to pay attention and accusing me of cheating. Whatever, I knew I wasn’t cheating, so did everyone else.
All that brings me to my most frustrating moment with her. At the end of the year, the teacher specifically asked me to stay after class. She went into this long lecture about how she was so glad I hadn’t asked her to sign the honors form for next year. She told me I was irresponsible, immature, and it was obvious I needed time to grow up. While she couldn’t figure out how I was cheating, she was sure it would catch up to me, and it was better for me not to take the next honors class. When I told her I was in the next class already and had straight A’s, she rolled her eyes and told me to stop lying; it just makes you even more unattractive than you already are. Obviously exactly what you should say to a self-conscious 14-year-old girl.”
Fed Up With Massive Embarrassment
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“‘You shouldn’t even be here. You’re nowhere near as qualified as our students. I’ve already failed you. Pack up and go home.’
This woman, in her 40s, thought this was perfectly acceptable to say to a 17-year-old girl, out loud, in a room of about 150 people. I’m sure the people in the back didn’t hear it but the folks nearby sure got an earful of it. This woman hated my mom, who was a higher rank than her, so took it out on me. This was at my first-degree black belt test (next rank above black in our system) at our school’s second location that was known for having a Cobra Kai McDojo mentality.
She forgot one very, very important fact.
She was not in charge of my test.
The school’s master, who was in charge of my test, heard everything. Thus began a 15-minute lecture from him to all assembled, including asking the pee-wee kids what the lady had done wrong, about why respect is our highest value in the school. I, being a teen girl who had just endured massive embarrassment in front of a ton of people while physically exhausted, was not handling myself well. I got taken to the other room and consoled by my grizzled old instructor until I got myself together enough to continue/not assault this woman. He doodled her face on the boards I had to break for the end of my test.
She was removed from the testing panel and had her instructor credentials revoked. Permanently. Considering you need to have those credentials to advance in the later ranks she was effectively cut off from ever progressing. The sad thing is, she wasn’t the worst person there. The schools eventually permanently split from one another and became separate entities – that particular school being full of truly awful people being on the list of reasons for the separation.”
Think In Spanish And Learn It Quicker
“There was an advanced Spanish teacher when I was in school who everyone loved. I could see why because she was bubbly and outgoing. She did seem a bit disingenuous sometimes, but I have trust issues, so I chalked it up to being just a ‘me’ thing. In the end, I liked her well enough.
The problem was is that I was a quiet, bullied, nervous kid who had trouble with the subject. A lot of what she had us do involve us coming up to the front of the class and speaking or doing examples, but I dreaded it because I was so far behind everyone and scared of being mocked. I kept trying to tell her I was having trouble, too, but she just kept brushing me off. I told myself that maybe she was busy. I moved on.
Then one day, after successfully ‘hiding’ for weeks, she calls me to the front of the class.
I hesitate. I nervously explain I don’t want to because I don’t know. I’ve been having trouble.
‘Oh, it’s easy! You just have to think in Spanish, and then you’ll learn Spanish!’
I told her that was the problem. I couldn’t think in Spanish. I needed help.
And her eyes get cold, but she’s still grinning, and she happily chirps, ‘Well, maybe you’re not the kind of person that belongs in my class.’
I legitimately cried, off and on, for days. Every time I thought about it, I just felt ridiculously stupid and unwanted and, as dumb as it sounds, it still sticks with me. I was so dumb that my teacher didn’t want to teach me and, even at 28 years old, I believe her.”