“I don’t know if this is the best but it’s pretty profound. I usually ignored note-passing. If a student didn’t want to pay attention but wasn’t bothering anyone else I was cool. In the age of cell phones notes were kind of outdated anyway. So I had this student who could do origami like a boss and he was always making all kinds of animal figures and cool shapes that I would put on the cork board behind my desk. This one day he is getting his fold on and is completely focused and not paying attention. Before I know it, class is over and it’s on my desk. He stops on the way out of my class and says, “You’re gonna wanna read that.” I read it and he asking for lunch money cause his mom took off and he was hungry. It hurts being a teacher some days.”

“An anonymous question to the class – In health class in freshman year of high school, we had to anonymously write questions about sexuality and the reproductive process–and the teacher would pull out a random card, read the question, and respond with a textbook answer.

Said teacher was very religious, and very open about her faith in a way that almost seemed patronizing. So I was surprised when she pulled out and read a card that said “what does the word c*nt mean?”

She look at the card, looked at us all calm, and then proceeded to pull up Wikipedia and other web media to inform us of the origin of the word, it’s connotation, and how it’s used differently around the world. I was kind of shocked that she just wanted us to know what it meant, as if to say ‘don’t look like a dumb *ss if you want to use this word in a sentence.’ “

“When I was teaching college classes, I caught two of the girls whispering, so I told them “If you’re going to tell secrets, you need to share with the rest of the class.” (I taught preschool before this). She looked right at me, and said, without the slightest embarrassment, “I was just telling her that I think you have a cute butt.”

I was teaching a Communications class, and we were discussing communications in the workplace, and I looked down at the textbook. After seeing what the next section was, I said “Ok, moving on to the next section, titled ‘Sexual Harrassment’.” Everyone roared with laughter.

A couple weeks later, at a baseball game paid for by the school, she came on to me really hard, with my fiancee right there.”

“Another non-teacher here, but my 7th grade teacher typically always wore a dress shirt to class and looked very presentable but this day he had his sleeves rolled up. Now, everyone loved this teacher but my immediate though was to write a note to my friend sitting beside me that his arms were super hairy, and that note was passed back and forth with us cracking jokes about it. Nothing malicious or overly mean, just that we didn’t think he’d have such hairy arms.

We eventually got caught, and between classes he took us aside and warned us to not pass notes, and since this was the first time this happened he would toss it out without reading it and let us go. Well, a couple months go by and he decides to wear short sleeves again, and his arms were noticeably less hairy. I know 12 year olds don’t have the greatest moral compass but to this day I still feel so bad that my dumb*ss little note might have made him so self-conscious about something so unimportant. I’m sorry Mr. Fifield, wherever you are now “

“I taught for a decade in a really rough area. I intercepted a lot of notes and was pretty shameless in public humiliation of my kids. I read a lot of a bad stuff out loud.

However, one really nice moment that stands out was when the super popular bubbly latina girl sat next to the stereotype depressed weird white theater band girl. I see them passing notes which is really uncharacteristic. The band girl seemed off and upset, but I let it go because it seemed like there was something going on more, and the latina girl was a really nice kid. I didn’t think she was bullying or anything.

I had the girls stay after for a second, and asked them what was up. The latina girl said, “I was worried about her, she looked sadder than usual. So I wanted to make sure she’s cool.” I asked the other girl if that’s what was happening and she said yep, and showed me the notes, which was a really heart felt convo about boys, relationships and feeling lonely. It was so damned sweet.

I asked if they needed more time, and they both said yes. I could get them excused from their next class and they asked if they could chill and talk more? I said sure, because you bet your ass wellness and mental health is a fuck-ton more important than curriculum.

They really had a moment, and it seemed to help them both. This was as 10th graders. I got to see them really develop a nice friendship over the next few years.

Go girls! Wherever you are now, I hope you’re still friends and I’m glad I could help facilitate that.”

“I was in eighth grade and it was a hot, sunny day in mid May. I wrote “it’s snowing” on a piece of paper and showed it to my friend sitting next to me, who immediately looked out the window. We both laughed because obviously it wasn’t snowing. Then he and I laughed when I showed it to another student and they immediately looked out the window. And so on until most of the class is in on the joke, and watching as I show the piece of paper to the next unwitting fool. Almost every student knows what’s going on, when my teacher sees that I’m showing this piece of paper to everyone and making them laugh. She walks over to my desk, looks down at the piece of paper that says “it’s snowing” and instinctively looks out the window. The entire class bursts out in laughter.”

“One day in middle school right around when the Nintendo Wii came out, you could add other friends online for certain compatible online Wii games by sharing a serial code of like 16 numbers or something around there. Sitting in the back of our 7th period science class, 3 of my friends and I started to exchange and write down our Wii serial codes on a small piece of paper. We’d pass it down and share it as we passed it and copy them in our notebooks.

Our teacher pauses his lecture as he looks at us, he just gets up from the front of the class, walked to our row where the 4 of us sat, put his hand out to my buddy for the paper with all of our serial codes on in, takes a moment to glance at it only to see a matrix of random numbers followed by the first letter of our names. He then glances up at us and then to my buddy with the most dumbfounded stare, squints, and asked “is this some kind of joke? Cause I’m clueless on this one…”

My buddy that had to explain ourselves saved us all the embarrassment and said I’ll explain after class as he blushed.

Luckily our teacher was a really cool dude and was fine with that answer and told us to just put it away. We told him after class and he understood but also said he was expecting some sort of elaborate code that we were encrypting messages in haha”

“Not a teacher but there was one teacher who was really cool, but still took his teacher job seriously. One lesson there is a note being passed around. Because of the giggling he sharpened his senses and honed in on the note’s location and intercepted the handoff. Did that getting ready for a speech cough, opened the note and laughed. The note said, “giggle and pass it on.”

There was another time he intercepted a note that said, “Happy Birthday Mr. _____” “

“Student, not the teacher. In my college thermodynamics class the professor said that he didn’t care if we got a text message in class, however he did care if we had our ringers on. So his rule was that if you got a text message and your phone went off loud enough for the whole room to hear it, you had two options. You could either read the text out loud to the whole class, or you could bring in donuts for everyone at the next class (there were about 20 of us).

Of course everyone keeps their phones on silent, so it never happens… until smack dab in the middle of one of the exams, when the Professor’s phone gets a text message and rings out loud and clear in the middle of the exam. Professor freezes, takes one look at his phone as we all start giggling, and says “Guess I’m bringing you guys all donuts on Wednesday”. (They were delicious).”

“My Freshman year of HS, we had a student teacher for Algebra. This poor dude was terrified of public speaking. I don’t think he made eye contact with any of us. Anyway…one day he catches someone passing a note. He demands that it be handed over. He unfolds it and reads it aloud:

“My dick’s erect.”

The whole class busted out laughing. The supervising teacher was horrified. But this guy was perplexed. He had a strange, puzzled look on his face. He read it again, with conviction.

“My dick’s…ERECT!”

By now, people are crying and choking from laughing so hard, but not him. He was still confused. Our normal Algebra teacher snatched the paper out of his hand, probably fearing a lawsuit or something. She managed to crack a smile and then join the laughter when she read the note, which had 3 words scrawled on it:

My Dixie Wrecked

Mr. Kirkpatrick, where ever you are, thank you for one of my fondest high school memories.”

“College professor who didn’t respond to any questions and just gave a final grade. It was an online class without lecture too. Unlike other professors who would post mini lectures or videos or whatever, it was a very “here’s the book, do your entire marketing campaign on this.”

One student called and messaged him nine times to get her grade from our midterm (something none of the rest of us got). He finally sent her an email with nothing but a bunch of white space and a one letter reply of her grade.

He gave me a B for the course. He gave the chronic C student that I tutored an A.

I’m pretty sure he just randomly assigned grades.

It was an awful experience overall.”

“Mrs. Hazlet had her in 5th grade and she was extremely rude to most of the class. I was bullied a lot during elementary school and I would always come to the teacher and my parents for help. She would never do anything about it at all and would sometimes just get me in trouble for asking her about it.

So one day I get beat up by some kids outside because they were trying to take a kickball that I brought from home. So I was covered in dirt and extremely upset and she comes over to them. I thought that this was finally when she would just them for something. Nope. She screams in my face and tells me to not tell my parents about this.

Went home and told my dad about it and he talks to the principal about the situation and is furious. She was removed for a week in class and we had a sub. She came back and never paid much attention to me after that.”

“My 6th grade teacher. He loved to pick on kids and make them the butt of his jokes. Unfortunately, I was his target for an entire year. He would always single me out. He always made me do humiliating things in front of the class. Sometimes, if I put an answer that he deemed dumb on an assignment, he would read my answers in front of the class. He would show the class my poor handwriting and ask them if he should mark the answers wrong just because he couldn’t read the answer. Having an entire class laugh at you day after day can wear you down. Unfortunately, when your teacher makes fun of you in front of the class, it spills over into the playground. Kids think they have immunity to make fun of you however they want. 6th grade was not a fun year.

I sometimes look back and wonder how sadistic a person must be to purposely humiliate a little kid.”

“Ms. Collins. She remarried, so her last name is something else now, but she was awful. Had her in high school for a couple of different classes, and she only cared about popular girls and baseball players- that’s it. If you were anything but a popular girl or a baseball player, she wouldn’t give you the time of day.

She was hateful, sarcastic, lazy, and entitled- but the popular girls and baseball players loved her because they knew they’d get away with murder with her. She had assigned seating, and she even made it obvious with her seating arrangements.

She was more worried about who was dating who, who slept with who, who wants to fight who, and other teenage gossip instead of actually teaching.”

“I’ll never forget Herr Taylor in college German. This dude was a f*cking riot, let me tell you.

When I first took the class, I heard rumors that he was a bit off but I didn’t know any specifics so I had a fairly clean-slate when it came to my experience as one of his students. He always wore a suit and was constantly sweating even though it was normally temperatures in the room and he was not overweight. Most days I had this class, he ended 20 min early because he had to “lie down because of his migraines.” I also saw him quite a bit out of class. As any college student, I frequented to local grocery store liquor section and I saw him there just about every time I went. After weeks of seeing him behave erratically in class and witnessing his weekly cart fills of wine, I connected the dots that he was likely an alcoholic.

About a month in to the class, things started getting nuts. He would go on these long rants that were completely unrelated to the course and we would just sit there in silence as he talked about being a hippy in San Fransisco in the 60s and having sex with some random “free spirit” on Jim Morrison’s grave. He once went on a 20 min tirade about Catholics and how religion has completely destroyed the fabric of academia and will be the end of civilized society as we know it. When he saw that we were just sitting in silence (very awkwardly), he’d just smile and say “you guys are just too young to understand.”

This dude also LOVED squirrels. We would sometimes have class out in the quad because he’d rather talk about the senseless bombing of Dresden during WW2 and how it destroyed a ton of art under one of the shade trees. He would constantly get distracted if one wandered by and immediately yell out “oh my, look at that one! It’s so pudgy and cute!” He once even claimed he saw a squirrel that looked EXACTLY like John Lennon. I wish I was making this up. Also, if you drew a squirrel on your quiz, you were given extra points. Not that this class was hard because he handed out the quizzes on Monday and collected them on Fridays each week. Never got below a 102 on any of them.

In the end, I felt bad for him. He always talked about loves lost and how great it was to be a hippie in the 60s. I didn’t learn shit about German that semester but I guess I got a taste of what radical hippies were like back in the day. It was a wild ride.”

“Mrs. Danner in the third grade.

She was a terrible teacher in general. She talked about her migraines constantly instead of teaching and explained how chocolate and Taco Bell triggered her migraines and explosive diarrhea and told us that anyone who drinks diet soda would immediately get cancer even if they drank it because they have diabetes and can’t drink regular soda.

She picked on different students, was vaguely racist, and loved to have loud, patronizing conversations with her teacher friend next door about students in her class as a passive aggressive way to get on to students.

She was particularly mean to me because she wasn’t from what would be considered a “good” family in the area but married well. In her new social circle, she wound up rubbing elbows with my grandmother, who absolutely despised Mrs. Danner and was not shy about making that fact known. So when she saw my last name on the first day of class, she decided to get her revenge.

It all culminated in one incident in which I had an altercation with a boy outside of school hours and not at a school event. On the Monday following the event Mrs Danner and her teacher friend pulled me into the hallway and said things like “Looks like the Pandersons aren’t as wonderful as they pretend” and “how ashamed your grandmother must be” and other things that turned poor, sensitive Dan Panderson into a mess.

I went home and my tears turned my mother into a bear ready to attack. The following day, my mother put on her best suit, donned her pearls, and pulled her hair into an elegant chignon and stomped her high heeled feet into that school at 3pm and stepped into the classroom. Mrs Danner said “Hello [Mom First Name]” my mother said, “Oh, you may call me Mrs. Last Name, my friends use my first name” and then laid the most gloriously condescending smack down on that b*tch that the world has ever heard.

Eventually the principal came down and Mama said “well, I’ve said my piece. Mrs. Danner will finish the year being much nicer to Dan or I will be forced to have a meeting with my cousin (the school board president) and see how he feels about renewing her contract.” Mama flounced out leaving shattered remains in her wake and it was honestly amazing.

Mama, being a grade A b*tch, proceeded to sign up to make all the baked goods for class and only made chocolate because Mrs. Danner can’t have chocolate.

God, I miss my mom. And f*ck you Pat Danner!”

“Ms. Morales, we had a girl with a bunch of health issues and allergies in our class, including latex, and one day she chose to let her favorite student hold a birthday party in our class with latex balloons everywhere. Girl, who was in a wheelchair, gets to class and immediately has breathing problems and starts breaking out.

She asked the teacher if she could go to the nurse, and this b*tch had the audacity to say “just tough it out until next period, I’m not letting you go to the nurse yet” luckily, our TA saw the girl and convinced Ms. Morales to let her go, but the girl wheeled to the nurse (which was at the other side of the school) by herself because the teacher wouldn’t let anyone else go. Girl got an epipen shot and was ok, but it still pisses me off 4 years later.”

“I’ll call her Mrs. R from here on out. She was one of my teachers in eighth grade.

A little background info: I was bullied horrendously growing up. In middle school, there was a kid named C who was the ringleader of bullies. He was the worst one.

Well, in Mrs. R’s class, she stepped out for a second and C decided that was the perfect time to chase me with a pair of scissors in an attempt to cut my hair. I grew tired of it, stood up, and screamed my head off. Mrs. R comes in and I thought he was going to get in trouble.

Three days later, my mom and I get called into the principal’s office. Mrs. R had sent a disciplinary report to the principal requesting I get suspended from school for disrupting her class and the special education class next door. My mom threatened to press charges against the school and C for assaulting me. My nana, who decided to see how bad things were for herself, tagged along and popped off asking if Mrs. R was sleeping with C’s dad because in what universe is allowing someone to attack another child not disruptive.

From that point on, Mrs. R tried daily to fail me on her class and get me either suspended or expelled. We had homework? Mine would go straight to the garbage can and a note would get sent home claiming I never turned it in. Tests? Didn’t matter how well I did, I’d always fail. Group projects? Everyone else in my group would get A’s and I’d get a C- because “I didn’t do any of the work.” Even though I was the only one who did the work on one project. And C? She allowed him to be as brutal to me as he wanted.

I barely passed her class with a C at the end of the year. I bawled like a damn baby.”

“Had a teacher in my first semester of college in an Intro to Linux class that was pretty terrible at teaching us anything about Linux for a few reasons.

She had not used Linux in over 10 years.
She had been assigned this class 2 days before classes started because the original teacher got caught sleeping with a student a few weeks prior
She barely spoke english
Her lectures consisted of her going through the powerpoints that the previous teacher had set up for the last semester, reading some of them word for word, and just flipping through the rest wordlessly. Then she’d have us do an activity from the workbook and would be of no help to anyone who got stuck.

Me and a few of the other students who had a VERY basic understanding of linux ended up organizing study groups and basically the class had to self teach in order for us to pass.”

“9th grade English teacher. She sincerely believed that I didn’t speak English. I don’t know where she got this idea, other than I am Spanish-English bilingual?

The first time she took attendance, Day 1, she asked, “Oh, minorfall27! I heard you speak Spanish! Do…you…speak…English…?”

She would noticeably slow down to talk to me, and made comments (several times) about my not understanding something because, “English is my second language.” (My English is better than my Spanish nowadays, they were probably about even back then.)

Meanwhile, at least 3-4 students would copy my homework.

It’s fine for a teacher to do these things if the student does need the extra help, if their English is indeed weaker than their native language, but that just wasn’t the case for me.”