Bad teacher's

Let's not forget that as children we weren't all angels. I remember we had a young French teacher we played up appallingly. It was a co-ed school but he had one lesson where he just had girls (think the boys were in PE). We specialised in distracting him by asking silly questions which he tried to answer so earnestly. We also sometimes asked things just to see if we could make him blush. Poor man!

Callistemon, I was lucky at that school, it had an inspirational head. We had houses, competed in various sports events and choral speaking competitions. He was a Gilbert and Sullivan fan so we had a production every year, everyone involved.. we were taken to the ballet,to Shakespeare and on trips to Europe. We also took O levels.
Needless to say, many of us went on to university as mature students

Iam64
The grammar school across the road from your secondary modern was not the one I attended then!

The teachers at the grammar school I went to made sure we all realised just how stupid we were. Any ambition other than becoming a teacher was scoffed at.
The last thing I wanted to do was become a teacher and end up like one of them.

Yes Day6, a good point to remember teachers who encouraged us. the OP though is about bad teachers.

In a spirit of fairness, I remember Miss Slater who taught us history from 12 - 15 when I moved (again). She nurtured by existing fascination with history and her lessons on the Empire, East India Company and the slave trade influenced my politics. Thank you Miss Slater

It is sad that in the past teachers could ridicule children and seemingly get away with it.

I imagine that today any adult abusing their status would be pulled up and disciplined. We recognise it as a form of bullying/abuse and I'd hope teachers wouldn't dream of behaving in that way. Times change. We move on.

I have memories of teachers who embarrassed me and allowed me to suffer. But I also remember those who were wonderful, interesting and inspired me to do my best.

Merseybell2 - wow! I missed the 11 plus by one point, we had moved so I was in my 7th primary school and only there for a week. The head at the sec mod I went to, after yet another move, said I should have been at the grammar school and in that town, would have been. It was the number of places for girls in my previous town that had me in a sec mod.

The second week, we had a supply teacher who gave us all detention for the next four days for being noisy in the line. He spent the first detention telling us we were 'failures who will amount to nothing'. He pointed to the grammar school across the road, talking about how they were successes who would go on to have successful careers whereas we'd be sweeping the floors in a factory.
Yes, they were the good old days weren't they.

Well it seems that school days weren’t the best times of our lives judging by the horror stories recounted on here !
I can remember well being smacked repeatedly with a ruler on the knuckles and hands by a primary school teacher. I was five. I spent most of my primary school years standing in a corner with a dunces hat on (this explains a lot) !
The first day in grammar school after passing the 11 plus, our teacher made us put our hands up according to what type of house we lived in. Either detached, a semi or a bungalow. There were just two of us in our form who lived in a terraced house. I’ve never forgotten this. She treated this girl and I like dirt from then on.

It was certainly a regular feature for girls to know a particular teacher would touch them, or try to look up skirts etc. We were so very young, beginning to be embarrassed about puberty, to fancy certain boys and look at lipsticks in Woolworths. I knew Mr Kay chose my friend as a favourite, he’d sit and help her with maths. She had a more mature figure than I did, skinny stick I was. You can imagine my surprise when he did the book drop trick near me. I’d assumed he targeted the more mature, grown up girls.

Mine was Mr Foster Iam64. Maybe it was a feature of maths teachers.

trisher, I agree with your post. (shall we rejoice! ).

I'd add that social work and the police are other areas of public service where there is a less diverse workforce, as you pointed out in your comments about teachers. As an aside, we may have had the same maths teacher. As well as the finger down the back of your school shirt, Mr Kay who taught us from 11 - 14, also dropped a book near the girls, the belief being he did this daily so he could look up our skirts.

Social workers, teachers, police officers (not sure about nurses) but those groups were drawn from a wide pool for people. Social work teams had people who'd been merchant seamen, engineers, cotton mill workers, rent collectors, hair dressers for example, as well as young graduates. The police were similar. Of course, 40 years ago, well until very recently, those groups of people, like teachers, were well trained, their fees paid by local authorities, the home office, etc. Now that group of staff come our with £60,000 debt, the majority will never earn big bucks, that isn't why they went into it. There is even talk of the police paying for their training.

There is no doubt that some teachers were bullies and I remember being told by one when I was on teaching practice in the 60s that the best way of maintaining discipline was to 'make an example' of one child who misbehaved even if only sightly. I think this strategy was widely used. But one thing I do think is now missing from teaching is the sheer variety and mixture of people who were teachers. Some of them were awful-like the maths teacher who would run his hand up and down your back when he was looking at your work ( the grapevine said he was trying to find out if you were wearing a bra!) and the chalk and blackboard throwers. Some of them were wonderful like the history teacher who insisted we should always check sources and look at recounts for bias, the French teacher who taught us slightly risque songs, the deputy head and head of my Primary who dressed as police men every Christmas concert and sang the Laughing Policeman and the Bold Gendarme. There were those who intimidated me but then so many people regarded children as needing to be trained to keep quiet and kept down, teachers were just following the social norm.

I agree to some extent, Jennifer. The big change came when 'corporal punishment' was banned in schools in 1987.
School staff started to develop their own programmes of discipline. By then I was working as an EP and we were often asked to help in this. The new programmes were more or less successful but depended on a great deal of extra time and effort from teachers. Since then even more liberal attitudes have spread.
Teaching isn't an easy job - I was never any good as a class teacher, I preferred small groups or one to one.
Strangely though 3 of our 4 children became teachers.

All these tales of horrid bullying teachers show just how widespread it was in the past, and it's right that things have changed now for children, but I can't help wondering if perhaps things have gone too far the other way.

Of course it can never been right for a teacher to bully or make sarcastic 'you will never amount to anything' remarks, but I also think that some teachers these days are just too chummy with the pupils.

Has the respect gone when pupils address the teacher by their Christian name ?

Surely there is a middle ground here?

Your teacher was abusive. She used the imbalance of power between you to bully and humiliate you.
I hope the lesson that you took from this nasty character is to never treat another human being in such a dreadful manner.
It is not always what we say to people that they remember but the way we made them feel.
There is a trick that bullied children are sometimes taught in counselling sessions but it works for adults too. Take a jelly baby, choose carefully which one you take. This represents the 'bully'. First tell the 'bully' everything you felt too afraid to say in the past, then slowly and deliberately destroy the jelly baby (usually this takes the form of eating) . It is normal to find that the bully never holds quite the same power again because the bullied child has the satisfaction of knowing that they have bitten off a major body part of the offender. It is the " I know something that you don't" that gives them an inner confidence. Bullies back off when their 'victim' ceases to be afraid of them. Symbolism is very powerful.

"Spare the rod and spoil the child"!!

Penultimate year in primary school I won a competition judged outside the school, daughter of a teacher came second. Following year the results were reversed and the head presenting the prizes was just so delighted that order had been restored. Even at age 10 it was so obvious to me.

Imagine, being allowed or expected to hit children with a cane. We had a teacher in high school who threw board dusters, or if really angry a window pole, used as a javelin. This was usually reserved for boys but his screaming outbursts at boys and girls.
Good old days ?

I've just remembered another teacher, a man, who was a disgrace imo.
My first job as a graduate, 1957, was a supply teacher in a special school, slow learners.
I was so naive, the class of 13-14 year olds had previously had a very experienced, strict, male teacher. Then they got me!
They ran riot . The HT said "you must cane them". And he made me try, but my heart wasn't in it. Then he showed me how it should be done - he was a sadist.
I was there a year, and eventually the children got to like me and behaved not too badly. And made progress.

Thank you for that, Shizam. What a brilliant man with words is Stephen Fry. He made me laugh at myself as I am pedantic at times, and of course we should realise that grammar tends to evolve.

GabriellaG54 I didn't "put her down". I merely reminded her of who I was and what she had said

WadesNan
I imagine you got great satisfaction from putting her down. 2 wrongs don't make a right.

Think inappropriately rude to pull someone up on grammar in what was a heartfelt message. Stephen Fry, who is rather good with words, did a great piece on Jeremy vine show recently re grammar et al. Will try to link.
Sorry OP, that the idiotic teacher’s horrible comments still sting you. She was definitely in the wrong job.

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p07f1dpx

My maths teacher was so horrible that I was determined to show her that I could succeed!

My maths teachers attitude/criticism put me off maths for life (a terrible thing for a teacher to do). People that cannot help/empathise with students especially those who are having problems are in the wrong job. Thankfully I made up for it in other subjects - others may not be so lucky.

Catching up with this thread since my post in response to the OP. I feel a bit choked, reading all these comments about how unkind, humiliating, cruel and bad tempered so many teachers were in response to us as children. As I said in my earlier post, in my working life, training adults to work with children inevitably led to those on the courses discussing their negative experiences in school.

There's a thread running currently on ceremonies to mark transitions in school. It started in response to ceremonies to mark the transition from pre school to reception primary school. In my first post, I agreed with the grumpy comments but having read many posts from grannies who had enjoyed being part of a "graduation" ceremony involving 4 year olds, I changed my mind.
I hope its ok to talk about another thread - but these two threads together should convince any of us that the new, more positive, Kindly and lets face it Child Centred approach to school, especially primary school is a Very Good Thing.