A single teacher can have a huge impact on her students, good or bad. That means teachers have a responsibility to maintain a very high ethical standard in their actions, otherwise the classroom full of kids watching them and looking up to them might get the wrong idea about what's okay and what's not.
These teachers did something that crossed the line and made them no longer role models. I really hope they "learned their lesson!"
[Source listed at the end of the article.]
The Rumor
“I was in 7th grade, about a month into school, and I was soon to have my 4th open-heart surgery due to my ongoing heart problems.
My locker was right next to a classroom with a teacher who was new at the school. She had been there less than a year, and I wasn’t in her class. And she didn’t know my situation.
She’d been talking to other students and had spread a rumor that I was anorexic. I have 5 congenital heart defects. Up until I was about 20 I was super skinny. I look at old photos have no idea how I didn’t break my legs by just walking. I was pale.
And she saw me go to the restroom a lot – because it was near my locker and across from her classroom. What she didn’t know is that I was on a medication for fluid retention. Especially for those with heart issues. It makes you go to the bathroom a lot.
So instead of making note of it and talking with other staff about me, she started the rumor. People soon found out. There was a huge meeting over it. She felt horrible, but was still fired. Not long ago I saw her again, after about 14ish years… she was working in retail at a department store.”
Goodbye, Old Bald Guy
“This was after I moved away, but a friend told me that one of his students said something terrible about another teacher’s late wife, and the teacher got really mad, freaked out and apparently threw a chair or something.
It was truly surprising because he was known throughout the school for being super chill, funny and down-to-earth, and he was even known as ‘OBG,’ a nickname he gave himself that stood for ‘Old Bald Guy.’
Come to think of it, he might’ve thrown the chair at the kid, maybe that’s why it was enough to get him fired. And this was at a middle school that also had 4th and 5th graders, so it’s sad to think that it could’ve been a kid as young as 4th grade who said something hurtful.”
School’s Out
“This was a substitute teacher. He subbed in for our math teacher during a big test that the majority of our class did not study for. Only three or four people were ready and he knew it just by looking at the class.
The teacher had given him instructions to remove one point from a 30 mark test for every time someone asked for a formula that we were supposed to know. He was not supposed to tell us this, even once someone had asked for one. His instructions were to just silently deduct a point, up to a max of 10 points!
Everyone protested the test asking for another day, so he texted the teacher. The teacher said to just administer the test. We knew the test was going to be on that day so we had no excuses.
But it didn’t go that way. This legendary man chose to not give the test and instead spend the day teaching the people who didn’t remember the formulas the mnemonics for memorizing them.
At the end of the day, he joked about that day being the last time he would work as a substitute teacher. We didn’t realize that he wasn’t kidding. He lost his job after the school board fired him for failing to properly substitute.
The math teacher had him reinstated, but it still doesn’t change the fact that he risked his job just so people wouldn’t fail this class. What a legend.”
Where Did You Find This Guy?
“This is a substitute teacher story. My brother once had a substitute teacher for one of his classes in junior high, and my brother said the guy looked like a roughneck down on his luck, who somehow got stuck in a classroom.
He had grease stains all over his shirt and tie, and he called a female student a derogatory word. He then saw that one the male students shoes were untied during class and the told him to tie his laces or else go to the office. The student refused, went to the office, and the administrators finally got involved after multiple complaints. The teacher was also writing down the names of the students who misbehaved.
From what I remember they had to call the police and have him escorted off campus.”
Beware The Triangles
“We once had a substitute teacher who was possibly part of the secret group known as the ‘Illuminati.’
My class had him in grade 7, when our main teacher was called out for an emergency and he was (I assume) the only sub they could find on such short notice. The first thing that we saw when we came into the class was a dude with mid back length hair and sandals who smelled strongly of something strange. He sat down at his desk and started searching for low-priced guitars on kijiji.
He told us to finish up our homework (our teacher didn’t give us homework) and kept browsing for about half an hour with two students looking over his shoulder and giving suggestions for which guitars looked the coolest.
When it was time for math he looked at the sheet and told us we were going to take a detour and talk about trigonometry for a while. He then drew three different triangles on the board and told us all about how triangles were a sacred shape, how they were found all over the world, and how pyramids had been found that were made out of an unearthly material and the government was trying to keep them a secret because of how powerful they were.
He did this for the 2 periods before lunch. When we came back from lunch, he was gone and the vice principal was teaching the class. I hope he’s doing okay because he was still the most fascinating sub we ever had–our class was too confused to even try and mess with him.”
Safety First
“He wasn’t fired for this, but one of the science teachers decided to show the class what happens when you put potassium in water.
He neglected to give the students safety glasses.
A small piece of potassium flew out of the water and landed in some poor kid’s eye.
The kid was lucky to not get blinded.
The teacher was banned from teaching and put in charge of the second-hand uniform shop for a few years.”
She Had A Follower
“My teacher found herself pregnant after she had a big fight and breakup with her much younger, more immature, and jobless boyfriend. The breakup drama had happened so many times, it even happened inside our school multiple times. But they got back together and got married because of her pregnancy.
A few months later, during lunch time, she was eating with some students, when her husband suddenly showed up, accusing her of having an affair with one of the students. He started yelling at that student, throwing chairs, and so on. Police were called. Then the husband kept showing up while she worked, refused to find a job, and followed her everywhere. She divorced the husband not long after that. She was not fired, but management talked her into resigning.
So she was pregnant, lost her job, then had no income, and no paid maternity leave because of that husband. That was a few years ago though, and she is doing great now. I am happy for her.”
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
“A year after I graduated high school, the new Physics teacher was trying to show off to a bunch of kids. The guy took a bucket of liquid nitrogen, and like any ‘cool guy’ froze a whole bunch of stuff – food, plants, etc.
To end it off, he wanted to show how even though liquid nitrogen is super cold, it boils off really fast and so you don’t have to be afraid of it.
So, instead of throwing the liquid nitrogen into the audience like a circus clown would with a bucket of glitter, he walked over to one of the students and poured it onto her lap.
She had to be rushed to the emergency room to treat the burns.
Suffice to say, he didn’t come back after that.”
You Can’t Erase That Mistake
“He wasn’t fired but ‘strongly encouraged to leave’ is what he told us.
He threw an eraser at a student because she wasn’t paying attention. He was an agriculture teacher and her parents were some of the top contributors to our school’s FFA (Future Farmers of America) program, so it caused a fuss.
Doesn’t sound like a big deal on its own, but the problem was that everyone else had gripes about him and once this happened it sort of opened the floodgates.
Admittedly, the dude was an absolute jerk and should have been fired for the way he allowed his shop to be run. We had hoses in the shop for blowing sawdust and whatnot onto the floor to sweep. He taught some of the rougher kids how to stick a welding electrode into one of them and shoot them at people. One of those things hit me in the arm and drew blood.
Still, I felt kind of bad that it went down like that. He works at a juvenile detention center now so I sometimes wonder how that’s going.”
Worth It For The Soup?
“An English teacher at my high school was arrested for getting loopy and breaking into his neighbor’s house to make soup.
The neighbor woke up at like 3 am from the noise and called the cops thinking it was a robber. Once they found out it was their neighbor they understood the situation and weren’t too worried because apparently that English teacher was always getting wild. He was however found naked sitting on the couch eating the now warm soup. He probably would have gotten fired but everyone liked him, so instead he was put on leave and sent to teach at a school for delinquent kids.”
They Finally Got The Message
“I’m not a student, but I may have gotten a teacher fired.
I work as a restaurant manager. A few months ago, a host came up to me to tell me a guest had been overserved, had grabbed her waist, kissed her on the cheek, and said ‘goodnight beautiful.’
The host was 18 and the dude was well into his 40s. Well, he came in again and I told him he had to leave. He wasn’t happy, but I told him why and gave him my GM’s card. He called. My GM, the teacher, and myself sat down for about 20 minutes.
My GM gave him a second chance, which I didn’t agree with but it was his restaurant. Fast forward 1 month and he is back with some co-workers. This time he is rubbing servers’ backs, kissing cheeks, etc. I kick him out for good and let him know he is not welcome back. I don’t give my GMs card. Instead I tell him I’ll call the cops.
About 2 weeks later I’m opening the restaurant and I’m getting texts, phone calls, etc. The guy is a teacher at a local school and just got busted for inappropriate behaviour. I think with the way he was acting in front of other teachers at the restaurant when I kicked him out, they put 2 and 2 together and it clicked.
Either way, he was a jerk.”
She Needed A Better Place To Vent
“Technically, my teacher was fired for engaging in a fairly vigorous tango (or whatever the dance was; lots of dramatic spins and so forth) with a high school student, but that was just the moment that allowed the school to take action.. it was mildly inappropriate at best and the dance was actually quite entertaining. The real story started like two months before that.
It was seventh or eighth grade, I forget which. English class. A kooky new-ish teacher (her second or maybe third year at our school) starts the class off by talking about how loopy she gets from her back pain treatment, and how she’s had a bad day already so she’s gonna take her treatment now. During first period, at around 8 a.m.
Then she starts talking about her life, particularly how crappy it’d been since moving to our town. She tells us that she actually came here to live with a guy she met online, and — presumably as the treatment or whatever peaked — went on to tell us a bunch of horror stories about what a dirtbag he was.
From there, it was maudlin weeping from all this awful stuff that’d befallen her in the past 2 years or so. She was effectively tasked with taming monkeys at her day job (junior high students are the most obnoxious people on the planet) and caring for her very sick boyfriend, who she still lived with, during the evening. The guy refused to leave the house, so she was responsible for all the shopping, all the public-facing stuff, the cooking, and everything else.
Rumors spread about that fateful class. She managed to keep her job but was pretty clearly on notice. Two months later, boom: gone.
Looking back now I feel horrible for the poor woman, since she was pretty clearly trapped in this situation by a nasty combination of romantic and financial dependency. But holy wow that was scandalous for my 14-year-old mind to hear. It was all we talked about for like two weeks.”
Dealing With Danny
“In my case, the teacher was the victim, and the student was the one who should have been ‘fired.’
There was this absolute dirtbag of a student, Danny. I mean, this kid was just cruel. He drove two different teachers to the brink, then drop-kicked them over the edge. I went to a school in an affluent area, so every grade had at least one Danny. Ours, I will always maintain, was the worst.
The first was just the nicest teacher. Soft spoken, passionate about his subject, a bit older. Danny would walk in 10 minutes late and just talk over the lecture like it wasn’t happening, argue every point the teacher made, personally insult him in incredibly cruel ways in front of the class. The teacher finally snapped and threw the podium at him. He missed, it kind of just fell over, but the intent was there. He just… totally broke the man. I saw him at the grocery store a few years later and he looked, and sounded, so much happier.
The other guy gave Danny a grade he didn’t agree with. He was in one of those portable trailer things, and they got into an argument on the steps. I’ll admit, this teacher was a bit of a hothead, and not overly liked, but I wouldn’t call him an awful person. Well, Danny loses his cool, and shoves the teacher. The teacher snaps and shoves Danny back upon regaining his footing. Danny had his back to the stairs, ends up stumbling down the three wooden steps. All of this was witnessed by other students. The teacher was fired, obviously, but Danny also pressed charges separately. No idea how that turned out (towards the end of senior year), but just… not necessary.
So overall? Screw Danny. He was a jerk to everyone, and a huge bully. No idea how he’s doing, but I hope karma bit him in the behind.”
These comments have been edited for clarity.