Students often forget this, but teachers are people too. Even though they dedicate most of their lives to helping children and young adults grow into strong students and stronger people, they aren't always perfect. They all have secrets, but some are stranger than others.
That brings us to a recent Reddit thread that asked students to share the strangest secrets they ever learned about a teacher. The following stories range from shocking to flat out weird, but they're all strange in their own way. So take a look at some of the strangest facts former students shared about some of their favorite teachers. All posts have been edited.
Ashly Madison Exposed So Many Cheaters
“A few years ago, Ashley Madison, a dating website for folks who intend to cheat on their spouses, was hacked and the user database was available to the public.
I downloaded the 30GB database dump and searched for a few specific email addresses that I suspected could have been a member of the site, but I didn’t really find anything of consequence.
I then ran a query for the domain ‘schools.org,’ and sure enough, at least 15 email addresses appeared. Most of the addresses were those of administrative staff and teachers in other schools, but the one that stood out to me the most was the arrogant science teacher I had freshman year.
I never revealed it publicly, though. I was a good egg and didn’t want anything on my permanent record or end up in the federal ‘pound me in the butt’ prison.”
They Found Out More Than They Ever Cared To Know
“My teacher was a published author who worked under a pseudonym. Unfortunately for her, she left clues about her book, and we were able to find the title and author.
We didn’t read it immediately but walked in the next lesson calling her by her pseudonym. She blushed and then yelled at us for invading her privacy. A classmate (now a lawyer) argued that if her privacy was really of concern, she wouldn’t have published a book, using a pseudonym or not.
Out of curiosity, due to the extreme reaction to us learning of her book, we decided to read it. That book was smutty as smutty could be. We never brought it up again.”
He Probably Should Have Changed Professions After This Incident
“I had an astronomy teacher in high school that had these very strange tendencies and was just socially awkward overall. He was one of those people who couldn’t understand social boundaries, no matter how obvious they were. After half a year of his antics, I started asking around to find out what his deal was only to uncover his very disturbing past.
Apparently, at the start of his teaching career, there was a student who fell in love with him and became obsessed to the point of stalking. For whatever reason, he engaged with her craziness and had an affair with her for some time before coming to his senses and told her that he couldn’t do it anymore. The grief got to her and she killed herself by sticking her head in an oven.
The teacher’s wife found out about the affair and divorced him, which I can only assume led to his strange behavior as my teacher sometime later.”
No One Was To Go NEAR His Desk
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“In the sixth grade, I had an art teacher who you were warned about as an elementary student. He was this old cranky, Asian man who would drop books on a kid’s head if he caught them dozing off, and was a really strict and uptight man, unusual characteristics for a career in teaching kids how to mix watercolors.
One of his rules that stood out to me was his desk obsession. No one was allowed to touch his desk or even come too close to it and NEVER go around to the back of his desk. He would sit at his computer all throughout class, and would only be away from it to give a short project intro at the beginning. If we ever had any questions, we had to bring our project up to him and address him from his desk at least a couple of feet away.
A year later he was fired. Why? He had stored large amounts of child smut on his school-owned computer. Suddenly, his desk rules made a lot more sense.
His wife was the other sixth-grade art teacher and I always thought it must have been pretty uncomfortable for her to keep working there after that little incident.”
Don’t Ask This Teacher About Her Past, Or Her Son
“One day, I decided to Google my teachers’ names to see if I might find something interesting. After not having any success with the first few teachers I looked up, I searched for my literature teacher, and wow.
She had a 22-year-old son and they used to live in a different city where her son was the prime suspect in a case involving the kidnapping of several girls a few years ago. To make things worse, her son had pictures all over his Facebook of him posing with weapons and hanging out with people who looked like they were straight out of the mafia.
Through my research, I learned that her son went missing after the whole city accused him of murder and kidnapping. That is when his mom (my teacher) gave an interview on TV and said that her son wasn’t a criminal, that those were toys in his pictures and that he hadn’t done anything wrong.
She proceeded to defend her son in an interview on national television, but unfortunately, the evidence was against her and people who saw the interview thought she was covering up for her son, and that she was a criminal too and deserved to die. I found multiple videos of the interview on YouTube and Facebook, and people all over the comments hated her.
The girls and her son never appeared again and the entire city hated her, so she moved to our city to escape it all.
Only four of my friends know about this, and they all swore to keep it in secret; we wouldn’t want the high school to know about this or to bring a ghost of her past to mess her life up all over again.”
He Didn’t Know His Teacher Was A Reality TV Star
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“I had a teacher who was once the winning contestant on a season of ‘The Bachelor.’
No one in the class knew until a male substitute told us about it. When she came back from her absence and a student revealed out loud that we all knew, she said something akin to ‘I can’t escape my past.’ So she allowed each student in the class to ask one question about the show. I asked if she got an unedited tape. She said ‘No,’ and that the producers hold a tight leash on what gets shown to the public. The next day, she played footage of her trying to sing in the show and had us write about an embarrassing moment of our own. After that, she said that was the last time she would talk about it.
When I learned about her past, I thought it was odd because she didn’t strike as a person to cause drama. Maybe that’s one of the reasons she ‘won.’ She was apparently still friends with some of her fellow contestants.”
This Teacher Tried A Little Too Hard To Get To His Student
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“My algebra teacher was always subtly hitting on me. I would catch him making eye contact with me all the time during assignments, standing at my desk so his junk was at my eye level. He started getting less subtle about it and would ask me to stay after class and help him with various tasks. He slowly built up to touching me, trying to hug me. One day, he thought it was a good idea to confess his love for me and try and kiss me. I rejected him and told him that if he did it again, I would go to the superintendent. I went to the superintendent anyway and they basically called me a liar, saying I was trying to ruin his career. He was kind of a family friend, so I wasn’t out to make the guy miserable, but I wanted nothing to do with him in a romantic way. Because he knew my parents, he knew they were going to be away one weekend, and I was home alone.
He actually showed up on Saturday night with a dozen roses and wanted me to let him in. I told him to leave, but he kept insisting he be let in. He even started looking in the windows and came around the back door trying to get in. I told him I would call the police, so he finally left.
The following Monday, I went to the superintendent and told him what happened, and again he accused me of being a liar. Except, I brought the VHS tape of our security system, showing my teacher prowling around the house, trying to get in. He told me not to go to class that day. The following day, my algebra teacher was suspended (with pay of course) while there was an investigation. After about a week, he showed back up in class as if nothing had happened.
The superintendent then told me there was not enough on the tape for him to be fired, and I was blowing things out of proportion. I asked him if he listened to the tape as well as watched it, and he claimed there was no audio on the tape. he also said that he was going to keep the tape in case there was any further investigation needed. My dad told him that if he didn’t hand over the tape he was going to the police. My dad then actually put the tape in the VCR in the superintendent’s office himself and played it on the TV. The audio was perfectly fine and the superintendent said there must have been a bug when he played it.
My teacher was eventually fired, but he would still drive by and try and come to the house when he thought my folks weren’t there. We eventually got a restraining order against him and I haven’t seen him since.”
I Think The Problem Is With The Students At This Point
“I had this German teacher my freshman year of high school and she was just terrible. She would give us project after project, all while not teaching us anything about the language.
That is until she stopped showing up for class one day. With no teacher, all of my school’s German classes were complete anarchy and utter chaos, which is not a good thing for high schoolers. It probably won’t come as a surprise, but she was fired a little more than halfway through the school year. Apparently, that wasn’t the first time either.
While conducting some research on her, we discovered that she had a blog. It was a Google blog that said, ‘On the road again. Been fired for no reason, just like the last nine times.’
Nine times. She was fired nine times before that, and that blog post was from a year ago, so it’s possible that the count could be higher by now.
If it was me fired at least nine times, I might have considered that it was my fault, I was a crummy teacher, and it was time for me to find a new profession.”
This Guy Sounds Like Some Weird Villain
“I had a college Spanish teacher who was so bizarre, he could have been a weird antagonist in a book. On the first day of class, we mostly chitchatted and he told us about himself.
First of all, he had a GIANT head. Some more of the things he told us included: He speaks five languages – Spanish, English, Icelandic, Italian, and French. He was born and raised in Iceland. His son is a semi-pro tennis player. He used to work for the United Nations, where he met his Italian wife. He frequently cheats on his wife with some woman in Canada. He has dual citizenship in Iceland, America, and Venezuela. He’s written five books. He thinks fat people are disgusting. He wouldn’t let ‘fat’ girls bring a snack to class but everyone else could. He wouldn’t let you use the bathroom.
He said all of this before he went on and on and on about how women were inferior to men and the reasons why they ‘belong at home.’ He did this every class. We made it through four chapters and he eventually gave us the answers to the final.”
His Thoughts On The Royal Family Sure Were Explosive
“I had a professor in college who was a bit eccentric and people around the school loved to tell stories about what he did while he had been a student there some 40 years before.
He would sometimes say odd things in class but nothing particularly noteworthy. It was a class of 20 and we all sat around a big table and discussed the readings we had done that week. We had been reading ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ and we were having a fairly productive discussion about the class disparity in England at the time the book was written and, somehow, this got my professor ranting (you would have thought they had killed his mother) about the current royal family and how useless they were.
The crowning glory came when he brought his fist down on the table and shouted, ‘They’re not worth the powder it would take to blow them up.’ Everyone got really quiet because we weren’t sure if he was trying to be funny or not. He was serious, and class ended soon after that.”
What An Odd Place To Run Into A Teacher
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“I work at an adult toy boutique and we have regulars. This meek looking man with killer taste in Hawaiian shirts kept coming in week after week looking for a certain type of ring. We’ll call him Q. He was very nervous because of the setting, but he was always nice and cordial.
Despite his coming in and buying different variations of the same thing once a week, he never actually told me what he needed. Over the weeks, we built up a bond over a mutual love of science fiction and Dungeons & Dragons. I even invited him to our local D&D group, where my siblings, some lifelong friends, and I have a weekly session.
Finally, on month three of seeing Q at least once a week for drastically different rings that were not working for him at all, he finally told me he had a medically diagnosed condition with the size of his junk, and nothing was working for him at all because they didn’t fit. Perfect! Finally! I went over his options and we found him one I recommend for that particular condition. No sweat off my back and I was happy he felt comfortable enough finally to let me help him more in-depth.
This brings me to the peak of our story when Q finally came to a D&D session. He was really excited because his son went off to college and he hadn’t played in a few years, and my three friends and two siblings were ready to open the group up to a new player. Q came into the building and my middle brother got extremely excited before running up to Q, saying, ‘Oh my god! Mr. Q is your friend? He was my favorite teacher!’ He then proceeded to go into the garage and retrieve a box full of ceramics he made in Q’s class over a decade ago. Half of our other players also had him in middle-high school as well.”
Everyone Has A Secret, Some Are Just Found On Itunes
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“During my freshman year of college, a couple of friends were taking an intro to communications with a teacher we’ll call Gary Ross. Professor Gary was kind of a prick. He wasn’t a bad teacher, but he was overly strict in the class (it was a lab format), he didn’t have much of a sense of humor, and he didn’t really try to relate to the students. In other words, he was super straight-laced.
Toward the end of the semester, everyone had to come up with a final project that involved something to do with communications, so my friends, one of whom was an aspiring film director, decided to do a 10-minute skit for his project. The night before this project was due, my friend was putting the skit together when he realizes he never picked out any music as a soundtrack for his skit, so after combing through his playlist and realizing nothing suitable was on there, he pulled up iTunes. And for whatever reason, he decided to search ‘Gary Ross.’
An album came up.
My friends called all of us over and had us listen to it with them and sure enough, it was the straight-laced teacher those two had as a communications professor. So being the intelligent, thoughtful 18-year-olds they were at the time, they decided to scrap their original setup and formatted the skit as well as they could to Professor Gary’s music, including the album cover (complete with Gary’s image) as the opening scene in their skit.
Apparently, their professor just sat there in stone silence for the duration of the entire presentation. I think they wound up getting Ds because the project was terrible, but they said the reaction of the class to hearing Gary’s music was worth it.”
What Was Going On With This Teacher?
“I went to a small Christian school and we had one very strange teacher. Here are some of the things he did:
He had ‘date night’ with his wife in his classroom after school hours. During class, he had us students move all the desks out and move the couch from the teacher’s lounge in. He set up a projector so they could watch ‘Lady and the Tramp.’ It sounds like a strange date unless they were using it as a cover-up to hook up at school or something.
He said that the reason he had a beard was because it would make people respect him and that we all subconsciously respected him more just because of his ‘glorious’ facial hair. He was definitely the most hated teacher in the school. Interestingly enough, he shaved his beard the next school year.
In Algebra class, he took my class on a field trip to a graveyard to collect data. When we got there, we had to write down the names and dates of 20 adults and 20 kids who had died. That was a strange project, but I kind of enjoyed it.
He told us lots of stories about his life, like how he proposed to his wife by writing her a check for ‘his life’ (super cheesy), and how at home he has all his clocks set to a different time so that he had to figure out what time it was in his head. He also was apparently suing Verizon because he used to work there and one time they made him work on Sunday.”
“If Only I Could Go Back To That Day”
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“Back in high school, we had this hot English and history teacher who was always looking at me. Back then, I was a diligent student and my only priorities were to study and get good grades; I had no interest in women at the time.
One day, she told the entire class that we would have an important test the next day and that whoever missed it would not be allowed to retake it. As I was about to go home to study, a friend of mine showed me his new PS2 game called ‘Legend of Legaia 2.’ I thought I’d play the game for like an hour before studying, but before I knew it, I spent all night playing it. Obviously, I couldn’t go to school, so I told my mom that I was sick and stayed/ home.
The next day, I was prepared to hear an earful from my teacher. After our class, she told me, ‘I want to speak to you after school.’ I was terrified but ready to get scolded. As I waited in the classroom while everyone was leaving, she entered the room and closed the door. She handed me a test paper and allowed me to retake the test even though she said she wouldn’t allow students to retake it. Not only that, she even tutored me while I was answering the test, basically spoonfeeding me the answers. She was looking at me so intensely I couldn’t concentrate.
She held my hand and I asked if I could go to the restroom. I left my bag in the classroom and ran straight home.
It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that my hot English teacher had a thing for me and I chickened out. If only I could go back to that day. If only.”
What Was Up With This Guy’s Obsession With Teeth?
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“In middle school, I had this one teacher, we’ll call him Mr. G. He was a tall, thin, CRAZY, old black man. He taught social studies and everyone made an A. However, he hated hearing kids talk. He said his biggest pet peeve was seeing kids’ teeth. Well, we had this one kid with buck teeth that showed when he closed his mouth. Mr. G was in a particularly bad mood and said if he saw anyone’s teeth, he would send them to the office. However, the buck tooth student couldn’t get his teeth inside of his mouth and got sent to the office.
Is that the end of Mr. G’s nuttiness? Nope.
We once walked in the classroom and he wasn’t there. So we just sat down and decided to chit chat. About fives minutes went by and we got louder until he popped out of the closest and yelled, ‘You, you, you, you, you, you, you, GO TO THE OFFICE!’
Surely that’s the end to the stories. Nope, one more.
We were taking a test one day and all we heard was a ‘Shhhhh, shhhhh, shhhhh’ noise. We looked up and saw nothing except Mr. G looking at us. The noise went away, and we go back to testing. We heard the noise again and looked around and saw Mr. G hanging out the window while brushing his teeth.
In high school, I had a teacher who always brought a bag of ice with him in the morning, dumped it in an ice chest, and left it there in his classroom. He did this every morning all the years he worked there. One day, a kid asked him why he did that, and his response was, ‘I love the sound of melting ice,’ and that was the end of that.
As far as I know, he still does this.”