7 Spectacularly Crazy Lessons Taught by Real Teachers
We get it: Teachers have a tough job. We don't want to be too hard on these poor bastards; children are objectively terrible. But still, when you're entrusting a professional with the fragile minds of the nation's future citizens, you kind of hope they're not, you know, frothingly insane. But the following teachers were either completely nuts or just having really off days on the job ...
Teacher Orders 6-Year-Olds to Beat Up Another Student
It must be a challenging and delicate task to deal with the problem of bullying among kids. If one of the kids in your class is being a little shit to everyone, how do you nip it in the bud without making it worse? Well, Texas teacher Cynthia Ambrose knew there was only one way: assemble the rest of the students into a tiny little lynch mob to dispense toddler justice.
"Tee ball? No, we like to think of it as 'bat assault practice.'"
Ambrose had been having problems with Aiden Neely, a 6-year-old student, who had apparently been beating on some of the other kids in her class. Rather than send the kid to the principal's office or make a phone call to his parents, Ambrose decided to give Neely a taste of his own medicine in true Texas style by lining up the other students and getting them one by one to beat the snot out of him.
They don't call it the Lone Scar State for nothing.
The teacher claims that the kids turned on Neely of their own accord, but witnesses -- including another teacher -- say that Ambrose encouraged the act and had her classroom set up like some kind of kiddie gladiator arena. Maybe she dreamed of filming it and pitching it as a reality show. Either way, Ambrose was hauled into court after the stunt and wound up getting sentenced to 30 days in jail, although the sentence was repealed due to a jury mishap and she's waiting for a new trial.
Teacher Lets Preschoolers Taste Her Blood
When it comes to learning, a little hands-on experience can go a long way. That's apparently what a Norwegian teacher figured when she allowed her kindergarten students, who were curious about blood, to play with and even taste her own bodily fluids.
Which is a service outside the pay scale of a typical preschooler.
According to the teacher (who is thankfully no longer employed), the children had expressed an interest in what blood was and how it works. Where normal people would sense that they were living in a horror movie and immediately burn the school to the ground, this teacher saw a learning opportunity. While there are numerous effective methods of educating kids on this matter, like showing them a goddamn diagram or educational video, the teacher decided on a more practical approach: She had a doctor draw out a vial of her own blood and then brought it to class for show and tell.
After passing the vial around the class for the students (who ranged from 3 to 6 years old), at least one kid apparently asked whether they could taste it. Presumably not wanting to upset what were clearly the Children of the Damned, the teacher said yes. Fortunately, staff and parents found out about it before the kids' career in vampirism could go any further, or before they became curious about any other bodily humors.
"No more playing with blood for today, kids. Why don't you go play with your toys instead?"
Somehow, Multiple Teachers Have Stripped in Front of Students
Those who study philosophy spend time pondering life's greatest questions. But for the students of one Paris high school philosophy class, questions like "What is the meaning of life?" gave way to "Why am I seeing my teacher's scrotum right now?"
In this class, everybody gets a D+.
See, teacher Bernard Defrance liked to play a game with his students: The kids would ask him questions, and every time Defrance failed to come up with the answer, he would remove a piece of clothing. One day his students were just too darn good for Defrance (or maybe he "lost" on purpose, wink wink) and he was left standing in the nude. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but we're pretty sure we can go without ever examining the folds of Defrance's body.
One of the students defended Defrance by saying that he was just showing the class that he was "like everyone else." We're not sure what they thought Defrance was like before this incident, but apparently they were worried that he was not an anatomically correct human male. Well, he sure cleared that up for them.
"See, I take my pants off one leg at a time, just like you."
In case you thought that teachers removing their clothes was just some crazy thing they do in France, an American physics professor at Columbia disrobed in front of students in an effort to show them how hard quantum mechanics is. He did this in front of a video of 9/11 footage, the entire show apparently being an effort to "confuse them" so that their weary brains might be more ready to accept the bizarreness of quantum physics. See, this is why that screen mounted to Stephen Hawking's wheelchair is just a continuous scrolling slideshow of penises.
Teachers Stage a Mass Shooting During a Field Trip
It can be hard to come up with unique activities to make your school camp memorable and not just another forgettable excursion to bumfuck nowhere, singing "Kumbaya" around a campfire while everyone wishes they were back at home. That's the dilemma teachers at Scales Elementary School in Tennessee faced, so they decided to spice up their field trip by staging a mock mass shooting for their sixth graders.
That explains why sing-along night included "Don't Fear the Reaper."
The "prank," which by the way took place less than a month after the Virginia Tech shooting, involved teachers (including an assistant principal) going from dorm to dorm advising students that a gunman was on the loose and taking no prisoners. The students were thus swept up in a whirlwind of panic as they shut off the lights and hurried under nearby furniture. To heighten the realism of it, a hooded teacher went by pulling on the locked doors, lest they falsely believe that school protocols would save them.
For their part, the students took it quite well, some sobbing in the tense darkness, others attempting to text their parents about their impending detour to the big Magic School Bus in the Sky. According to school director Marilyn Mathis, the prank was intended as a safety drill, which it kind of was if the goal was to teach students what to do if their teachers ever went bugfuck insane.
Step One: Find a new school district.
Many enraged parents hoping to see pink slips rain from the sky were sorely disappointed to find out that dickbaggery is not a firing offense -- it only resulted in suspensions for a teacher and the assistant principal. Well, that's fair -- after all, a suspension is what another district handed out to a 7-year-old for eating his Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun. That's pretty much the same thing.
Teachers Keep Working Bizarre Slavery References into Math Homework
Obviously students need to learn about slavery, since the practice influenced pretty much everything that happened in American history up until, well, now. But there is a time and a place to talk about it, and that does not include working joke references to slavery into math homework, as one New York City teacher did:
"If European expansion began in 1419 and it's currently 2014, how long until Whitey gets what he has coming?"
You might be thinking that this had to be an isolated incident by some ridiculously ignorant teacher, but another teacher was forced to resign from a Georgia school after he also created slavery-themed math problems for his third grade class:
Bonus question: How many obsessive-compulsives did it take to prune the orchard to that level of consistency?
What the fuck? How in the hell did this happen more than once?
Wait, there's more! A third teacher, this one from Washington, D.C., was fired for also creating extremely graphic and unseemly math questions. These questions didn't feature slavery, but did contain kidnappings, bloodsucking, terrorists, and deaths. For example:
Tilda Tiger has many hungry children to feed on Thanksgiving Day. She caught 169 Africans, 526 Americans, and 196 Indians. She then put the people equally into 9 enormous ovens to bake. How many desperate people were in each oven?
See, Mom? We told you math corrodes your brain.
Teacher Skins Coyote in Class
In a break from the longstanding tradition of dissecting frogs and pigs in high school, Massachusetts teacher Miles Dowling thought it would be really neat to drag the carcass of a coyote in front of his class and skin it for them. No matter that Dowling teaches carpentry, not biology, or that a coyote is not exactly standard issue when ordering from the specimen supply company.
"I've only brought woodworking tools, so this'll be messy. Gather 'round."
That's because Dowling got his coyote the same way we all do: He picked it up from the side of the damn road. Where others see roadkill, Dowling sees opportunity. You see, Dowling fancies himself an "amateur taxidermist," which is really just a socially acceptable way of saying "I rip apart furry creatures for fun."
You don't want to see what he assigned for an Easter project.
After Dowling made it to the school with his prize, he hauled it in front of his students and allowed them to assist him as he relieved the coyote of his skin. Not surprisingly, the Department of Public Health had a slight problem with kids being allowed to handle dead wildlife.
To make things worse, Dowling's trophy wasn't even a fresh kill, but had been baking in the sun long enough to turn its brains to mush. As such, it couldn't be tested for diseases, which meant Dowling's students had to go for after school rabies shots.
A Welding Teacher Stages a Mock Execution
When standing before a classroom of adolescent students and attempting to cram something like useful information into their Xbox-addled brains, the ability to keep their attention is the closest a teacher might come to finding the Holy Grail. A 60-year-old welding teacher from Virginia recently had enough of his students' insolence and disciplined them the only way he knew how -- by lining them up against the wall and summarily (simulating) blowing their brains out.
Which may explain why the reading assignment the night before was Ezekiel 25:17.
Manuael Dillow was evidently at his wits' end about how to get his students' attention when he had the bright idea to borrow a blank-firing handgun from a staff member from another department and use it to scare the dickens out of his students by firing it at them point blank.
After the targeted students realized they weren't hurt (although they probably had to change their pants), they presumably gave their undivided attention to Dillow's very important welding demonstration for the rest of the period, because a man that unhinged and in possession of a welding torch is no one to be messed with.
If you can't hold a kid's attention with this in the first place, maybe teaching isn't for you.
Unfortunately for Dillow, discharging a weapon directly into someone's face, even if it's unloaded, is apparently a crime, and he received a five-year suspended jail sentence and two years' probation for the prank. The kids learned something valuable about the world that day: The standards for getting hired as a schoolteacher in some places are just lax as shit.
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Related Reading: For some lessons you wish they'd taught in school, clickedy click right here. Interested in the real reason "they" don't want evolution taught in schools? Cracked videos can show it to you. We've also got the craziest examples of people teaching animals, if you just click here.
