Almost every teacher is responsible for an unnecessarily awkward moment or two, but these were really too much.
The Grandmaster
“Last semester in one of my computer science classes, I had a professor come into class and put on a movie about algorithms. Everything seemed normal as usual, and during the movie he went outside to use the restroom. When he came back, he seemed a bit loopy and uncoordinated. Every 10 minutes or so after that he would continue this cycle of going to the restroom and coming back more and more “loopy”. He would occasionally pause the movie to comment on it but his words were slurred and he wasn’t making any sense for the most part. I remember I left the class for a few minutes and I as I was walking back to class I saw my professor walking to class VERY uncoordinated. He was swaying back and forth while trying to reach for the door. When the movie ended he was obviously not sober at that point and went on a very awkward and cringe-y tangent about how much he loved us and telling my classmate to actually create the quiz for the class (which is something a student can’t do for obvious reasons). My professor kept saying things like “Yeah man, you know what to do right? You’re the grandmaster. You can create the quiz.” while my friend kept saying “what do you mean create the quiz? What should I put in it?” And my professor said “Oh man you know. Come on you’re the grandmaster you know what to do. You’re the grandmaster. We’ve talked about this before (they hadn’t). You’re the grandmaster.” After the class ended and everyone left some of us went back to check up on him and turns out that he had taken some medication for his brain injury that basically made him act like a drunk person. He didn’t come to class for a week and a half after that episode.” (source)
TMI, Man
“I was 9 and I was in a sex-ed class with the other boys of my age. I don’t know if this was an Australian thing for primary schools, but we were separated by age and gender for sex-ed for a while.
Anyway, the teacher for this class also happened to be our principal. He was easily pushing 70 and had a voice that was a mixture of John Howard and Mayor Pelican from Blinky Bill.
He went on to describe wet dreams for us. “Sometimes, you uh, might wake up in the middle of the, uh, night, and…. your, uh, underdaks will be wet.” (Why he thought ‘underdaks’ was a good phrase for underwear is beyond me.)
Then came the clincher. “So, when do boys stop having wet dreams?” asked my friend Sam. “Well, never, really. I mean, I still have wet dreams.”
Hands down, the most awkward, cringe-inducing incident in my schooling life.” (source)
TFW The Teacher Would Fail The Class
“Two years ago, college lecture on the Galapagos Islands:
The lecturer began with “The Galapagos islands are located off the coast of Africa” everyone kinda heard that and didn’t process it properly and let it slide, I mean after all its a 9am lecture, so only one person corrected her.
Later on she was explaining about darwin and the animal species there, and went on to say something about the “Galapagos turtle” and a lot of people started to speak up saying no its the Galapagos TORTOISE.
The lecturer made the mistake of saying “whats the difference?” and the room almost exploded with all (close to 800) students trying to speak over each other about what the differences are.
The lecturer has a doctorate in marine biology, this was a marine biology class. she should know the differences between turtles and tortoises.” (source)
What Were We Supposed To Learn Here?
“Here’s a story from my sex ed class. She (the teacher) had us stand in a circle, we were each given a picture of an animal Disney character, for example, I got Mickey. Then she read this story, and every time your character gets mentioned, you hold up the picture in your hand. But the thing is, the story was basically a really bad erotica fanfic full of pregnancy and HIV transmission. Basically Mickey is HIV positive, he and minnie have drunken sex in a closet. Minnie later has a one night stand with Donald. She later finds out she’s pregnant and has piglet a few months later and both her, and Piglet are HIV positive and so is Donald. Donald and goofy are participating in a swimming competition and are shaving before the race, Donald is just about to finish shaving when he cuts himself, and the ever impatient goofy grabs the razor and manages to accidentally cut himself as well. After the competition, the now HIV positive goofy, went and had a gay foursome with Dewey, Huey, and Lewis. There was some other stuff, but that is the extent of my memory of the story. Also another time, she brought in a dildo and showed us how to put a condom on it.” (source)
Need Better Rewards
“My school used to employ this incentive for not fighting. Fight Free Days, was what they were called. Every so many days without a fight, we were rewarded. Thirty days, ice cream. 60, dress out of uniform day, etc. We had managed to go a full school year without one incident. We were told we were getting a huge surprise. What could it be? Use up one of our snow days that we went without? THIS BETTER BE DOPE, BECAUSE ZACH TOTALLY DESERVED A JUGULAR PUNCH A FEW TIMES.
The day comes. Lo and behold, there is an effing helicopter in our parking lot. That was intense. Every student got to come up and look at it while a pilot told us about it. A few got to sit inside. Then, our principal essentially announced, “Hey, children! You’ve been so good at not wasting my time with your B.S. Catholic school kid violence, you get to watch me fly around in this thing while you sit on a black top parking lot in the humid start of the summer heat!” She truly thought we were going to think it was awesome.
So she goes up. We sit there in the heat that could start a riot as a years worth of declining violence boiled in our skin. She comes down and has the audacity to brag about how amazing it was and that we deserved it.
Started a fight the first week of school the next year. A lot of kids did.” (source)
Where’s Your Bedside Manner?
“In seventh grade during English a call came over the intercom, and the administrator said, I kid you not, “Would you please send (a girl in my class’s name) to the office, her father just died.”
This girl’s father had died of a heart attack about an hour previously and her mom came to pick her up. The administrator somehow thought that informing a 12 year old girl over intercom that her dad was dead was an appropriate thing to do.
The girl burst out crying and our English teacher let her run to the office while he gathered her things for her. The students were alone for about five minutes, and usually that would result in chaos, but nobody said a single damn word.” (source)
Mr. Creep
“We had a teacher who had a nervous breakdown and quit mid year. So we had all these long term substitute teachers. We had this guy who went by “Mr. Harvey” (Harvey is his first name). Creepy as hell. Anyhow one day he got mad at the class for being obnoxious so he had us all stand up, and asked each of us to start reciting books of the bible. If you couldn’t name the next one in order you got to sit down (yea!) and a detention (no one served it though). The only kid who could recite all of them was told he could go with Mr.Harvey for a “prize”. He quickly disappeared from the class; it turns out something happened and he was quickly placed in home school and no more Mr.Harvey.” (source)
Nope.
“In the beginning of the school year (when I was in 8th grade) there was this new social studies teacher who bragged he could do the worm. We were all pretty interested so we asked him to show us. He promised that if we reminded him at the end if the year, he would show us. Fast-forward to the end of the year and a couple friends and I remembered at the end of the day and quickly went over to remind him. He happily got into position and then proceeded to do the worst worm I have ever seen. We just sat there awkwardly as a 30 year-old man pretty much humped the floor in front of us for a few minutes. We walked out of there in silence and never spoke about it again.” (source)
Keep It In Your Pants
“In junior high, our English teacher was fresh out of college, early 20’s, and single. Our 50-something gym teacher was obsessed with her. One day she walked past our gym class on the way to the office and he stopped the class and called her to get her attention. Once she looked he decided to show off some muscles… not by flexing his arm, but by turning around and performing a squat in his gross old-guy too-short gym shorts. She was horrified and ran away. Our class felt awful for her.” (source)
Would It Have Been A Good Joke Either Way?
“In middle school, I had a teacher that was always a jokester. Wore wacky bowties, sang ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ when teaching history, etc.
There was a student in our class who had a rough home life, and everyone knew it. His father died when he was 6, and his mother remarried a horrible person.
One day, he shows up a bit late to class with a pretty bad shiner. Our poor, clueless teacher, jokingly asks him what bully beat him up and made him late to class.
Turns out, his stepdad beat him up. Cringe city.” (source)
Have Some Tact
“Communications class. Students had to give short speeches about an unforgettable event in their life. A student with Down’s Syndrome got up in front of the class and talked about getting his first job at the Vista School (a local academy for kids with autism and other mental disorders). When he’s finished, the next speaker gets up and starts to prepare for her speech by writing her name on the board. She’s writing sloppily and from the back of he room my professor shouts “With handwriting like that you must have gone to the VISTA SCHOOL!”. Everyone in the class cringes. No one laughs. The Down’s Syndrome kid has his jaw on the floor and tells my prof that his joke “Wasn’t very funny”. He dropped the class the next day.” (source)
And We Don’t Want To Find Out
“In 9th grade, a guy in my classroom was chewing gum. When the teacher told him to throw it away, the guy refused to do so. She then said ‘Ok, then I’m going to put my finger in your mouth and get that piece of gum and throw it away for you… And you have no idea where my finger has been.'” (source)
Keep Your (Old) Day Job
“In high school, school funds were running low so they made the coaches teach classes. The varsity football coach ended up having to teach the Career Choices/Economics class. He decided to make a game out of one of our tests. For the first time all year, the whole class was animated and really enjoying ourselves. It came down to two students who had to do a sort of fire round, the teacher was so pumped when one of the students won, that he slapped her a** then yelled, “Good Game!” He immediately realized what he had done, everyone silently stared at him and the student. He turned bright red, profusely apologized, while backing up with his hands up towards his desk.
We never played any games again.” (source)
… TMI, Man Pt. 2
“My high school freshman English teacher was a huge Shakespeare guy, and was very openly a yogi/spiritual gay man. After delving into ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, we began discussing the character Nick Bottom. With an awkward laugh he goes,” I don’t know about him, but I’m more of a top.” All 28 of us fourteen year olds sat in awkward, confused silence.” (source)
You Picked On The Wrong Kid
“My 8th grade english teacher was a mid-60’s ex-marine who decided that, because we were in a poor school, that we needed strict discipline and he was the one to provide it. One day, after class was over the teacher pushed one of the kids pretty hard as the kid was walking by him. The kid in question was one of the quieter kids in class, pretty smart, not a troublemaker at all. Nobody was sure why the teacher did it – didn’t make sense. The kid rears back and clocks him in the jaw damned near knocking the old man out.
The next day the teacher acted like nothing happened. He totally dropped his tough-guy act right away. Totally weird.” (source)