Cyberbaiting, involves creepy teachers but no Chris Hansen.

When I was in middle / highschool, personal cameras used VHS tapes and were the size of a loaf of bread - so, there wasn't a whole lot of secret camera recording. But, we had this teacher in 8th grade that we all hated. And, she hated all of us. We had to move classrooms that year, as we started in another building, and gave her so much trouble, we had to move closer to the principals office. We would do all manner of things to cause her grief, but one thing she could not stand, was that we were always talking and carrying on, generally being disruptive and unruly after she walked in and the bell rang for class to start.

The routine was the same, she would say something like, "Alright, settle down class." "Okay, now be quiet." "I said, be quiet!" "QUIET!" Then, if we had not quieted down, she would grab the principals paddle (The middle school principal also had a homeroom class, and taught history. So, we were meeting in his classroom after we got moved.) and bang it on the side of the wooden podium to get us to be quiet. Same thing, every day.

One day, I walked in and saw that the principal's favorite wooden paddle was broken in the middle. It had holes drilled in it, I guess for better swing velocity, and apparently the principal had cracked it in half earlier that day. It was a perfect break, so I walked up to the desk, and jammed it back together, and laid it gently on the desk. Sure enough, a few minutes later when she walks in, she goes through the routine.

When she grabbed the paddle to bang it on the podium, it broke, and one end went flying across the front of the room. It didn't hit a student, but one of the other trouble-makers pretended it did. So, ol' teacher lady is standing there with the handle end of the paddle, while the whole class is saying, "Ooooh, you broke [Principal]'s favorite paddle! You're in so much trouble." And, the front-row student has flopped on the ground screaming how bad his leg hurts from being hit the other piece.

Teacher lady goes beserk and starts screaming how we drove her to hurt this student, how we are all deviants and worthless and will never amount to anything. The principal had walked to the door about the time she started screaming at us.

She either quit or was fired and later ran for City Council. She sells real estate now.

 

In my 7th grade math class, there was a kid who sat in the front row and talked constantly during class. He had been sent to the principles office by different teachers on numerous occasions because he would not shut up. This one day, the teacher had enough, she was writing on the blackboard and could overhear him talking. After asking him politely to not talk during lecture, she just kind of snapped: she turned around, threw the chalk and the eraser at him, screamed 'stop talking' at the top of her lungs, and ran out of the room after a few awkward seconds. We had a sub for the next few days while she cooled down and admin switched the kids class.

 

I can't recall us ever being mean to a teacher. If we sensed he or she was weak we'd just do whatever the fuck we wanted and ignore them. Cue an AP chemistry class that consisted of ten kids cheating on homework, another ten involved in a real money poker game, and the last kid, from the Ukraine, openly drinking vodka during the last period of the day.

Edit: I remembered this one. We had a long term sub, and she'd give us daily writing prompts. One of them was "if you could change one thing about your parents, what would it be?" We had one kid who just didn't feel like doing the assignment that day, so he wrote a big tirade about how the Bible says to honor thy father and mother and that he loved his parents and the prompt was offensive and went against his religion. In response to his master trolling, he received a written apology from the sub, and was excused from all further writing prompts.

 

Our 8th grade history teacher had spine surgery (or something, the school was really vague), and was gone from school for about 8 weeks. So, we enjoyed 8 weeks of fumbling, nervous subs. Of course kids sensed this and gave all of them shit. Most of the subs just took it and got through the day. One sub lost her shit, though. She started screaming at everyone to "shut the hell up". One kid had crutches propped up against his desk. During her tirade one of the crutches accidentally fell. That made her lose her shit even more. She walked over, got in his face, and started screaming at him to go to ISS. He literally wasn't doing anything so the entire class was like, "Uhhh...." Awkward.

 

Must have been 9th grade Religious Education class (i went to a catholic school, so we had mandatory religion classes up until our final 2 years).

New female teacher, really super into the God fan club and this was her first proper teaching gig. I had her alternately crying and screaming at me by the second week of term. By the fourth week of term id been given a library pass for my RE classes and never had to attend another one for the rest of the year.

How did i do this? I relentlessly questioned every single thing she tried to teach us, id poke holes in everything and always had a question she couldn't or wouldn't answer (and once i got to that point id just keep pushing that one area knowing it would eventually set her off).

This was all basically due to my mothers boyfriend at the time, he was a serious atheist. He had read the bible cover to cover just to get ammunition. He would invite Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses or whoever the fuck rocked up at our front door, with some version of a bible in hand, trying to spread the good word and just go to town on these guys. Systematically picking apart their beliefs until they lost their shit and left (all in a pleasant and non confrontational manner, these poor bastards would actually start out thinking they had themselves a convert on their hands).

Naturally, my teenage self thought this shit was hilarious and i ended up emulating his behavior in RE class. I got away with it because i wasn't being aggressive, i was asking questions that any competent, strong teacher should have been able to answer or deflect without going apeshit and/or having a breakdown.

At least thats what my mum went with when she got called into the Principals office about it (they wanted me suspended), her exact words were "You want to suspend my son for asking questions of his teacher? Just try it. Ill have a complaint in with the school board and the catholic education board this afternoon if you try to suspend my son for asking questions his teacher cannot or will not answer"

They couldnt solve the issue, there was no room in another class for me and this teacher point blank refused to even have me in her class ever again (ostensibly because i was distracting the other students from learning about the all seeing, all powerful old white dude in the sky and his water walking zombie son). So the solution was to just sweep the whole issue under the rug and give me a free class whenever i was meant to be having RE.

I actually just really fucking hated RE class and wanted out, so it worked out pretty good for that year. Next year they put me with a much stronger teacher who was more than willing to argue the shit out of a point with me until we both agreed to disagree. I appreciated that approach a lot more. He treated me like an adult and had an adult conversation with me, then when it got to the point where he could have just said "You are wrong, i am right. Im the teacher. IT IS THIS WAY. END OF STORY." he was happy for me to hold my own belief's as long as i would at least listen to and consider the merits of his.

Would i have recorded and uploaded it to youtube if it was around at the time? I dont think i would have but its entirely possible, i was kind of a little asshole in my teens. I wasn't trying to be malicious though, i just saw no value in the class and resented having religion crammed down my throat. I took that resentment out on a young teacher that was just getting started and i do feel bad about it (now).

 

You guys are all making me a little terrified for student teacher in the fall.

Anyway...

I went to a catholic school from preschool until 7th grade. Most of the teachers weren't too bad. We had nuns, but they are the nice, sweet kind. That all ended in 4th grade. I don't remember her name, but she was the evil, abusive nun that the stereotype comes from. Within one year, this woman threw an eraser full of chalk into a kid's face, pulled someone out of the room by their ear, pulled me out of the room by my hair, threw a yard stick with such force that it got stuck between the cracks of the chalkboard (this wasn't as amazing as you might think. They were old boards and the cracks between the slabs of chalkboard were kind of sticky from not being washed in 20 years), and broke a chair when she slammed it down trying to shock us into shutting up. I have no idea why we all found these outburst hysterically funny or why she didn't get fired, but she later became the principal of the school before it closed down. It did not close because it was so horrible, but because the church lost funding.

Also, my 7th grade teacher started losing her hair from the stress of teaching us. We didn't really do anything too horrible. It was just that she had no idea what she was fucking doing. She was an English teacher who spent an entire class period one day trying to teach us Spanish for no explainable reason. We did not have Spanish text books. She just decided one day that she was going to teach us Spanish, then gave up on it the next day because she realized she didn't know how to teach Spanish. Because she was an English teacher. Also, she spent the first 10 minutes of every class trying to sell Avon to 6th graders.

I think if it weren't for my parents, I would never have learned how to read or write.

 

We had a student teacher in my 8th grade math class, Ms. Trumbauer. Well, Ms. Trumbauer was "blessed" with fairly muscular calves for a girl and kids in my class would yell out "donkey legs" during class and when they passed her in the hall. One day she flipped shit and started crying and we got yelled at by our actual teacher.

I also remember my computer class in grade school making our teacher cry because we wouldn't listen to a word she said. She was one of those weak teachers. The reason she really lost it that day was because her dad had died the previous week. Whoops.

One of the main reasons I never wanted to be a teacher was because of how mean the kids in my class were to the teachers. And I went to Catholic school. When I went to public high school, I was actually surprised how nice the kids were compared to the kids I grew up going to school with. I have no idea why anyone would want to be a teacher. Between the kids and the parents, I'd probably end up going to jail.

 

My 10th grade math class consisted of one or two overachievers amidst a bunch of slackers. Our teacher was a young and very attractive woman who had just gotten her degree, and this was her first job post-degree.

We gave her hell. Not me personally, but most of my classmates. Talking back, being smartasses, ignoring her, etc. She never snapped, but she did frequently lose her composure a bit. One day she snapped off with something along the lines of "I wish they would bring spanking back into public schools."

Without missing a beat, one of the guys replied "You can spank me anytime you want, Mrs. S."

Yeah, kids are shits.

 

Our high school drama teacher was the somewhat cliche man hating lesbian. She was also extremely short and morbidly obese. When she used an umbrella, she bore a marked resemblance to some sort of mushroom. So, we invented a game where every time she said something derogatory about men, we would start loudly discussing toadstools. It took her about 0.5 seconds to figure out what was going on, and start giving all (4 of) the guys in the class detention. Detention consisted of us being kept in the drama room with her at lunch, which we would spend discussing the poisonous aspects of various toadstools, and what thoroughly unpleasant pieces of fungus they were, and how it was no wonder no-one wanted them in their houses, and do you suppose cats would eat them when they died? This went on for a large part of the semester, and I would love to have video of some of her freakouts. I think the best one was when she burst into tears and went on this rant about how men had no feelings and David Bowie's Heroes should be the national anthem. Yeah, I don't really know either. Good song though.

The worst one though, was my yr 10 maths teacher. Fuck you Mr Downey, in whatever cold and lonely grave I hope you now find yourself. This was the guy that would publicly humiliate the dumber kids in class every period. He was an intimidating bull of a man, and I actually saw him grab a kid by the scruff of the neck and drag him out of class for not doing his homework. We were terrified of him. One day when we were riding around we saw him go into a house, which eventually turned out to be his home. I'm not sure whether this is baiting, exactly, but we blew up his mailbox to start with and it escalated from there. Silly kid stuff in hindsight, but for a while we thought we were total badasses, and for a while after that we realised we were total pussies when we thought we were going to jail. If video cameras had been around back then, some of us might have. To this day I'm glad that evil, bullying motherfucker had a stroke.

How do you stop cyberbaiting? Banning mobile phones in the classroom would probably help.I doubt you can stop it entirely, and for that matter I'm not even 100% convinced that you should. I still remember being powerless to do anything about cruel, shitty teachers, and I think kids inviting the world into their classrooms is at worst a double edged sword. I remember the huge outcry that went up when <a class="postlink" href="http://www.ratemyteachers.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.ratemyteachers.com</a> went live, and everyone was warned on pain of expulsion not to ever put a teacher from our school up there. Well, I just looked up my old school for curiosities' sake, and there are ratings and comments for just about all of them. Interestingly, most of them are fair, although you do have to adjust for some butthurt kids obviously having a whinge about nothing.

The more I think about it, the more I think that the way to stop cyberbaiting is to raise the annual salary of teachers by $15k across the board, then raise the entry level score required to get into a teaching degree. Get rid of the Dip Ed program we have here in Aus where if you have a degree in a subject like maths, science, english, history, you can do a 12 month course and become 'qualified' to teach generations of kids. Honestly, I've got a number of friends who became teachers, and they did it because the course was easy to get into, easy to pass, and guaranteed employment, not because they were passionate about teaching or had any particular aptitude for it. Raise the quality of teachers, and you'll lessen the incidences of successful cyberbaiting.

 

This talk of teachers made me start googling them; hot ones, admittedly.

It brought me to a youtube playlist of hot teachers: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC729067FAC791C18" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC729067FAC791C18</a> Numbers 12, 13 and 14 made me laugh.

 

Four incidents come to mind.

The first was a teacher named Mrs P, a nickname she presumably took because she thought it made her cool with the youngsters. One day we were sitting outside the classroom and she started playing a guitar and singing a song about how I met a girl named Wuzzy and had a baby that was fuzzy. I went inside, picked up a guitar, and started singing my own song. "Mrs P is a fucking whore" were all I got out before the looks on everyone's face made me turn around. Mrs. P had walked in right as I started. She broke down in tears and started apologizing to me, and said she wouldn't have sang that song if she knew I would get so offended.

My Age of Change teacher was a bulky French woman pushing 250. One day while she was outside the classroom, some kids got on her computer and found lesbian porn. Our teacher had a very thick accent. She would slur the D in Genghis Khan's golden horde so that it sounds like 'golden whore'. We would talk during class so she told us to focus, except pronounced the hard O soft so that it sounded like 'fuck us'. Let's just say that these three things met, and had a baby that nearly ended a teaching career.

One of my Chinese teachers only smoke English semi fluently (sadly this is very common and if you want to make teaching languages a career you should be an expert in more than one). One day she passed around a bunch of items, including a cucumber. We were supposed to say the item in Chinese and then someone else would toss it to us. My friend started sticking the cucumber in his mouth, and we were making jokes about different ways we would use dildos. Of course, once the exercise started the first kid asked for the cucumber. My teacher clapped her hands and loudly proclaimed, "You got the dildo!" The confused look on her face when everyone started laughing almost made me feel bad. She later found out what a dildo was, and broke down crying. It really wasn't that one incident, we treated her horribly and that was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

My personal favorite was my chemistry teacher whose name, I swear to god, was Mr. Payne. He was mortified of any confrontation whatsoever. This is a bad attribute for a teacher to have. Throughout the semester we would openly cheat during tests, (I mean lay the textbooks right on the table and ask each other for answers) mock him while he was in ear shot, and purposely changed experiments to create something either messy or dangerous. One day he decided he had enough and told my friend, the worst offender in the class, that he would have to take the exam sitting in a corner. It seemed like I could hear his heart pounding three times faster while he did this. After the exam started my friend slowly inched his desk across the room. The class started snickering and my teacher frantically shifted his eyes from his desk to my friend as if he couldn't decide whether to make a stand, or pretend he didn't notice. As my friend inched further across the room Mr. Payne started shaking and his mouth opened and closed, but nothing came out. When my friend finally made it to another group of classmates he audibly asked, "Hey, do you have the answers?" and the class went from snickering to roaring laughter. Whatever backbone that man had left, died that day in that room.

 

Thinking back, I was basically a horrible person in high school. I rarely got in trouble or anything and most of my teachers liked me and thought I was a good kid - but I was basically a terrible bastard child.

At one point, we had a really weak, annoying, spineless english teacher, who would periodically snap and act like a complete cunt and rip some kid apart, usually one of the ones who hadn't actually done anything. My year had a core group of jackals who all ended up in her english class. We spent about 6 weeks making her life hell - endless loop questions, moving shit around on her desk or in the class while she wasn't looking. Leaving drawings of her in compromising positions on the board in her class. At one point someone stole her car keys and broke the key off in her door and left the other keys on the ground next to her car, like she'd left the keys in the lock and someone had come in close enough to break them off.

About 6 weeks into this process, she snapped. Had a complete break down in class. They had to call an ambulance to have her admitted to hospital and she spent a fair bit of time in a psych ward. We thought we were awesome and kings of psychological warfare at the time. Looking back - I feel pretty bad about the whole thing.

 

[At my secondary school we had these electronic registers that were linked to a timetable database that showed students who should be in the class.]

I remember we had a substitute teacher covering a Math lesson once and whilst she was discussing the lesson plan with another Math's teacher outside of the room we logged into the register (as she was borrowing it from our usual teacher and he was a dumbass who wrote it on the inside cover] so we began adding fake students with hilarious names and taunted the poor teacher every time she read the names out.

 

When I was in the seventh grade, a teachers nervous breakdown led to me getting in my first fight. I was in a predominantly hispanic school, the girls in this math class would talk shit to this old lady daily. They would make fun of her hair, her big glasses, tell her she's stupid and yell at her in spanish. I hated it, I'd always thought you should respect your elders, especially those willing to teach you something you don't know.

One day this girl sent the teacher into an emotional outburst, she fled the room crying. With the teacher gone, the bitchy kids began tearing into other kids, including me. It's okay, I had the last word.

 

When I was a sophomre in high school we had a remarkably attractive history teacher, so we would go into class before she came in and drop all the chalk and erasers on the floor so she would have to bend down to pick them up.

Funny thing is I haven't moved all that far past that level of maturity.

 

My friend JP and I gave our English teacher shit almost every day throughout sophomore year. He's prone to ranting, and one day he got owned, hard, by a girl who calmly told him simply to shut the fuck up. Dead fucking silence. This was a girl who was about the most pleasant as could be, never angry or confrontational. (and whom I had a massive crush on). The teacher told him to leave the room; he did. I got in zero trouble, but never fucked with Nicole ever again.