Unfiltered Story #256772

My highschool Pre-Algebra teacher was horrendous. She was retiring at the end of the year, and had clearly decided that this meant she could utterly phone it in.
The class was structured thusly: She would put up the answers to the previous night’s homework on the board. We were to correct our own work, and if there was a question that we couldn’t figure out where we went wrong, we were to confer with a classmate that had gotten the correct answer to figure it out.
Then the notes for the day were also projected on the board, and we would copy those down and do a couple of practice problems. If we had trouble with the practice problems then, yep, you guessed it, we were to again confer with our classmates. We were essentially teaching ourselves, and our test scores were about as good as you’d expect.
The most egregious example of this was towards the end of the year, when finally our only partial understanding of the material came to a head and there was a homework question that absolutely NO ONE got right, and further, no one could figure out why. Most teachers would accept that this was a clear cut sign that they had failed to adequately explain the material.
Not my teacher.
She flatly refused to help us. We pointed out that we had already pooled our resources and she just shrugged and told us to figure it out. She absolutely would not even answer specific questions about elements of the problem, let alone go through the whole thing step by step.
At the end of the term, I had scraped by with a C, and one of my friends failed altogether and had to take a summer course as a consequence. His summer school teacher was actually appalled that he was even there, as once he had someone to actually explain everything properly he aced the whole course easily. He’s an engineer now.
I also managed to eke my way into an Honors level Calculus class the next year, and entirely aced the class – though not without loudly exclaiming at one point ‘WAIT. The entire point of calculus is to FIND THE AREA UNDER THE CURVE!? HOW DID I NOT EVEN KNOW THAT!?’
Yeah. She managed to impart so little of the subject matter that I didn’t even know what the calculations I was doing were FOR. Easily the worst teacher I have ever had.