My favorite bad teacher actually tried to take my job…
He started out trying to teach math in middle school. It takes real talent to deal with those kids, and a level of patience I don't have. I know, I did part of my student teaching at a middle school — oddly that was the segment I made an "A" on. I didn't do as well in High School CS, but that's a long story.
They brought him over to our school and he didn't do much better. They gave him my favorite group of kids, regular CS I, in an effort to relieve me of the number of preps. His classroom management style was intimidation. It was an interesting technique which didn't work very well. He would pick on an a white kid with ADD (not hard to find in our school, somedays I think all the white kids have ADD) and ride them hard. None of the other kids were bright enough to figure out that he couldn't pick on the minorities that way. He also didn't treat girls very well which was extremely aggravated to me.
He also didn't have any adult social skills, so I'm not real surprised that his social skills with students were not very well developed either.
Speaking of which, that is what surprises me the most as when I was in school I was far from being the popular kid, though I am perceived by both parents and students as being one of the popular teachers. Strange.
Anyway, he was applying to the district to work in the IT department and so finally left the district. In the middle of the year, which tells you again that he wasn't the right kind of person to teach. I think committment to stay for the full year is important.
Leave a Reply