20 People Share Why They Hold Justifiable Grudges Against Their Teachers

The world has some rather unkind people in it. But what matters not is what they are like, but how we react to them. These stories are a collection from people who faced off against an almost villainously wicked soul that hadn’t gotten in touch with their highest self and were operating on a rather hateful and basic level.

#1

I wrote about this recently in another thread, but I’ll repeat the high points.

1. 11th grade, Calculus III.
2. Handed in homework, teacher noticed one answer without work.
3. Teacher questioned me, basically accusing me of looking the answer up in the back of the book to save time.
4. “No, Mr Q. I did that one in my head.”
5. Teacher: “Class, we have a genius on our hands! Mr. S can do calculus in his head!”, trying to humiliate me.
6. Teacher writes a similar problem on the chalkboard, challenges me to answer it without writing anything down.
7. I give the answer after working it out in my mind.
8. Teacher works the problem out on the board and arrives at an answer which is different from the one I had stated. He turns smugly toward me.
9. “Mr Q, that answer is wrong.”
10. Teacher: “Ah, so now Mr S knows better than his calculus professor, who has a Master’s degree in mathematics! Amazing!”
11. Teacher hands chalk to me.
12. I go to the board, work the problem step-by-step, reaching the point where he’d made a simple, albeit critical, operational error.
13. Others in the class who “get” calculus gasp audibly.
14. I finish the problem, arriving at the correct answer, the same one that I had given after working it out in my head and answering him.
15. Teacher: “Take your SEAT, Mr S!”
16. Teacher proceeds to bully me in front of the class for weeks afterward.
17. I write a formal complaint to the Principal, the Math Department, and the County Superintendent of Schools.
18. Teacher is given an official reprimand in his record.
19. Teacher never apologizes nor acknowledges his error ever again.

Believe it or not, the above is shorter than the post I wrote a while back. Quotes are paraphrased, obviously… it was 33 years ago.

Image source: Onyx_Hokie_2

#2

Image source: IGotMyPopcorn, Chris Liverani

Had AP Calculus teacher in HS intentionally try to fail me because I was good at math. When his lies were uncovered, the reason he gave (in the principal’s office) was *women don’t belong in the sciences.*. This was in front of me, my parents, my counselor, the VP, and principal.

My counselor was so aghast at what happened, he spoke up and said if my parents were willing to transport me, he would sign me up himself at the local community college for the same class. Then I would get college credit in just a semester without having to take the AP test. I did it.

I then went on to get my BS in Mathematics.

F**K YOU CANTRELL

 

#3

Image source: 13YearsLost, Rubén Rodriguez

6th grade, end of November in SE Minnesota. Home ec teacher gave me detention for something I did (or more likely just got accused of, that happened a lot) and didn’t let me leave for home until after 7:30. It’s snowing, cold af outside and this c**t refuses to let me call my mom so I had to walk home. 3 1/2 miles in the snow and the cold.

F**k you Ms. Hanson. Glad you lost your job for that s**t.

 

#4

Image source: 14FunctionImp, DuoNguyen

My English teacher gave me a 99 on a paper. I flipped through, curious where my error was.

She had marked “egomaniacal” for word choice with the note “not a word”.

I asked about it, she insisted it was not a word, I insisted it was, and then I got detention for being insubordinate.

“How do you know ‘insubordinate’ but not ‘egomaniacal’?” I asked.

Then I got more detention.

 

#5

My English teacher… I’m dyslexic, which he said was not a real thing and i was lazy and stupid. He spent three years destroying any confidence in myself, ridiculing me on an almost daily basis and encouraging the other kids to bully me.

Twenty year later, I left my first published book on his grave..and took a p**s.

Image source: Kflynn1337

#6

Image source: Straightup32, Dim Hou

Oh ya,

I had an English teacher in 9th grade. Our task was to come up with a scary story. The whole school had to do it. It was a contest and whoever was voted the best scary story was going to have it published and they were going to get an award.

The only requirements of the scary story was that it be scary and tell a story.

So I didn’t do the project until the morning of. But in that morning, I had an epiphany and wrote probably the coolest poem I had ever written.

Well Everyone had this long winded 6 page paper and they were reading it. It was my turn and I went up and read my 1 sheet poem and everyone loved it. Teachers I had never even talked to were stopping me and complimenting me on the story. Everyone said my poem was the most creative and sure to win.

Well flash forward a week and I was pulled into the teachers office. She told me that she knew that I cheated and plagerizef this poem but she couldn’t prove it so I was disqualified. I tried getting my home room teacher to back me up that he watched me do it and actually helped a little bit. But he wouldn’t back me up, saying I was on my own.

Frankly that entire school had a grudge against me for being brown. And I was ok with it. But that one incident stung especially.

 

#7

Had a sixth grade social studies and homeroom teacher who was super charming and kind, and even made a point to boast about how his “fuse went all the way around the room” in regard to his temper/patience. And then one day when the class made him mad over something the day before, he’d barge into class and spend the whole period verbally abusing the entire class, hitting things with his fist, being irrationally mad. And then the next day he’d be back to being all Bob Ross like it never happened. This happened like 4 more times in the school year just to my class. When he did it to other classes, you could easily hear him going off if you shared a wall with his classroom, and even down the hall.

I was a good kid, and I took it very personally. I’d never been yelled at like that my whole life. I became viscerally afraid of him, horribly anxious, and angry that I had to be subjected to his verbal abuse after having done nothing wrong. I hated the unpredictability of it all too. I’m pretty sure my experience with this man shattered any respect for authority and unlocked something dark in me.

Now that I’m much much older, I’m still mad that nobody in the school intervened to put a stop to his behavior. None of the aides, none of the adjacent teachers, nobody in administration. They knew it was happening. I’d like to think that s**t like this would never fly today. I hope he’s dead and I hope his death sucked. You do **not** do that to children.

Image source: plasma_dan

#8

Image source: parklife980, Samantha Hentosh

Didn’t happen directly to me, but to a classmate in high school, not the most popular kid, but he was super intelligent and had a great capacity for memorizing facts, details and the like.

During a class test, this classmate included a lengthy quote as part of one answer. Some of us included bits of it, but no-one else but him could recall the whole spiel…

Teacher didn’t just award him no points, but docked him points for cheating, cos no-one could possibly remember that whole quote, he must have had it written down somewhere on him. There were protestations all round. Poor lad threw his arms up – what’s the point in putting in the effort to learn and retain info.

Was only an inconsequential class test, not a graded exam, but I still remember the injustice of it many years later.

 

#9

Image source: Cocobean4, Zhivko Minkov

We were about 6 years old and the teacher told us to make Father’s Day cards. I went up to the teacher to tell her my dad was dead. She snapped at me “do it anyway.” So I was made to sit in class making fathers day cards to my dead father.

 

#10

Image source: Feed_Typical, Ali Jouyandeh

Ha. I was in 4th grade and was enduring a lot of abuse at home. I wasn’t the most hygienic so my hair was frizzy, and I didn’t wear underwear because if my parts weren’t hanging out, I just didn’t see a need. It was tight and uncomfortable. My teacher and her assistant were behind me one day during a test and started talking bad about me and giggling, making sure they were the perfect distance away for me to very audibly hear them. Saying I never brushed my hair or showered, and I was dirty. As someone already being psychologically abused by my parents at the time, it definitely took a major toll on me. As an adult, I cannot imagine how anyone could act like that with a child. I cannot imagine the depths of sadness and insecurity for an adult in her 40’s could belittle a child who had little control over what was going on with her life. It’s disgusting.

 

#11

Image source: PM_ME_IF_UR_BATMAN, National Cancer Institute

In 6th grade I had a science teacher who didn’t like me and would give me detention almost daily. I don’t know why, I was a good student, did my homework, was on the honor roll, rarely got into any kind of trouble. But she would find a reason to give me detention, this was over 20 years ago at this point, but the two reasons I remember most vividly were:

Accusing me of having a girl do my homework for me (I have good penmanship for a guy and she knew this from having seen my homework and tests for months at this point.)

Calling me out in front of the entire class for talking, when we were doing a group project.

After weeks of my dad getting pissed about having to make 2 trips up to the school for my brother and then myself he demanded to know why I was getting in so much trouble. I couldn’t give him an answer because I didn’t know why she had such an issue with me, my dad called the school. As it turned out, apparently she couldn’t give much of an explanation as to why I was receiving detention either. My dad proceeded to cuss her out (her words) and I never received detention from her again.

I think she just liked having some sort of control over me and having me sit in her empty classroom as she would leave the room and just check on me every 10 minutes or so was just for kicks.

 

#12

Image source: BingoHighway, Towfiqu barbhuiya

My idiot seventh grade science teacher, and I remember this because it was so ridiculous.

We had to watch a video on wildlife or something and then write a short paper afterward about what we watched. I was in advanced reading classes when I was younger and read my thesaurus and encyclopedias for funsies, so I had a slightly better grasp of English than my classmates. I’m not trying to brag, but this is relevant information.

This asshat teacher knocked twenty points off my paper because I “did not use grade-appropriate language.” I got a lower mark because I was using words she felt were beyond my grade level. I’m still salty about it 25+ years later.

 

#13

Image source: Ok_Mulberry7837, Abigail Keenan

Wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom on my period. I was 14 and really heavy and still navigating having a period in the first place. Told her that I was on and I had leaked she didnt care. Cried to her, didn’t matter. Other classmates told her to let me go and she wouldn’t. Got home and I was an absolute mess, my mum went bonkers.
Frustratingly now I’m an adult I’d never let that happen, I’d just go to the toilet. But at 14 I was so scared of getting in trouble at school I just stayed put.

 

#14

So, I hate authoritarian teachers – the kind who exert classroom control by monitoring and enforcing minor rules to the fullest extent the system allows.

The kind of teacher who makes a rule that you have to prop the automatically locking door open with the trash can when you leave for the bathroom, and if you forget, she’ll refuse to open it for you, and literally make you wait outside for the rest of the class, while nobody else can use the bathroom because you have the only hall pass.

The kind of teacher who creates byzantine formatting rules for assignments, and will reject your paper and give you a zero for using footnotes instead of endnotes.

The kind of teacher who who insists that you only sit quietly when you’ve finished your work, and will hand out detentions for pulling out a personal book to read if you finish early.

I watched this woman shout a student into tears, yelling that she, “would have the last word!” as the student cried and kept responding, “okay.”

The student wasn’t talking back. They were just in shock, and instinctively responding with obedience to the teacher shouting at them – but this woman took it as an affront to her authority because “okay” was technically the student “having the last word,” and so she continued to berate the student and shout that the last word would be her’s until there was nothing but stunned silence across the class.

I’ll never forgive that frigid b***h for the psychological abuse she subjected us all to so that she could stroke her own authoritarian ego.

I’m a middle aged professional now and I still see red when I think about some of the teachers I had in school.

Image source: The_Law_of_Pizza

#15

Image source: MediocrePetrichor, LOGAN WEAVER | @LGNWVR

This one English lit teacher made it clear she didn’t like me. I think it was because I’m not white. She gave me Cs and Ds on all my work. In years past I had gotten As and been invited on special field trips for English classes. I won poetry and fiction awards. I tutored other kids. I got special assignments because I was always 2-3 years ahead reading level wise. And it was the only academic I was good at. My GPA was hovering below 3.0, English and art were the only subjects preventing me from being even lower. Science and math were Cs and Ds I deserved. I accepted that. But this?

To do a test of my theory my friend who is white and I handed in the same exact assignment, a book report or something. Virtually the same wording, same thesis, everything. We switched our names on the reports. I got a C and he got an A. She was just grading me lower because she didn’t like me.

Turmoil at home and a general teenage apathy prevented me from trying to do anything about this. I just kept my head down and took my Cs. I stopped trying, I’d hand in stuff cut and pasted from Encarta and I’d get a C. I’d include hip hop and punk lyrics and I’d get a C. I even did 5 pages of the same paragraph. C. She wasn’t even reading what I did.

She prevented me from getting into AP English my senior year, as you needed an A- in the prerequisite class. I was furious. It was my only hope for any AP class.

But it turned out my senior year English teacher was awesome though, she was a genuine hipster and let me design my own projects since I had read most of the books on the curriculum already. She would burn me cool CDs. She got me into My Bloody Valentine and The Vaselines and The Pastels and the like. She gave me her copies of Naked Lunch and Even Cowgirls Get The Blues and let me just read them and discuss them with her.

But. Still f*****g hate the s**t junior English teacher though. She was morbidly obese and ugly as absolute f**k all, she probably died a gnarly death years ago. F**k you Mrs. S. You were a steaming pile of rancid dog s**t and everyone hated you.

 

#16

I’ve shared this before, but back in grade school I had two really close friends named Juan and Nick. [Here is a picture](https://i.imgur.com/Kv9IWWf.jpg) I love of us at the circus with me in the front, then Juan, and then Nick. The three of us were really close and bonded of our shared nerdy interests of reading, Star Wars, and The Simpsons. We also really enjoyed drawing.

I don’t remember how it started exactly, but we ended up making this notebook that we passed back and forth between us. It was a comic about a guy named Tom and his cat. We would each take turns doing a strip of a few panels and then hand it over. [Here is a quick drawing I did of Tom on my phone](https://i.imgur.com/atgHmod.png) so you can get an idea of what he looked like. The comic was about the everyday life of Tom and it was extremely mundane. It was things like Tom tries to decide on a shirt or Tom dropped the cat food on the floor. It was really dumb stuff, but the three of us found it incredibly hilarious because we were weird kids.

One day our teacher caught us with the notebook and confiscated it from us. She never said a word about it, but I bet when she looked through that thing she probably thought it was the weirdest f*****g thing ever, especially since we were laughing hysterically at it when she took it from us. We never got that notebook back because apparently she lost it.

Over 20 years later and I’m still mad about that because I would love to be able to look at the dumb comics we made and because of her that are gone forever.

Image source: -eDgAR-

#17

Image source: No-Medium-92, Christin Hume

A teacher in university accused me of plagiarism and said she spent the whole night trying to find out what I plagiarized but because she couldn’t prove it she wasn’t gonna report it to the school. I wrote it myself.

 

#18

Image source: PersonMcNugget, Dev Asangbam

Had a super s****y drama teacher in 8th grade. He was a recovering alcoholic/born again Christian and he would lecture us about it every day. He also targeted me to bully, and would ask me things in front of the whole class like, when was the last time I washed my hair, etc. I was 13. My hair was greasy regardless. He also gave other students extra points for imitating me in a negative way. Then on the last day of class, he pompously said that he thought the class was ‘a little hard on me’, as if he hadn’t been encouraging them every step of the way.

Ran into him at the grocery store with his kids about fifteen years later. He said hello, and I just kind of grunted at him. His daughter said ‘why didn’t she say hi, daddy?’ and he answered ‘I don’t think she likes me very much’. Yeah, you got that right, a*****e.

 

#19

My high school Lit teacher was OBSESSED with Planet of the Apes. Like if you had a class with him, guaranteed, you’d watch it at least once during the year, and he would frequently compare the books he assigned in class to the film. He was also VERY against students using state-of-being verbs (is, are, was, and were) to the point where you couldn’t use any of them in any of the assignments you did for him and if you did you would lose points for each instance of them. Many students struggled with this restriction, myself included because he didn’t give us any real tips or direction on how to write effectively without them leading to some literary gymnastics to avoid using them instead of actual better writing. He also just generally didn’t seem to like me.

So when I wanted to take AP Literature my senior year of high school, it required a minimum of 90 in all your English classes to get in. I’d gotten 99 or 100 in all of my classes the previous three years EXCEPT for his class, in which I’d gotten an 89. As a result, I was required to take an online AP Lit Prep class over the summer, and as long as I got an 85 in that class I could take AP Lit. Of course, he taught both AP Lit and the Prep class, so I was worried about whether whatever issue he had with me would manifest, but I worked hard on the essays for the class.

Somehow, in a nearly statistically impossible outcome, he gave me an 83 on 5 essays in a row, meaning I didn’t qualify for AP Lit because the minimum grade to get in was an 85. Even more insulting, I tried to appeal to his love of cult films in one of my essays by comparing the auditory hallucinations of the main character in one of the books we were reading, Camus’ The Fall, to a scene in one of my favorite films, Carrie. He wrote in the notes how I should be ashamed that I compared “the literary genius of Albert Camus to a B-movie based on an airport novel.” If that wasn’t bad enough, two sentences later in his notes on my paper he drew a comparison to Planet of the Apes.

Luckily my mom pointed out how absurd it was and how it was a pretty transparent attempt to keep me out of the class so I got to take it anyway.

F**k you and your guacamole, Mr. G.

Image source: oblivionkiss

#20

Image source: AreWeCowabunga, Jesús Rodríguez

My high school Latin teacher was a jock when he was in HS and college, and most of the people in my class were also jocks. I was not a jock, just a short, dumpy guy. He was always ragging on me, putting me down and generally being a low key d**k to me. The worst was when I had signed up for AP Latin for my senior year, and over the summer he blatantly transferred me out to a lower class taught by someone else, I’m sure purely because he didn’t like me. I talked to him and when he couldn’t come up with an actual reason why I shouldn’t be in the class, he grudgingly let me back in. What a d**k.