Who was your craziest / most interesting teacher

Bretrick

Bretrick

Well-known Member
Location
Perth Western Australia
Mine was my Year 10 Science Teacher Mr Mcgee, He was always encouraging us to think about every aspect of the world around us.
To question everything.
He was always coming out with phrases such as, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny?
And he often quoted Professor Julius Sumner Miller, "Why is it so?"
 

I have several teachers from high school....but I don't remember their names, just their idiosyncrasies.

One teacher in high school was a native Indian and he never smiled. He was dark and had braided hair. He stood out because of his stoic character. Sometimes we expected him to say "How" and squat on the floor, that's how authentic he looked.

One other teacher had a wandering eye and always wore the same greasy clothes, and the girls never knew who or what he was looking at. Particularly when he would bend down to look at their work. Was he looking at their work or peeking down their blouses?

Another teacher wore sneakers, and she would chase the students down the hall if the bell rang and they were still in the hall and not in their rooms. She had a nickname, I think "the sneaker lady" but I can't recall it now. Everyone was afraid of her because she could put them in detention.

Another teacher would always push her hair back or flick it back whenever she talked. It had been noticeable by everyone. There even was a bet to see how many times she pushed her hair back. I think the record was like 120 times in one class. She also brought up the subject about the need for kids to use deodorant and to not smell. This was a biology class.

I hope and pray none of the teachers are on SF! They didn't realize that we were paying attention to these things about them. :D
 
My Latin teacher (Years 8 and 9) was extremely eccentric, and dangerous. She used to throw the Latin text book at inattentive students but that was OK because it was soft covered. Her aim was notoriously bad so it could come as a surprise even if you were entirely innocent. One day she threw a drawing compass and after that we were all very attentive.

When I came home and told my mother about the rather strange new Latin teacher her ears pricked up. She asked me her name and as it happens Mum had this same teacher when she started high school in Katoomba. I mentioned this to my teacher and fortunately she did not remember my mother, but after that I became a pet. I could get away with a lot, including not having done the necessary preparation for a lesson. As a result I was the one chosen by the class to ask a question about Roman history or mythology at the beginning of a double period. This diversionary tactic made the long lessons less challenging for all of us.
 
My eighth grade English teacher didn't like girls and missed no opportunity to show that by sarcasm and humiliation. He'd make us kneel in front of his desk for the slightest of infractions, sometimes for the whole period. How he got away with it, I don't know.

Fast-forward a couple of years and he was a Boy Scout leader and molested several boys before he was caught.

I guess that explained his behavior in class.
 

Who was your craziest / most interesting teacher​


A rather lengthy saga from my archives

Brings me back to grade (elementary) school, as they all had their peculiarities;

SCHOOL

Year One

We didn’t have kindergarten. Hell, we didn’t even have all eight grades in that one room school tucked deep in the Chapman hills.
And we didn’t have a bus, or lunchroom, or gym, or indoor plumbing.
What we did have was Mr McDunn.

Looking back, he was the best grade school teacher I’d ever have.
Field trips were field trips, thru the woods behind the school house, down to the creek, buildin’ mud dams, and makin’ wood sail boats, or we’d head up stream to the beaver dam, and when the steelhead were runnin’, before I even knew of a sea run rainbow fish that would grow to enormous proportion, he’d stand straddle legged in the stream and bail out those monsters with his hands.
Then we’d watch him cut one open, displaying the biggest fish eggs I’d ever seen.

One time, when it was snowin’ like a banshee, we took an old mop wringer and made igloos.
Yeah, we went every day, snow, ice, whatever.
And yeah, no bus, so kids appeared at school early, and while we were waiting for teacher to arrive (from his attached living quarters) we played with these little plastic red bricks that would snap onto each other….they fascinated me. We made planes, and built forts, and skyscrapers. It was like goin’ to the beach, I could never get enough.

But school, it was work books, my own pencil, my own desk.
Desks were the old wooden ones you see in old movies, the kind that hook up in a row, had the ink well, and groove to put your very own pencil, and you had a place underneath, housed in black wrought iron, to put your work books, and the seat flipped up, and so did the person’s in front of you.
That person was Francis Keller.
She was a tad messy, as her workbook place was eternally jammed with wadded up papers, and leaky pens, and broken things.
And Francis herself was a bit unkempt. But she did have a fetching look about her, and she was tough as nails.
She could beat the crap outta most kids there even though she was only in third grade.
One rather disenchanting thing I recall about her was her habit of snorting whatever was in her throat and nose and swallowing.
First I’d ever heard such a noise. Kinda like a reverse gargle…..and she ate paste.
Thinking about it years later, those unseemly habits may very well have become attributes………

One time during recess, nature called, and I headed to the outhouse.
It was a three holer, and it had a trough.
I grabbed the middle hole so I could peek thru the crack in the door for female invaders.
But Francis got the jump on me.
There she was. But she wasn’t there for business.
Next thing I know she’s flippin’ her dress up and her underwear down. Standin' here starin’ at me.
Whoa, I immediately had a flash back of me and Connie in grampa’s tool shed, and made the brilliant deduction that Connie was not deformed, as most or all girls were missing some very vital things.
Then I took care of my back side and jumped off my perch to button up and head the hell outta there, but not quick enough to skirt Mr McDunn’s shadow.
So there we all were, Mr McDunn in his aura of teacher/god like omnipotence, Francis of who magically had put herself back in the altogether, lookin’ at me like I was satan, and me, standin’ there with my bib overalls huggin’ my ankles.
I learned a couple things that day.
1) Wimin are way ahead of any mind game you may ever venture to get conned into playing.
2) It’s because they are not distracted by all the apparatus us guys have.

So, yeah, we didn’t have all the facilities of the schools in town, but my first classes in psych and anatomy were right there in the three holer.

Over all, I learned more about social life that first year, than all the other seven grades put together.

And now, every time I go fishin’, wading a small stream, and catch the faint scent of roiled mud and creek water wafting thru my nostrils, my mind flashes back to those first golden autumn days of school.









School, The following years

The local craftsmen had united and built us a real school.
Closer to town.
Two rooms.
Indoor plumbing, one for boys and one for girls.
Newer desks.
Swings.
…and a huge field.
Mr McDunn took us out to the field to explore.
Now I’d been runnin’ thru fields all my life, so I was a tad unimpressed….until he had us kneel down and move slowly thru the weeds and thistles, identifying everything that grew or crawled.
It got so I couldn’t wait for the next discoveries.

OK, we were all a bit rowdy, but he had a presence about him that got your attention. It sorta made the teachers that followed pale in comparison….and we took advantage.
Seems every one after him ended up having some sorta nervous breakdown right in the middle of the year.

Not sure what happened to Mr McDunn, but I got drift that our folks were not impressed with his philosophy, cause he was quite direct and they were a bit protective of their little darlings.





The Year of Taboli

Mr Taboli arrived my third year, straight from the Philippines….or as he said, the ‘pillippeens’.
He wore a suit.
Reminded me of Desi Arnaz, hair all slicked into a pompadour with half a can of pomade.

And that accent. He didn’t have a chance.
‘OK turd grade, turn to page turdy eight.’
We slowly sacrificed that poor soul.

An event that I recall was pretty much the end of Mr Taboli.

Francis had a little brother, Dicky. Remember, this was in the ‘50s. The term ‘dick’ had yet to have a negative connotation. Fun with dick and Jane was just that.
We called him ‘Dicky’.
The kid was just one happy little guy.
Always grinnin’ that huge grin, buck teeth spaced wide apart, gigantic mouth….but had some intellect issues.
However, happy…just glad to be included in anything we did.
Unfortunately what we did was mostly to his detriment.
Andy had this oversized gravenstein apple.
‘Hey Dicky, I bet you can’t put this whole apple in your mouth.’
Turns out he could.
It’s just that he couldn’t get it back out.
So, we’re all laughin’ our asses off, and Dicky is laughin’ and droolin’ and chokin’ some, when Mr Taboli blows the recess whistle.
We all file back inside to our desks.
Dicky’s sittin’ there with his gigantic mouth stretched to the max, buck teeth clamped on that apple, just starin’ down at page turdy eight, droolin’ all over his work book.
We’re all lookin’ straight ahead.
Then Dicky begins to get a little red and choke.
I gotta say, he held it together pretty good, not bein’ able to swallow and all, but once he commenced gagging, it was pretty much all over.
Remarkably, Mr Taboli was pretty good with a knife.
He leaped over Bart’s oversized legs hangin’ in the aisle, and proceeded to perform an applectomy right there in class.
So, he was a hero…….for a few minutes.

It was only a matter of weeks that his rosy outlook of teaching the children of the trees would take a turn.
The event that became the clincher to his destiny was our zip guns. Little simply made ‘guns’ from clothes pins, springs and pebbles.
Just enough zip to cause a welt.
A well placed shot destined for a girl’s hind end…unless it was Francis….she’d take it from you and feed it to our own hind end.
Well, after all the lunchtime screaming and running, Mr Taboli rounded us up and just sat at his desk for several minutes.
Then calmly gathered up our zipguns and placed them on the floor in a little pile and commenced to jump up and down on them, screaming something in a language other than English.
Then he strolled over to his desk, sat, put his head down, and started beating the surface of it with both fists.
Fascinating.
We didn’t have school for a couple days after that.
The Wadsworth years would follow.



I bumped in to Dicky a decade or so later.
‘It’s Richard now’

The poor chap had been working in the woods.
If you are short on brains, the woods are not the place to work. It’s bad enough if yer quick and sharp.
Seems Dicky had run a chain saw up his hand, right between his fingers, up to his wrist.
They didn’t do much for him in the patchwork dept.
At first, seein’ him at a distance, I’d thought, geez, Dicky is a Trekie, showin’ me his Vulcan wave.

Wonder how they're all doin' now..............






The Wadsworth Years

Mrs Wadsworth was our teacher for a couple years…..actually 2 ½ years, as she stepped in when Mr Taboli made his infamous exit.
The white coats didn’t come to get him, but after the zip gun affair we never saw Mr Taboli again…our first conquest.

Mrs Wadsworth was different.
She was old, and done with it all, but folks gathered around her and conned her out of retirement.
Turns out she’d run a concentration camp of grades six thru eight back in Milton-Freewater for centuries.
Quite the disciplinarian, as she could still wield a bamboo rod with the deftness of a samurai.
And those high top orthopedic oxfords that housed her rheumatoid ankles were nothin’ to mess with either.
She stood about five six, and weighed in at oh say 97 lbs, but still had a presence about her.
I got her to smile a couple times, but usually she wore this sour look, like she just got fed some horse shit, of which we tried.
She had what was sometimes referred to as denture face, some real jowls, kinda looked like Deputy Dawg’s gramma….and she used it to her advantage, lookin’ down on you thru her bifocals.
Eddy P, the terror of turd grade, was putty in her gnarly hands, and even his little brother, satan of second grade, was no match.

So things were as quiet as they could be in those two years.

We all respected her, and I even admired her, and I’d like to think she got a charge outta me, as she would single me out as an example for others not to follow.
When she gave me her special attention, I’d notice her neck would commence to sorta blossom into a rather deep crimson beginning at the start of her collar and creeping up to her chin.
This aurora was gradual, and mesmerizing.

Grammar was her specialty, and diagramming sentences on the black board was what we all did, over and over…past participles and me became friends, as we both found our little special place in the parse tree of life.

But the second room in that school held my fond attention.
Miss Dickerson taught kindergarten thru second grade.
She had a dimpled smile that would melt me into deep daydreams of her and I.
I’d sit thru history class, fanaticizing about us goin’ campin’. Her lookin’ on with admiration of me building a camp fire with nothin’ but my woodsman’ prowess, and then skinny dippin’ and then, well things got sorta grey from there, so I’d be stuck on replay, filling in more details with each re-run of my boyish manliness and her absolute womanliness, then fog, then back to camping, swimming, fog….sometimes we’d just lay on the bank after skinny dippin’, all naked, basking in the sun, fixated on each other’s *******s…but there was always that darn fog…….



The Mrs Nelson half year….aka The Half Nelson

She tried to be nice.
‘You can attract more bees with honey than with vinegar.’
Killer bees

The white coats did come for her
 
Gary O' said:

Who was your craziest / most interesting teacher​


A rather lengthy saga from my archives

Brings me back to grade (elementary) school, as they all had their peculiarities;

SCHOOL

Year One

We didn’t have kindergarten. Hell, we didn’t even have all eight grades in that one room school tucked deep in the Chapman hills.
And we didn’t have a bus, or lunchroom, or gym, or indoor plumbing.
What we did have was Mr McDunn.

Looking back, he was the best grade school teacher I’d ever have.
Field trips were field trips, thru the woods behind the school house, down to the creek, buildin’ mud dams, and makin’ wood sail boats, or we’d head up stream to the beaver dam, and when the steelhead were runnin’, before I even knew of a sea run rainbow fish that would grow to enormous proportion, he’d stand straddle legged in the stream and bail out those monsters with his hands.
Then we’d watch him cut one open, displaying the biggest fish eggs I’d ever seen.

One time, when it was snowin’ like a banshee, we took an old mop wringer and made igloos.
Yeah, we went every day, snow, ice, whatever.
And yeah, no bus, so kids appeared at school early, and while we were waiting for teacher to arrive (from his attached living quarters) we played with these little plastic red bricks that would snap onto each other….they fascinated me. We made planes, and built forts, and skyscrapers. It was like goin’ to the beach, I could never get enough.

But school, it was work books, my own pencil, my own desk.
Desks were the old wooden ones you see in old movies, the kind that hook up in a row, had the ink well, and groove to put your very own pencil, and you had a place underneath, housed in black wrought iron, to put your work books, and the seat flipped up, and so did the person’s in front of you.
That person was Francis Keller.
She was a tad messy, as her workbook place was eternally jammed with wadded up papers, and leaky pens, and broken things.
And Francis herself was a bit unkempt. But she did have a fetching look about her, and she was tough as nails.
She could beat the crap outta most kids there even though she was only in third grade.
One rather disenchanting thing I recall about her was her habit of snorting whatever was in her throat and nose and swallowing.
First I’d ever heard such a noise. Kinda like a reverse gargle…..and she ate paste.
Thinking about it years later, those unseemly habits may very well have become attributes………

One time during recess, nature called, and I headed to the outhouse.
It was a three holer, and it had a trough.
I grabbed the middle hole so I could peek thru the crack in the door for female invaders.
But Francis got the jump on me.
There she was. But she wasn’t there for business.
Next thing I know she’s flippin’ her dress up and her underwear down. Standin' here starin’ at me.
Whoa, I immediately had a flash back of me and Connie in grampa’s tool shed, and made the brilliant deduction that Connie was not deformed, as most or all girls were missing some very vital things.
Then I took care of my back side and jumped off my perch to button up and head the hell outta there, but not quick enough to skirt Mr McDunn’s shadow.
So there we all were, Mr McDunn in his aura of teacher/god like omnipotence, Francis of who magically had put herself back in the altogether, lookin’ at me like I was satan, and me, standin’ there with my bib overalls huggin’ my ankles.
I learned a couple things that day.
1) Wimin are way ahead of any mind game you may ever venture to get conned into playing.
2) It’s because they are not distracted by all the apparatus us guys have.

So, yeah, we didn’t have all the facilities of the schools in town, but my first classes in psych and anatomy were right there in the three holer.

Over all, I learned more about social life that first year, than all the other seven grades put together.

And now, every time I go fishin’, wading a small stream, and catch the faint scent of roiled mud and creek water wafting thru my nostrils, my mind flashes back to those first golden autumn days of school.









School, The following years

The local craftsmen had united and built us a real school.
Closer to town.
Two rooms.
Indoor plumbing, one for boys and one for girls.
Newer desks.
Swings.
…and a huge field.
Mr McDunn took us out to the field to explore.
Now I’d been runnin’ thru fields all my life, so I was a tad unimpressed….until he had us kneel down and move slowly thru the weeds and thistles, identifying everything that grew or crawled.
It got so I couldn’t wait for the next discoveries.

OK, we were all a bit rowdy, but he had a presence about him that got your attention. It sorta made the teachers that followed pale in comparison….and we took advantage.
Seems every one after him ended up having some sorta nervous breakdown right in the middle of the year.

Not sure what happened to Mr McDunn, but I got drift that our folks were not impressed with his philosophy, cause he was quite direct and they were a bit protective of their little darlings.





The Year of Taboli

Mr Taboli arrived my third year, straight from the Philippines….or as he said, the ‘pillippeens’.
He wore a suit.
Reminded me of Desi Arnaz, hair all slicked into a pompadour with half a can of pomade.

And that accent. He didn’t have a chance.
‘OK turd grade, turn to page turdy eight.’
We slowly sacrificed that poor soul.

An event that I recall was pretty much the end of Mr Taboli.

Francis had a little brother, Dicky. Remember, this was in the ‘50s. The term ‘dick’ had yet to have a negative connotation. Fun with dick and Jane was just that.
We called him ‘Dicky’.
The kid was just one happy little guy.
Always grinnin’ that huge grin, buck teeth spaced wide apart, gigantic mouth….but had some intellect issues.
However, happy…just glad to be included in anything we did.
Unfortunately what we did was mostly to his detriment.
Andy had this oversized gravenstein apple.
‘Hey Dicky, I bet you can’t put this whole apple in your mouth.’
Turns out he could.
It’s just that he couldn’t get it back out.
So, we’re all laughin’ our asses off, and Dicky is laughin’ and droolin’ and chokin’ some, when Mr Taboli blows the recess whistle.
We all file back inside to our desks.
Dicky’s sittin’ there with his gigantic mouth stretched to the max, buck teeth clamped on that apple, just starin’ down at page turdy eight, droolin’ all over his work book.
We’re all lookin’ straight ahead.
Then Dicky begins to get a little red and choke.
I gotta say, he held it together pretty good, not bein’ able to swallow and all, but once he commenced gagging, it was pretty much all over.
Remarkably, Mr Taboli was pretty good with a knife.
He leaped over Bart’s oversized legs hangin’ in the aisle, and proceeded to perform an applectomy right there in class.
So, he was a hero…….for a few minutes.

It was only a matter of weeks that his rosy outlook of teaching the children of the trees would take a turn.
The event that became the clincher to his destiny was our zip guns. Little simply made ‘guns’ from clothes pins, springs and pebbles.
Just enough zip to cause a welt.
A well placed shot destined for a girl’s hind end…unless it was Francis….she’d take it from you and feed it to our own hind end.
Well, after all the lunchtime screaming and running, Mr Taboli rounded us up and just sat at his desk for several minutes.
Then calmly gathered up our zipguns and placed them on the floor in a little pile and commenced to jump up and down on them, screaming something in a language other than English.
Then he strolled over to his desk, sat, put his head down, and started beating the surface of it with both fists.
Fascinating.
We didn’t have school for a couple days after that.
The Wadsworth years would follow.



I bumped in to Dicky a decade or so later.
‘It’s Richard now’

The poor chap had been working in the woods.
If you are short on brains, the woods are not the place to work. It’s bad enough if yer quick and sharp.
Seems Dicky had run a chain saw up his hand, right between his fingers, up to his wrist.
They didn’t do much for him in the patchwork dept.
At first, seein’ him at a distance, I’d thought, geez, Dicky is a Trekie, showin’ me his Vulcan wave.

Wonder how they're all doin' now..............






The Wadsworth Years

Mrs Wadsworth was our teacher for a couple years…..actually 2 ½ years, as she stepped in when Mr Taboli made his infamous exit.
The white coats didn’t come to get him, but after the zip gun affair we never saw Mr Taboli again…our first conquest.

Mrs Wadsworth was different.
She was old, and done with it all, but folks gathered around her and conned her out of retirement.
Turns out she’d run a concentration camp of grades six thru eight back in Milton-Freewater for centuries.
Quite the disciplinarian, as she could still wield a bamboo rod with the deftness of a samurai.
And those high top orthopedic oxfords that housed her rheumatoid ankles were nothin’ to mess with either.
She stood about five six, and weighed in at oh say 97 lbs, but still had a presence about her.
I got her to smile a couple times, but usually she wore this sour look, like she just got fed some horse shit, of which we tried.
She had what was sometimes referred to as denture face, some real jowls, kinda looked like Deputy Dawg’s gramma….and she used it to her advantage, lookin’ down on you thru her bifocals.
Eddy P, the terror of turd grade, was putty in her gnarly hands, and even his little brother, satan of second grade, was no match.

So things were as quiet as they could be in those two years.

We all respected her, and I even admired her, and I’d like to think she got a charge outta me, as she would single me out as an example for others not to follow.
When she gave me her special attention, I’d notice her neck would commence to sorta blossom into a rather deep crimson beginning at the start of her collar and creeping up to her chin.
This aurora was gradual, and mesmerizing.

Grammar was her specialty, and diagramming sentences on the black board was what we all did, over and over…past participles and me became friends, as we both found our little special place in the parse tree of life.

But the second room in that school held my fond attention.
Miss Dickerson taught kindergarten thru second grade.
She had a dimpled smile that would melt me into deep daydreams of her and I.
I’d sit thru history class, fanaticizing about us goin’ campin’. Her lookin’ on with admiration of me building a camp fire with nothin’ but my woodsman’ prowess, and then skinny dippin’ and then, well things got sorta grey from there, so I’d be stuck on replay, filling in more details with each re-run of my boyish manliness and her absolute womanliness, then fog, then back to camping, swimming, fog….sometimes we’d just lay on the bank after skinny dippin’, all naked, basking in the sun, fixated on each other’s *******s…but there was always that darn fog…….



The Mrs Nelson half year….aka The Half Nelson

She tried to be nice.
‘You can attract more bees with honey than with vinegar.’
Killer bees

The white coats did come for her
Click to expand...
Gary O' - that was some fine writing! I loved it! Thanks so much for sharing this! I felt I was there, experiencing everything. :)
 
Bretrick said:
Mine was my Year 10 Science Teacher Mr Mcgee, He was always encouraging us to think about every aspect of the world around us.
To question everything.
He was always coming out with phrases such as, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny?
And he often quoted Professor Julius Sumner Miller, "Why is it so?"
Click to expand...
Thanks for bringing up this interesting topic, Bretrick! Brings back memories of a long time ago...
 
I can never forget my professor at the University of South Florida. He was nicknamed "Knocky" Parker. He taught a film course that everyone took for credits because it was so easy. He was so funny and politically incorrect, but he actually introduced us to great films like The Magnificent Ambersons, so we were learning about really important films without even knowing it. Now THAT is a great professor!

Because of this thread I just Googled him and learned that he used to play the piano when he played silent films. I don't remember that, but he was quite the character. He apparently passed away at 68 a few years after I graduated...

https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/usf_photos/176/
 
dseag2 said:
I can never forget my professor at the University of South Florida. He was nicknamed "Knocky" Parker. He taught a film course that everyone took for credits because it was so easy. He was so funny and politically incorrect, but he actually introduced us to great films like The Magnificent Ambersons, so we were learning about really important films without even knowing it. Now THAT is a great professor!

Because of this thread I just Googled him and learned that he used to play the piano when he played silent films. I don't remember that, but he was quite the character. He apparently passed away at 68 a few years after I graduated...

https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/usf_photos/176/
Click to expand...
Good to have great educators.
Glad to stimulate your mind to enquire about your professor.
 
Last edited:
Ruth n Jersey said:
Kindergarten and 1st grade were combined when I started school. The first thing our teacher did was assign a kindergarten kid to a 1st grader. With that out of the way all she had to do was teach the 1st grade.
She had quite a system.
I do remember the kid I got smelled to high heaven.
Click to expand...
Your teacher was smart to delegate.
Pity about your 1st grader being odourous
 
Professor KD Irani ~ Lawyer, disciple of Albert Einstein, fascinating human being but, I must confess that I did not understand half the s____t he was talking about. Just the same he did inspire me to learn a good deal more about a variety of subjects and led me to studying Jorge Santayana whose book "The Last Puritan" remains my all time favorite novel.


Prof Irani: kdirani.com

Kaikhosrov D. Irani - Wikipedia




Despite all, I did admire and well remember him even though 50 years have passed since we last met.
 
jujube said:
My eighth grade English teacher didn't like girls and missed no opportunity to show that by sarcasm and humiliation. He'd make us kneel in front of his desk for the slightest of infractions, sometimes for the whole period. How he got away with it, I don't know.

Fast-forward a couple of years and he was a Boy Scout leader and molested several boys before he was caught.

I guess that explained his behavior in class.
Click to expand...
So sad when this sort of thing happens. :(
It is a pity that young people were not told how to go about reporting bad behavior of teachers.
We were learnt to obey and never complain
 
Craziest was my third grade teacher, a Mrs Korman who hated my guts and used to insult me every day in class. I complained to my mother again and again but she did not believe what I said. I finally convinced her that what I said was true and she confronted the b_itch only to be threatened by her with a stapler. Another teacher intervened and this finally put a stop to all the daily s____t I went through. Dunno how I managed to survive an entire year in that friggin wench's classroom.
 
Definitely Mr. McAuley, our chemistry teacher. Brilliantly clever and 'mad as a hatter'. He would demonstrate chemical reactions by improvising little 'Shakespeare dramas" where we acted out the role of the chemicals. He would also have us standing on our desks to sing the Periodic table, the list of transition elements etc .
Unfortunately, his Phd studies had been interrupted by WW2 and when working on weapons research, was accidentally poisoned. He suffered ill health the rest of his life and retired early. I had initially hoped to study industrial chemistry, but without his inspiration, by interest waned and I studied electronics instead.
 
Aunt Bea said:
There were several.

The only valuable thing that any of them taught me beyond the basics was a seventh grade teacher that drummed into us the need to be skeptical.

Not cynical, but skeptical.

It’s a lesson that has served me well in business and in life.
Click to expand...
I learnt that lesson as well. Skepticism over Cynicism.
 

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