I have gone to two different colleges: the University of Hawai’i Maui College and The Evergreen State College. I am about to receive my bachelor’s degree and I have had over 30 professors. They have all been total crap except for two.
I’m told there are good teachers out there, but where are they? Someone studying a different subject than me recently pointed out that I’ve been a business and marketing student for all of my educational experience—a comment that made everyone in the room laugh out loud because I suppose business teachers are a joke.
I thought I would take a moment to reflect with you all on some of my top four worst teacher moments:
- The worst teacher I ever had was from Texas and he bullied me in class so many times that I had other students coming up to me asking if I was alright. He’s the only professor that I’ve had who made me cry, and when I spoke to the vice-chancellor about him, I was told that they had received a plethora of complaints about him during his singular semester at the college, so I shouldn’t worry because he would never be teaching again. Low key I have never told anyone this but I saw him one day at a Jamba Juice near my house one day and I hid behind a giant Range Rover until he was gone.
- I’ve had a teacher attack my religion to my face, call me a fake Christian and make lewd gestures to our whole class. Halfway through the semester, we thought class was canceled because he was suspended, but it turns out he got cancer. The man got cancer so the class was turned into an online class taught by a woman who was not even a faculty member. She just worked in the community as a professional marketer. Some students did not have the means to keep up with an online class so they had to drop the course. The semester started with 30 students and ended with only 14.
- I’ve had a white teacher say the N-word twice.
- Teachers have been rude to my face, make inappropriate jokes and get pissed when they were called out for it.
If you can relate to this, I am sorry. Being a student should not mean having to be an audience member to a self-absorbed talks-a-lot mobile. Teachers are supposed to teach. I learned a lot from these shitty teachers—lessons I wish I never learned.
If you have a great professor now or had one in the past, you should send them a thank you card. Also, let me know who they are because I have one more semester and I am over this bullshit.
@HeyMariah is a student at The Evergreen State College. Her hobbies include making TikTok videos for her 65,000 followers and drinking hazelnut lattes. She loves that Evergreen’s mascot is a geoduck who wears a shiny glitter shell because she’s never met a glitter anything that she didn’t love. You can catch her in the morning listening to The Morning Toast on the daily and playing with her Pomeranian puppy @HeyKingston.
