Teachers do such a tough but necessary job in our world, but, if we're being honest, we've all had a couple of — er — not so professional teachers in our lifetimes.
And recently, Reddit user u/Dr_sus172 asked, "What did 'that teacher' get fired for at your school?"
A lot of the stories people responded with were more shocking and disappointing than you can imagine. Take a look for yourself:
1. "She got busted giving different grades to boys and girls. This was my sixth- and seventh-grade civics and social studies teacher. For some context, I always got good grades in school. I'm a good test taker, and I always worked hard to make sure my GPA was as high as I could get it. Her classes were like brick walls to me though. I could never get better than a C. By the time eighth grade rolled around, several other students along with myself had a feeling she was grading the girls differently than the boys since all the girls seemed to breeze through her classes while all the boys struggled. A couple years later, a group of kids got suspicious as well and set her up in a sting on an essay assignment. Basically, they all wrote the same essay, but worded differently."
"The girls got As, and the boys got Cs and Ds. The group reprinted their essays, took their names off the papers, and took them to the headmaster to grade them. He gave all the essays either high Bs or low As, saying they were essentially the same essay with different phrasing. They then showed him the original essays with their grades. She was asked to resign at the end of that term."
2. "She had apparently been doing this for a while, but this girl was the first one to report it. She taught home economics. While teaching childcare, she would demonstrate stuff for us. She showed us how to feed a baby, burp a baby, change their diaper, and calm them down. She demonstrated these things on one student instead of a doll. It was really bizarre. At one point, she had the student in her lap and simulated breastfeeding her."
3. "My teacher was fired for passing out drunk in the middle of class. He passed out; a student ran to the office to get the principal, and when she came in, she couldn’t wake him, so she called paramedics. Then, she sniffed his coffee mug and starting going through his desk, and pulled out a bottle of vodka. The worst part was his daughter was a student there."
4. "A teacher was 'asked to leave' after having sex with a student (who was the daughter of another teacher). She was 18, so it wasn't illegal, but definitely frowned upon."
5. "My sophomore year, a teacher quite literally became Walter White and cooked meth, but he did it in the chem lab instead of an RV."
6. "He yelled at the first-grade class so much that one kid peed his pants at his desk because he was too afraid to raise his hand to ask to go to the bathroom. He was fired the next week."
7. "A teacher at my school was fired because they called a 13-year-old a 'prostitute' for wearing her skirt 'too short.'"
8. "So...I got in huuuuge trouble. You see, the previous day, the teacher had advised all students that the following day there would be a 'show and tell' of sorts, but the goal was to bring something the presenter was certain no one else had ever seen. I had no clue what I could bring. So I asked my dad, who really appreciated historical things and was excited to show me a grenade. Now, this was a dud. It had been drilled out, and no fuse existed, so the mechanism could not detonate. But it had been, at one point, a very real grenade. So the next day in my very small Canadian town, on a typically quiet street, at a mostly calm school yard...there were over a dozen service vehicles, a SWAT team no one knew existed, and a hybrid tank/battering ram vehicle thing we're still not sure how the town procured."
"About 40 minutes before all this, I was being dragged by my shirt collar to the principal's office by my teacher while she held the grenade in the other hand, almost as though she was displaying it and also disgusted by it. She paraded me, and the grenade, in front of sooooooooooo many students. Panic ensued. The bomb squad eventually identified the grenade as harmless, my teacher was discharged, I was suspended for two days, and my dad went to bat for me."
9. "Two teachers went on the eighth-grade school trip to an amusement park, and while there, they were seen drinking beer at lunch. It got back to the school, and they were canned."
10. "In high school, a student didn’t understand the directions to something, and the teacher responded by saying, 'What, are you on the spectrum or something?' Turned out the student was indeed on the spectrum. Surprisingly, the teacher wasn’t fired right away, but he got sent over to teach at the middle school. Not even a year later, the same teacher made fun of a student for smelling bad and wearing the same outfit two days in a row. It turned out that the student was living in a van with his mom and didn’t have access to a shower or laundry service every day. The teacher obviously got fired after that. It still blows my mind he wasn’t fired the first time."
11. "He wasn't fired, but he was asked to resign after his arrest. Apparently, he got coked up and fist-fought a guy at a Disturbed concert."
12. "My teacher was fired for pretending to shoot kids with a fake gun during a lockdown drill."
13. "We had a younger long-term substitute teacher while I was in high school (probably four to five years older than most of the students). Someone thought it would be funny to invite him to a student party, and he actually showed up. The dude got shitfaced and tried to leave with a student in his car, but got pulled over for drunk driving and arrested. The guy showed up on Monday to teach like nothing happened, and he was promptly told to leave. The school had to go on damage control after that to make sure nothing else happened at this party."
14. "He was going to show us the Michael Jackson documentary in music class, but accidentally opened a porno."
15. "My teacher got fired for doctoring a student's work so that it fulfilled the criteria of the examination it was submitted for. This was discovered when the piece of art was returned to the student and they noticed the alteration. The student contacted the exam board directly. In the end, the student's award was withdrawn, and they were required to resubmit."
16. And lastly, "My math teacher would confiscate 'illegal' calculators (programmable, graphing, basically anything that cost more than 5 bucks) from students, saying, 'Come see me at the end of the term, and you can have them back.' If they didn't come get them, he would fucking sell them on Craigslist or whatever equivalent there was at the time. First, he wasn't even allowed to confiscate them at all, and the school found out when eventually someone who bought from him found a whole bunch of information about the previous owner somehow and assumed (rightly) it was stolen."
Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.