Warning: This article contains mention of sexual abuse.
Recently, I asked former students in the BuzzFeed Community to share wild stories about teachers in their district who were fired for very, very good reasons. Here's what they had to say:
1. "About a year after I graduated, she was arrested for embezzling roughly $8,000 in school funds to pay off her gambling debts."
–Anonymous
2. "My 5th grade teacher threw a desk at a student. He said the student was well known for being a POS, and already had multiple dealings with the school board, but they had done nothing."
They couldn’t fully fire him because they knew he (aka the union) would win a lawsuit. They couldn’t put him in a classroom after his outburst. So they promoted him to vice principal of the school across town. He later became principal."
3. "She kept leaving hemorrhoid cream in students’ lockers. Was it hers and she kept somehow misplacing it in their lockers? Was it a bizarre gift of some kind? I never learned."
–Anonymous
4. "A middle school teacher (28 years old) created a literal cult around herself. She was your stereotypical American teacher – blonde, fashionable, coach of the cheerleading team."
"At first she seemed nice but then her disrespect for students showed through. Her favorites (who are exact replicas of her, just younger) would brag about seeing her wedding dress or meeting her fiancé. They got sent to honors with near-failing scores and a classmate of mine who had perfect scores didn't get into Honors because he allegedly mocked her in one of our classes, even though he was just repeating instructions to a confused classmate."
–Anonymous
5. "My cousin’s science and shop teacher was fired for teaching the boys in shop how to make pipe bombs."
–Anonymous
6. "Our algebra teacher was fired after one year because he couldn't do math. I'm not kidding. Several of us would go up to the board and correct him mid-problem because we could understand how to balance equations and he could not."
7. "When my daughter was in 2nd grade (around 6-7 years old), her art teacher flipped out because a kid started painting before she told him to. She grabbed his almost-finished project and ripped it up, and when some of the kids started crying, she grabbed theirs as well and tore them to pieces."
"She then taunted the class, saying anyone that moves will get detention where she’ll make them sit in the woods for an hour at dark. At this point the kids are crying, some are frozen with fear. My daughter and three others ran out of the classroom and were chased down the hallway by the teacher. They ran into another teacher and her art teacher told the other teacher that the kids were liars and not to believe anything they said. It’s no wonder when the next week a mass email was sent out saying their art teacher was retiring effective immediately. I think some of my daughters classmates are still in therapy over that."
8. "One of the chemistry teachers was caught masturbating in his, thankfully, empty classroom."
–Anonymous
9. "I had a middle school band director who stuttered badly. He got mad at the percussion section but couldn't manage to actually chew them out (stuttering too badly), so he would throw drumsticks at them."
"Mind you, percussion is always located at the BACK of the band, so those sticks had to fly over the ENTIRE BAND in order to reach the drummers. We had a new director the next year."
10. "They found out the music teacher didn't have a degree. He worked there 20 years."
11. "My freshman year health teacher was arrested on nine counts of child porn and one of child exploitation. He started working at an elementary school the year I graduated and was arrested about a year and a half later."
–Anonymous
12. "I got a teacher fired from my middle school because of his penchant for touching students in weird ways. It started with placing his hand on the back of kids' necks, or on their shoulders, but then one day he grabbed a girl's bra strap on her shoulder and snapped it (not broke, but snapped like a rubber band)."
"The other staff wouldn't listen to us when we complained, so I made a petition and took it around the school (pretty much everyone who had a class with this teacher signed it) and submitted it to the school resource officer. The teacher was gone before the end of the week."
–Anonymous
13. "My high school English teacher, who had only recently graduated from college and was very normal-seeming, was teaching the book Finnegans Wake by James Joyce and a major theme in that book is dreaming, so she decided to read us her dream journal. Unfortunately, the majority of her dreams were unbelievably unhinged and incredibly sexual."
"I won’t go to into detail, but one of them involved her having explosive diarrhea while banging the art teacher (who was in his 70s). Students were begging her to stop but she didn’t even answer them, she just kept on reading. It was like she was in a trance. Someone ran out and got the principal, but she wouldn’t stop even then. Security took her off of campus. It was wild!"
–Anonymous
14. "She made a 'Big Boob List' – a list of teachers and faculty members with large boobs – and gave it to her students, telling us that it was required reading."
–Anonymous
15. "She boinked the PTA president’s husband."
–Anonymous
16. "My freshman year in high school, my science teacher was sitting on his desk. As I walked past him he grabbed my arm, pulled me between his legs, and squeezed them together as he whispered in my ear, 'You excite me.' I, of course, went home and told my dad, and we went to the school board."
"I was removed from science and placed in study hall, got an A in science and this teacher's contract was cancelled at the end of the year."
–Anonymous
17. "A teacher at my small-town school was arrested at a strip club for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest after entering the club's women's room (gross, dude). A couple of years later I ran into him working the valet at a chain restaurant in Boston."
–Anonymous
18. "She killed someone in a hit and run accident and proceeded to go to school and teach that day."
"Someone reported her plates and she was arrested outside of school hours. She was the home ec. teacher at my high school... She got a light sentence, two years I believe, and was let out of prison before I finished high school. Now she runs a small boutique downtown and if you Google our school her mugshot shows up."
–Anonymouos
19. And finally, "My eight grade science teacher explained, in elaborate detail, what her boob job had been like – how the procedure worked scientifically, why she decided to get it, how much it hurt, what her boobs felt and looked like now."
"She showed us before and after pictures and a chart she made showing how she slept with almost three times as many men per month after getting the operation. It was an out of body experience. She was fired VERY soon after."
–Anonymous
Now I want to hear from you. If you're a teacher who has seen other teachers be fired for completely ridiculous reasons, tell us about it in the comments or using this anonymous Google Form. Your response may be included in an upcoming BuzzFeed post.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE, which routes the caller to their nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center here.