School is supposed to be a place of growth, curiosity, and intellectual discovery, and for the most part, teachers are the unsung heroes making that happen on a budget that would make a grown adult cry. But then there are the others. The ones who confused authority with power. The ones who took a question as a personal challenge. The ones who assigned three hours of homework on a Friday afternoon.
This list is for every student who sat in a classroom thinking, “I don’t think this is legal,” and turned out to be completely right. It is a tribute to the passive-aggressive sticky notes, the public humiliations disguised as teaching moments, and the inexplicable grudges held against 11-year-olds. We see you. We survived them, too. Barely, but still.
#1 I Crashed Out Internally
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#2 A Good Love Story Needs A Villain And An Obstacle
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#3 I Really Like His Teacher (She’s Great) And Can Understand Why She’d Want To Minimize Chaos In A Classroom
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Nearly 30% of secondary school students report being bullied by a teacher. Not a classmate. A teacher. An adult who chose, presumably voluntarily, to work with young people. But it gets worse. Almost 64% of young people report being bullied by a teacher at least once during their school years.
A frankly breathtaking 93% of high school and college students say they could identify at least one teacher in their school career who qualified as a bully. Which means that if you’re sitting there thinking, “I didn’t have a toxic teacher,” there is a very strong chance you simply didn’t notice, or you were the favourite, in which case, congratulations, and also please reflect on that.
#4 Some Teachers Need To Go Back To School
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#5 Apparently, My Teacher Thinks That This Is “Insufficient,” “Unreadable,” And “Demonstrates A Lack Of Attention During Her Classes”
At this point, it’s evident that she’s trying all possible to make me, among most of the other students, simply fail. She keeps on insisting on and making deranged questions about things she said some day MONTHS ago, and then never again literally negating the evidence.
She even dared to say that I lack memory and that IF I have “psychological problems,” I should solve them by myself, as she, quote unquote, doesn’t care at all.
I’m sitting at the back of class (a place I absolutely despise), and for this reason, she automatically thinks that I’m a cheater (fun fact: I’m not – straight 90% average on most subjects).
On test day, she kept her eyes on me ONLY, and I did get a 87% with the valuation table.
A couple of days later, same exercises, and she gave me 50, which is 10 points below sufficiency.
I’m genuinely trying not to fail, but it’s just hopeless. Class ends in June, and I can’t drop it at this time of year.
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#6 This AI Slop Cake, My Food Teacher Wants Us To Recreate
Basically, one of our big projects is a “NAILED IT!” Style challenge, where every group recreates a cake, and whoever does it best wins.
Everyone was excited to see what we were supposed to make, and then it ended up being this. This teacher also praises AI constantly, and even encourages it to be used for “help” on assignments.
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Here’s what separates teacher bullying from the garden variety playground variety, and why it does damage that tends to stick around well into adulthood. When a peer bullies you, it is painful, it is wrong, and it absolutely needs to be addressed. But somewhere in the back of your brain, you know that other kid doesn’t have actual authority over you.
When a teacher does it, the entire framework collapses. This is the person who is supposed to be safe. The person who represents knowledge, fairness, and the adults who are meant to have things figured out. It teaches a child, at a deeply formative level, that authority cannot be trusted, that safety is an illusion, and that the people placed in charge of you are not necessarily on your side.
#7 The Teacher Grades Assignments Before They’re Due. Sometimes Even On The Day She Assigned It
“You have 4 days to complete this assignment.” Grades it that SAME DAY, basically everyone gets a zero.
“Email me when you finish the assignment.” Yells at our class for sending her too many emails.
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#8 The Message I Got From My Daughter’s Teacher. Third Grade
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#9 The Teacher Messed Up Our Attendance, And Now It’s “Already Uploaded,” So We’re Stuck
I’m so frustrated. Our teacher started using this AI voice thing to take attendance, and it messed up half the class. She marked people absent who were literally right there, mixed up names, said the wrong roll numbers, and did everything that she could do wrong.
After seeing this doc, we confronted her, and she just kept saying, “Oh, Wispr must’ve heard it wrong.” Yes, but she was the one using it. Like, at least check it before finalizing it?
The worst part is that this is our final semester, and she says it’s already uploaded on the portal, so she “can’t do anything now.” So all of us who were present are actually finally marked absent for no reason, and now, instead of studying for the finals, we have to deal with this mess first and have to run around trying to get it corrected.
It’s honestly so annoying. Tech is fine, but if you’re relying on it, at least double-check things instead of blaming the app and leaving us with the mess. And we’re not even sure if she is still going to stop using it or not.
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So how do you know if what your child is experiencing crosses the line from “strict teacher” into something more concerning? ThoughtCo says teacher bullying can include yelling, deliberate humiliation, and the deployment of sarcasm as a weapon, not the fun kind, but the kind specifically designed to make a child feel small in front of their peers.
On the home front, the signs tend to show up physically before they show up verbally, because kids don’t know how to say “my teacher is targeting me,” but their bodies will absolutely say it for them. Sudden dread of school, stomach aches on Sunday evenings, unexplained headaches on Monday mornings, and a general personality shift around the topic of education. These are the signals worth paying attention to.
#10 I Let My Son’s Teacher Borrow The Penguin Sculpture I Made, And She Left It On A Windowsill For 6 Months
I spent several hours moulding and painting this penguin. It was lightweight, rubbery, and pretty indestructible, so when my son asked to bring it to school for show and tell, I figured the worst that could happen would be it getting detached from the base, so I obliged. His teacher liked it so much she asked to “borrow” it to use as a decoration in her classroom. She told my son she’d give it back at the end of the year. This is what he brought home. Apparently, her chosen place to display it was in an east-facing window.
I worked so hard on this thing and was so freaking proud of it. How it looks now is exactly how I feel: deflated.
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#11 My Maths Teacher’s Water Bottle
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#12 How Dare A Student Expect A Professor To Help Them With Class?
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think this is all just tough love? Think again. The argument that harsh teachers are actually doing students a favour, toughening them up for the real world, building resilience through discomfort, is baloney. High school vice principal Jessica Stephens says it doesn’t work. What “tough love” actually relies on is fear and control, which produces not resilience but compliance.
Compliance has a habit of coming packaged with suppressed emotions, chronic self-doubt, and a quietly growing disengagement from learning that can take years to undo. The argument that cruelty builds character is one of those ideas that sounds vaguely plausible until you look at what it actually produces. Struggling students don’t need more pressure.
#13 An American Teacher Thinks Every Country Shares The Same Federal Government
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#14 Teachers Are Promoting Dehydration To Kids. Look At This
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#15 My Teacher Slammed My Laptop, And It’s Like This. So I Go To High School, And I Was Using My Laptop While I Wasnt Supposed To Do And Then My Teacher Slammed It
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Thomas Edison was twelve years old when a teacher decided to tell him, with full adult confidence, that he was “too stupid to learn anything.” A teacher looked at the future inventor of the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a practical electric light bulb, and concluded, “nothing here worth investing in.”
Edison’s mother, Nancy, who was herself a former teacher and apparently made of considerably sterner stuff, promptly pulled her son out of school and taught him at home. The rest, as they say, is the kind of history that’s been printed in the textbooks of the very establishment that gave up on him. It is one of the more spectacular misfires in the long and storied history of adults underestimating children.
#16 My Teacher Marked Me Wrong Because Africa Is Now A Country
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#17 I Love Teachers, But Some Really Are Karen’s
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#18 The History Teacher Used ChatGPT For My Assignment. Half the questions didn’t make sense, and none of the links went to where the information is
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Kate Winslet was told by her drama teacher that she should make peace with “fat girl” roles and plan accordingly. This was a casual, crushing dismissal that a person in a position of authority handed out in passing and that the recipient carries around for years. Winslet carried it, alright. She carried it all the way to an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA.
She gave us an acceptance speech in which she directly credited that dismissal as one of her greatest motivations. She famously called her success the “best revenge,” which is a deeply satisfying thing to say from a podium holding a golden statue, and we would like to believe that somewhere, that drama teacher saw the speech and had a very uncomfortable evening.
#19 Teachers In A Nutshell
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#20 The Teacher Marked My Son’s Homework As Incorrect. I Disagree
I feel like this is so cut and dry, but here we go. My son is in first grade and just switched to a new, better school in our area. Last night we did his math homework together. Today, it came back marked as incorrect.
I am so irked by this because I feel like when you look at the example at the top of the page, it’s clear that this is how you’re supposed to do it. Not to mention that the size of the blank spaces beside the red and yellow counters clearly insinuates something longer belonging there than a one or two-digit number. I know it’s a stupid hill to die on, but… Am I crazy here?
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#21 I’m Studying In Special Education, And We’re Not Allowed To Be Alone In The Classrooms
On lunch break, a teacher is supposed to be with us in one, but it’s almost over, and I still haven’t eaten.
I’m in S.E and I’ve been waiting over 30 minutes for a teacher to come and open one of the classrooms for us (me and other kids) to eat.
I can’t eat outside because of the smell of cigarettes from other kids, and I can’t sit on the floor and eat due to my OCD (the reason why I’m in S.E).
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Rowan Atkinson spent his school years enduring a severe stutter, mocked by peers and, notably, by the teachers who were supposed to protect him from exactly that. One of his science teachers delivered what has since become one of history’s more embarrassing predictions, informing Atkinson that there was “nothing outstanding” about him and that he expected precisely nothing from his future.
Atkinson responded by earning a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Oxford University, then pivoting to a comedy career that would make him one of the most recognizable faces on the planet. Mr. Bean has been broadcast in 245 countries. We can only assume the science teacher has been informed.
#22 My 5th Grader’s Health Teacher Told Their Class The “Blood Is Blue” Myth As Fact, And Wouldn’t Listen When Some Kids Tried To Correct Her
These kids really did try to tell their teacher that “our blood being blue inside our bodies” is a BS myth. They tried to point out that it was obviously red in the Magic Schoolbus video they had just finished. She told them it was wrong because 1: it was a cartoon, and 2: it was old and out of date.
My son’s bff asked her to Google it, and she snapped that he needed to be quiet before he got in trouble for talking back – poor kid is probably the smartest kid in the entire 5th grade, and his behavior is impeccable. He’s so sensitive that he was so afraid of actually getting in trouble that he cried at recess.
I sent this text to a friend who works for the district at both my kids’ schools to gauge if this was actually as dumb and demonstrative of poor teaching skills as it looked to me.
She called me later that evening to talk, and she’s not a fan of anyone at my son’s school except his main 5th-grade teacher (phew. Last year here for any of mine!), especially that health teacher, and told me she’d pass my concerns along to the appropriate people.
I doubt she cared enough to look, and even if she did, I also doubt she’d be big enough of a person to address the class and apologize to the kids still brave enough to correct authoritative adults.
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#23 When I Was Like 12 Years Old, One Of My Teachers Didn’t Give Me The Full Score Of This Homework Just Because I Drew A Goat And A Cigarette
I WILL NOT get over this any soon, especially the horns thing. For those who don’t know, it’s Ralsei from Deltarune, a literal goat. I bet she thought it was a demon because of the horns, and the fact that all I needed to get everything perfect was a single point is what always bugs me the most.
Oh, and obviously the dude is Sanji from One Piece. Guess smoking is a sin, so I also couldn’t draw that.
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#24 Our Teacher Took 5 Students And Is Making A “Private Lesson” With Them, Leaving The Other Kids Unattended
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Teaching is, genuinely, one of the most important jobs in the world. The good ones (and we know they are out there!) shape lives in ways that echo for decades. A single encouraging teacher can redirect the entire trajectory of a person’s story. The bad ones, unfortunately, can do the same thing in the opposite direction.
What this list ultimately points to is that children are not finished products. They are not accurately assessed by a single adult’s impatience, insecurity, or bad day. Every person on this list who was told they were too stupid, too fat, too stuttery, too nothing, went on to prove the verdict spectacularly wrong. Which is a beautiful thing. It would just have been considerably more useful if someone had believed in them first.
#25 Child Shows Creativity
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#26 My Daughter’s Daycare Misspelled Her Name On Her Tag
My daughter’s name is Rhiannon. I get that this will probably happen a lot since it’s not a very common name. That being said, she’s been going to this daycare for almost a year, and I would hope by now her teachers would have learned to spell her name.
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#27 My Teacher Ruined My Phone
I’m so mad and I can’t really do anything about it, she forcibly took it from my hands and put another phone of top of it (an iPhone 14 if I remember correctly), they got rubbed together and it left this huge scratch, yes that’s a scratch doesn’t wipe off, I saved up for this phone and I loved it, now she ruined it.
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#28 Bad Science Teacher
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#29 My 9 Year Old Son’s Math Teacher Marked This Wrong
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#30 My Kid’s Teacher “Correcting” Her Work To Capitalize Words In The Middle Of A Sentence
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#31 Our Art Teacher Teaches Us How To Draw Faces Using AI-Generated Images
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#32 My POV When The Teacher Announced, 27 Minutes Before Class, That We Would Be Studying Online Instead Of Offline
If you zoom in, you can vaguely see the end of this stream of motorists.
The road is not even a one-way street; it’s a two-way one. There are just too many people coming from one direction that you pretty much can’t even go back in the opposite direction.
And I ain’t even close to either the class or my house, I was literally 5km away from both of them.
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#33 My Teacher Gave Me A 100% On A Rough Draft And Gave Me AI Generated Feedback. As Far As I Know, She Hasn’t Read Any Of Her Students’ Essays Either
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#34 Just Found Out Why My Math Teacher Got Fired. He Turned Out To Be A Cult Leader. He’s The One In The Center
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#35 Is It Normal For Teachers To Teach Christian Beliefs To Their Students?
Ok, so this was kinda a jump scare, but a girl was eating Takis, and the teacher said: “You should stop eating those, they aren’t healthy for the future baby Jesus is going to give you.” LIKE WHAT TO A MINOR? ISN’T THAT WEIRD? Then she also admitted to teaching Bible verses to the class? Is that just weird? In high school, I’m past Christian, now an agnostic. Also, that’s my cat, Popos Xiao Pang, pretty boy, he’s a pretty fat boy. USA, NOT A RELIGIOUS HIGH SCHOOL. The class teacher also teaches geometry! If you call my cat cute, I will personally tell him that you called them cute.
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#36 Don’t Try To Justify This (My 11th-Grade Homework)
I was thoroughly annoyed that this was my night’s waste of time. My teacher threatened to call my parents when I poked fun at it.
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#37 Asked My Teacher Why I Got 1/2 Off This Question. It Was Because I Put An “Extra” Space
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#38 I’m 16, And I’m In Love With Art. I Want To Take Some Art Classes In College, But My Teacher Is Making Me Feel Like I Might Not Be Qualified
He is very dismissive of my work, and his favorite student sits right next to me. He hangs up other people’s artwork but never mine.
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#39 Does Your Teacher Have An Actual Teaching License? Because I Can Read This Completely
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#40 My 8-Year-Old Nephew’s First Day Of School. Apparently, The Teacher’s Ability To Teach Isn’t Graded On Their Own Intelligence
The kid didn’t write any of that. That was the teacher.
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#41 No Wonder She Is Karen
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#42 My Friend Is An Amazing Teacher Who Has To Deal With EB Tenured Teachers
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#43 A Guy In My Class Got An A On The Bottom Right And Top Left Ones. The Teacher Doesn’t Believe Anyone That These Are AI
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#44 Our School Added Lock Systems Only Unlockable By Teachers, So Students Can’t Close Classroom Doors
We have no idea why they made this unnecessary change; there was no explanation.
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#45 My Daughters 4th Grade Math Teacher, Everyone. More Concerned About The Correct Way To Say Laptop Computers Than The Answer Being Right
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#46 The Teacher Gave Me A 4-Page Worksheet, Saying It Was The Answer To One Question In The Exam
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#47 My Little Sister’s School Assignment. Written And Handed Out By The Teacher, And Sister Has To Find The Answers
She can’t even figure out what half of these questions even mean.
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#48 Professor Won’t Excuse Me For My Dad’s Funeral
My dad died unexpectedly and traumatically over the weekend. Instead of allowing me to retake my exam, my professor is standing firm. Writing a report to the Dean as we speak.
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#49 When Teachers Do This
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#50 My College Professor Says I Cheated On A Homework Assignment With Bizarre Claims
So, I’m a college sophomore studying mechanical engineering. My dynamics professor went on a long rant at the start of the semester about how we are only hurting ourselves by using Chegg and stuff like that. Okay, I thought to myself, that’s fine cause I’ve never used those sources before. Should be good to go.
Fast forward to today, and I get my homework grade back. All good except for one problem that I got 0 points on. I’d normally be fine with that, but I saw that the comment accused me of using online homework solvers, so I decided to send my professor an email.
He responds with the text seen above, accusing me of the most FAR-REACHING claims of cheating I have ever seen. This got me extremely angry cause I’m not a cheater. I had a big, angry response written out, but I thought I should cool off and see what other people think before responding. (And yes, the irony of getting help online for this is not lost on me.)
My professor accused me of cheating because I used some strategies he didn’t teach in class.
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#51 Am I Crazy, Or Is This Too Much To Ask Of A Kindergartner?
He has to write full sentences detailing his thought process of coming up with an invention. That sounds pretty intense for a kindergartener who’s still learning how to spell the word “this”. And then get up in front of a group of adults he doesn’t know and tell them about his thought process coming up with it? My son has really bad anxiety; he sometimes goes completely nonverbal with his own parents.
It’s not just projects tho either. He comes home with A LOT of homework as well. Every single night, he has a book, a front and back writing page, and a front and back math page, plus any unfinished classwork. If he misses any school, he has a lot of classwork too. He had a belly bug 2 weeks ago and missed 1 day of school, and the next day he had 4 2-page packets of classwork, plus the math sheet, the writing sheet, and the reading. Anytime he misses a day of school, he comes home with 4 classwork packets due the next day. Even when he misses school because the SCHOOL closed. They closed 2 days before the holiday this year because hand, foot, and mouth disease was going around really badly, and they were getting the school completely cleaned and sanitized to help with the spread. That Wednesday, when he got home, he had 8 2-page classwork packets, 3 math and writing pages, and 3 entries that needed to be done in his reading log. It took us 3 hours to complete everything because he writes and reads really slowly because he’s still learning.
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#52 I Hate My Business Teachers. All Of Them
These 5 business teachers at my school run DECA, the only competitive club I actually like because I’m bad at sports (skill issue, I know), but they don’t even TRY to hide how much they don’t want me there.
Never was rude to these people (I’m a quiet kid, so I’m usually just chilling in the background). Never missed an assignment in one of their classes. And it’s not like I’m bad at DECA— I made it to nationals last year AND this year.
Just got sent an email after missing school today (it’s Monday, and we came back from the states on Friday) telling me to send an apology letter to all my teachers for being sick. This has literally NEVER been a policy at my school.
I had my parents email her about it, and she DOUBLED DOWN?
I’m incredibly irritated, and I’m definitely not writing those letters because I have 10 different teachers.
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#53 Looks Like I’ll Be Having A Chat With My Son’s PE Teacher On Monday
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#54 My Teacher Is Making Our Class, And Only Our Class Does A TikTok Dance
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#55 My Teacher Put A Different Font For Each Question
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#56 Been 3 Days And My Teacher Has Not Responded To His Email Of Why I Failed His Class. Not Sure How He Graded
Even if this is inaccurate, I graded it myself based on his syllabus, and I still ended up with a C.
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#57 That’s Crazy
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#58 Is That A Universal Thing?
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#59 Five Months?
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#60 My Sister’s Professor Wrote This On Her Essay. What Is This? How Do People Read This?
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#61 I Found An Assignment From 2nd Grade. I Still Don’t Know What My Teacher Was On
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#62 The Way My Teacher Corrected My Work
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#63 I’m About To Graduate, And My Teacher Fed A Picture Of Me Into AI Without My Consent
I am finishing up high school, and due to ADHD, I am in the neurodivergent room at school. This room has plants (pictured, though not all of them), and I’ve been the one watering them. My teachers found that very helpful. They also know that I like blue raspberry Jolly Ranchers, since they’re used as a reward for me. Today, when I got up to the room, Mr G told me he had something to show me, and after I put down my things and came to his desk, he showed me an AI generated picture of me surrounded by potted plants and blue crystals meant to be Jolly Ranchers, and holding a PS4 controller (I wear headphones all the time for sensory reasons, so I suppose that’s where the AI got the controller.). He said he’d print it out and put it on the wall and give me a copy, and even though I told him I don’t support AI art, he said he’ll print it out anyway. Mrs N was sitting at her desk in the back, working with another student, and she didn’t say anything about it. The worst part is that I can’t do anything about it, since he currently holds authority over me.
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#64 The Teacher Knows My Daughter Is Being Treated For ADHD. Mark Her Down For Playing Tic-Tac-Toe
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#65 My Art Teacher’s Desktop
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#66 The Change Up
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#67 My Teacher Got Me A Knife For Graduation
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#68 I Live In Turkey. I Argued With My English Teacher About This, But She Still Said This Was Correct
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