Bad Teachers Teaching Badly

About a year ago, for reasons now lost, my students and I started a running list of things bad teachers do, or bad teaching techniques.

We have derived a lot of amusement from creating this list, although seeing it typed out gives me pause—I see my own imperfections and those of my colleagues. Although my students and I may have been chuckling as we added another item to the list, I also see how pernicious and destructive bad teaching can be.

(I remember Mrs. C, a 6th grade teacher in a public school I attended. She accused me of something I hadn't done and required me to stay after school to write 100 times that I wouldn't do it again--I don't remember what it was. When I tried to protest, she brow-beat a false confession out of me. I still can't believe how easily I capitulated. After school, while I was writing, she accused me of giggling when I sighed, and added another 100 repetitions. Almost 40 years later, I can't believe how worked up I can still get about all this.)

A list of things bad teachers do throws into relief what a decent, not to say, good, teacher might avoid and suggests what a decent, not to say, good, teacher might do.

Feel free to add to this list in Comments.

• Insult your students.
• Threaten your students.
• Use physical and psychological aggression to punish and humiliate your students.
• Show off in front of your students.
• Indulge any digression you feel like in front of your students; allow yourself to be continually distracted.
• Ignore student questions.
• Get angry when students ask questions.
• Repeat answers to questions even when it’s clear that they don’t understand the answer you are giving.
• Encourage students to bully and tease each other.
• Arrive late to class, or don’t come at all.
• Play favorites in a class and treat students unfairly.
• Compare one student with another, favorably and unfavorably, especially with regard to older siblings you have taught in the past.
• Punish a whole class when one student deserves discipline.
• Indulge horseplay.
• Teach wrong or outdated facts. Make up answers when you don’t know them.
• Spend the class talking about yourself and your conspiracy theories.
• Teach the same thing every day, day after day.
• Yell.
• Comment on your students in a way that will embarrass them.
• Give them nicknames that they don’t want and don’t appreciate.
• Show movies.
• Fall asleep in the back of the class during student presentations.
• Call students by the wrong names.
• Lose students' work after they hand it in, then claim you never received it and accuse them of lying if they insist that they handed it in.
• Don't return students' work.