A teacher can be a profoundly influential force for good. To inspire and educate a teenager is to provide a foundation for positive outcomes throughout the rest of a life.
A teacher can also conduct some of the most disturbing, inexcusable behaviors with vulnerable adolescents. These cringe maneuvers provide some of the most severe, awkward silences ever to grace the lives of every kid in class.
And those silences echo for a long time afterward. So long, in fact, that they end up on Reddit years later, when the adolescents have become internet-surfing adults.
The detail descriptions prove that those moments are tattooed on the brain for years.
dummy5678 asked, "What was the creepiest thing your teacher did?"
An Irresponsible Use of Water
"My teacher showered 6 times in one night on a residential trip when I was 10 as an excuse to walk around naked." -- Dan-0-28
"Perhaps he sh*t his pants... repeatedly." -- richoaust
"Homeschooling is weird." -- Scotthew89
AV Club
"We had a teacher with a school aged daughter, like 7-9th grade. She and a friend were flipping through the TV channels and stumbled upon a live feed of their bathroom."
"Turns out he was recording these young girls in the shower."
-- darebear1193
That'll Teach that Punk Warwick
"Third grade teacher filled a bucket of water and pushed a students head in the bucket causing a sensation of drowning. (Whenever there was an unruly student he would fill a bucket of water and threaten to dunk them.)"
"One brave lad, Warwick, refused to be cowed so the teacher held his head in the bucket. This was 1970s rural Australia."
-- chinguetti
Permanent Record?
"My little sister took ceramics her freshman year high school. They had to do some project and she wanted to look on google for some references."
"She went to ask her teacher if she could use his computer, and she saw that he had a computer folder open that was full of pictures of her."
Extracurricular Creepin'
"I had a teacher in middle school who would leave the classroom door propped open 24/7 so he could see the halls from the white board. Without fail any time a cute (middle school) girl would walk by he would literally stop lecturing to stare at her when she walked by."
"He was also the baseball coach and got fired a few months after I finished his class because he was harassing the players making fun of them for dating ugly girls, or giving them props for dating cute girls. Total creep."
-- ncou524
A Committed Level of Cringe
"As a 'treat' for being a good class, my high school economics teacher turned off the lights, used a dry erase marker as a microphone, and sang 'Truly, Madly, Deeply' by Savage Garden."-- ellWatully
"It depends, though βLike did he make eye contact with anyone During the line 'I want to bathe with you in the sea?'" -- noonegetsmyjokes
Bit of a Logical Leap, No?
"When I was in 8th grade, I was sitting by my friend and my teacher noticed this. At the end of the day, he came up to me with a creepy smile and gave me a shoulder rub. Whispering in my ear 'you're not focused in my class so I'm gonna get you focused with a shoulder rub.'"
When a Joke Gets Old QUICK
"There was a teacher in my all-girls Catholic high school who had a daughter who attended the school. When she got to the point where she was in his class, she didn't want to address him by 'Mr. (insert last name here)' because it felt awkward so she just kept calling him 'dad' or 'daddy.'"
"Not a huge deal. At first."
"Kids are weird, so it became a trend apparently for that whole class to refer to him as 'daddy.'"
"He not only allowed them to continue doing it, but actively encouraged it by 'jokingly' refusing to answer to girls who didn't call him by his 'proper title.'"
Pet Names are Never Good for Students
"I had a teacher give me a nick name... it was 'Cherry' because I had red hair and wore this cute cherry necklace that I adored because it was given to me by my best friend."
"He would walk over and grab my shoulder. And say 'how you doin little cherry'... and yeah... he would compliment me on my hair or how I dressed and would say 'you're one of the good ones cherry.'"
-- krisredd22
An Unfair (And Horrifying) Point System
"Gym teacher wasn't allowed to teach the swimming unit anymore because he gave extra credit to any female who would wear a bikini."
-- nt579