It's been a while since I wrote a 'Storytime' post, but let's just start this one. Sometime in my elementary school we had a substitute professor who was teaching geography and he had some big shoes to fill in as the professor that was absent was pretty loved. He was Michael, young and new in this business. So he came all friendly, a bit confused and all over the place, but very nice. He also told us we could call him only by his first name which was a huge difference to all other teachers and professors. And we were about 12 years old at the time. It was kinda weird so we kept calling him 'professor' whenever we needed him. Although I kinda missed the old one, I really liked Michael. And I think he liked me. Not only me, but I always did my homework, I did good in his class so he liked that.
One time we were given pair assignments and my friend's any mine was to write a paper on Cyprus and present it to the class. This was going on for few weeks before we had to do it. We've already listened to about half the class and we saw how everybody was doing it. We all had posters and papers in front of us to read all the stats and information we're supposed to present. Nobody was good at presenting in 6th grade.
So our turn came and my friend didn't show up to school that day (I forgot the reason why) so I asked my other friend if she could just read those parts off a paper. She said she could so we came up front and started. As soon as I started reading, Michael stopped me and started yelling. He said we couldn't read anything. We should have learned it. I first had to defend my friend and explain to him why she knew nothing about that and why was she even there. Once that was cleared, I still had to defend myself. The whole class was confused because it was not how Michael usually reacted and, also, everybody else was also reading everything off papers. After few minutes that felt like ages, Michael told me to sit down and I never finished my presentation.
I acted all strong and just pissed off, but when I got home I started crying my eyes out. He yelled at me in front of everybody for something that wasn't my 'fault'. I told my parents what has happened, they went to school the other day and talked to my class professor and Michael. The next geography class, Michael invited me to stay a bit after class. Of course, my whole class stayed because we were noisy little creatures. He invited me closer to his desk and apologized saying "he shouldn't have reacted that way". I just said "OK, thank you".
I still have no idea what happened that day, but me and Michael were pretty good afterwards and I also called him by his first name few times in later grades. He then left our school after about 2 years. I've seen him few more times afterwards, just passing by.
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What's your worst teacher/professor experience?
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