A List Of Teacher Stereotypes
by Terry Heick
Ed note: This post has been republished from a late 2012 post
1. Crazy Teacher
This is the teacher whose class you don’t miss. The one that roller skates into class on the first day of school tossing out goodie bags of highlighters and breath mints, and swigs Mountain Dew right out of the 2-liter bottle before putting it back in her purse.
2. Talkative Teacher
While being talkative can stifle a student’s opportunity to learn—students do their best to keep the Talkative Teacher going: the more the teacher talks, the less students have to work.
3. Rebel Teacher
This is the one who mocks the principal when they turn their back, thumbs their nose at “the state,” and encourages students to stand on their desks and rip their SpringBoard book into pieces. Viva la rebel!
4. Fire-and-Brimstone
If you do not learn to read Chaucer or solve theorems with the same urgency as the Fire-and-Brimstone teacher, you’ll fail. At life.
5. Displaced College Professor
This is the K-12 teacher that grew up dreaming of teaching Emily Dickinson at Stanford, but instead teaches band at Mudhen Middle School, and hasn’t quite come to grips with it all.
6. The Over-Achiever
This is the teacher that has to have their class first at everything: first in fundraising, first to the lunchroom, first in reading goals, first in parent participation, and first to every PLC meeting–everything graded, in alphabetical order, with a “research-based strategy” ready to start the meeting. All in the name of education and “school spirit,” of course.
7. The Forgetful Teacher
The Forgetful Teacher forgets everything. That they scheduled an exam, to grade the exams, to go to the library, to collect field trip money, to give the questionnaire, and so on. This teacher is closely related to the “swimming in papers” teacher. In fact, they’re good friends.
8. Late Teacher
The Late Teacher is rarely punctual, but of course insists on better from their students. They start class late, hand back work late, and sometimes even arrive to school late, lugging papers and books while the students line up at the door.
9. Tech Addict
The Tech Addict loves technology—more than books, tests, and even their own children, they instead fawn over the latest gadgets. The Tech Addict is often guilty of unnecessarytechimplementationisis, a common ailment that arises when technology is used with little to no real learning gain, primarily for the sake of tech itself.
10. The Repetitive Teacher
The Repetitive Teacher, well, they repeat themselves over and over again, often shuffling around the words a bit for effect, but ultimately taking 10 minutes to explain one simple idea.
11. Long-term Sub
Ah, the difficult plight of the long-term sub. They are teachers but are not teachers, stuck in some awful limbo of establishing the classroom as “theirs,” or doing what they’re told and going home. Either way, they don’t get paid enough for that hot mess.
12. O Captain! My Captain!
This teacher sees themselves as the savior for the students, and invites melodrama at every opportunity, full of rhetorical appeal and unnecessary lectures on effort and the future.
13. The Swimming-in-Papers Teacher
The Swimming-in-Papers teacher loses essays, often forgets to hand back even graded work, and takes home a huge stack of On-Demand essays every evening with the noble intent of grading them all while watching Honey Boo Boo, never having discovered the miracle of the paper clip.
14. Get-off-my-lawn Teacher
Teaching was better back in their day. And so were the New York Yankees. No newfangled social media contraptions, standardized tests, or dagbern smartphones. Get off their lawn—and take your iPad with you.
15. Diet Coke Addict
Diet Coke is the new coffee, and the Diet Coke Addict will bring down a wildebeest with their bare hands to get their fix. Without it, they are irritable, forgetful, distractible, and fun to harass.
16. Cool Teacher
The Cool Teacher can remind you of the TMI teacher at times, but they stop just short of that. Rather, the Cool Teacher knows what’s cool—clothing, music, pop culture references, all of it. They #hashtag quiz grades and create Lil Wayne analogies to explain complex chemistry problems, treating their teaching career as a second chance to be the cool kid in school.
17. Overly-Authoritative Teacher
This teacher will nail you to the wall for even a poorly timed sigh. Classroom management is the foundation for a high-functioning learning environment. Now get with the program maggots!
18. Hippie Teacher
Made famous by Beavis and Butthead, the Hippie Teacher plays Neil Young in the classroom, wears flowing skirts or sports a shaggy beard, and is the only car in the parking lot with a carpeted dashboard. Peace, love, and moonbeams.
19. TMI Teacher
TMI teacher gives too much information to the students: favorite sitcoms, their facebook “friends,” or the source of their heartburn.
20. The Suck-Up
The Suck-Up lives for times when the principal or other teachers are in the room. The tone of the classroom changes dramatically when an administrator visits and they invent incredible clunky questions to try to demonstrate the “rigor” of their classroom, only to fail miserably as the students get lost in the confusion, and the principal is fooled nary a bit.
If we’ve forgotten any, let us know in the comments section!
A Humorous Look At The 20 Types Of Teacher; image attribution flickr userusarmycorpofengineers; Forgetful Teacher, Tech-Addict Teacher & 18 Other Teacher Stereotypes