Crappy Social Studies

I'm not sure why ... did others have this experience? ... but nearly all my Social Studies teachers were

1) Men
2) Total lazy asses who didn't appear to do anything or even know or care much about Social Studies.

Now not Mrs. Storey! She was my sixth grade Cultural Studies teacher, and she was great. I actually wrote her a letter when I was about 27, and she wrote back: " ...Of course I remember you. My little redhead, with her nose always in a book ..."

Translation: "Yes, I remember you and what an ugly little doofus outcast you were!" - HA!

Anyway, that was about it for good Social Studies. Oh, WAIT! I took psychology my senior year and that was awesome! (And not taught by a man, hmm ...) For some reason I always forget that psychology is considered the same department as History and Government.

Other than that ... mostly tons and tons of worksheets, the kind where you find the sentence in the textbook and copy the word missing from the sentence into the blank. Yeah, that's pretty stimulating.

Some videos, which even then I suspected the teacher had never previewed, and were certainly never discussed in class after viewing them. I remember in US History, multiple kids would fall dead asleep on their desks during the videos, and Mr. Stanton would take a break from reading his newspaper and go around the room whacking their desks with a ruler to wake them up. Yup, our tax dollars hard at work.

I think he did it more for entertainment purposes than because he cared whether anyone was actually watching.

Another memory from that class, let's see who can figure this one out:

There was a list of terms on the board we had to copy and define (ie, copy the definitions out of the textbook). Some blond girl I didn't know squinted at the board and then said, "What's the gee-eye-bee-eye-eleven?"

Oh yeah, and my American Government teacher, Mr. Sanford, was fired about a month after I finished his class, allegedly because he never gave back any graded work (he didn't), and a female student asked him after class if she could please see her test and what she missed. He told her that he could only do that if she came to his home and looked at it with him there!

Yup! Gotta love it!