I have a teacher this year that instantly struck a bad note with me.

A student raised his hand in class. The teacher pointed to the student. The student asked a question about what the teacher was discussing.

The teacher’s response came off to me as rude and completely inappropriate for a teacher. The teacher started with something like, “As I said before…”

The tone is what really got me. The teacher was clearly suggesting the student should have already known this based on what the teacher said before but I thought it was a completely reasonable question.

I could just be sensitive to this kind of thing but I think it’s a teachers responsibility to try and bring the students along with them. If the teacher loses a student then the teacher has some responsibility in it.

Fortunately, it’s early in the school year so I get to use my usual approach to solve this problem:

Switching Classes Is The Easiest Solution

I’ve found that I can switch out of just about any class if I’m honest and polite in my request.

I politely asked my counselor to switch me to a different class.

The counselor asked me why…

I avoiding giving a full answer because I knew that couldn’t lead to anything good for anyone. I just said I didn’t think I was a good fit with his style of teaching.

The counselor didn’t want to delve too deep into it either.

I was switched to a different class by the end of the day.

I find that counselors are almost always willing to do this early in the school year.

What About Late In The School Year

I’ve had times where I’ve been surprised by a teacher later in the school year.

The teacher seems great early on but later in the year they seem to fall apart. A couple years ago I found out late that a super friendly teacher virtually never gave our work back with a score on it. (It’s kind of hard to learn things when you’re not getting wrong answers back.)

In this situation, I had to ask a few different times to switch classes but eventually it worked.

Here is what I learned:

No one wants to stir up trouble. If you keep politely asking then you become more troublesome than the trouble switching will stir up.

Everyone wants to give you what you want. It’s just a matter of making it clear that it matters to you a lot.

What You Shouldn’t Do

I have one friend that happened to try a less tactful approach with his teacher.

The teacher was grading him in a way that he thought was unfair. He called the teacher a nasty name and walked out. Naturally, that got him in big trouble. But it was worse than that…

From that day forward, no one was willing to listen to this student’s requests to leave the class because this student already showed his cards. (He stirred up serious trouble for everyone around him.)

It doesn’t matter how rude that teacher was to the student from that day forward. The student publicly gave up all his leverage with the administrators.

(A polite request makes you look reasonable. A cursing rage makes you look like the problem.)

What do you do to deal with a “bad” teacher?

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