Teachers Hall of Fame, Part Deux

Vincent “the cruel” Meany – Acknowledged to be far and away the most sadistic teacher to ever get chalk stains on his pants, Meany was beloved by his students for such endearing tricks as putting tacks on their seats, calling attention to their physical imperfections (“Who knows the answer? How about you, banana-nose? No? What about four eyes over there in the corner? No? How about you, gopher teeth?”)
Perhaps Meany’s cruelest stunt was to pick the shyest girl in the class and force her, under fear of failure, to read a racy scene from “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” and make her act it out.
Meany was nearly fired when, having his students fill out Emergency Contact Cards at the beginning of the year, he instructed them to put in the name of their “Parents, guardian or your mother’s latest stud.”
Meany barely weathered that storm, but met inevitable downfall when he took his classes on a field trip and then held them for ransom for three tense days before surrendering.
Meany today runs a successful chain of day-care centers.

Celeste Ariel Lipschitz – Celeste holds the distinction of being the most out-of-touch-with-reality teacher of world literature in educational history. Year after year, for all 28 years of her tenure, Celeste Ariel taught her barely literate students Chaucer in Middle English, as well as Milton, Shakespeare, Eliot, Shaw, Moliere, Camus and Joyce, blithely oblivious to the fact that her student’s eyes were glazing over, their mouths agape and their heads were hitting their desks with a resounding thunk every few seconds.
Lipschitz's favorite quotation, which she repeatedly told her class, was by Anon. “To know great literature is to know some mighty darn good writing.”
To pass her class each year, students not only had to memorize Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, but had to offer a totally original interpretation of the poem that didn’t even occur to the poet himself.
Ms. Lipschitz retired from teaching in 1976 to pursue a career in stage acting. Her dream was to play Banche DuBois in a production of “Streetcar” but was sadly discouraged after several auditions when the producers proclaimed her “Far too spacy for the part.”

Dr. Norman Numerica - Before Jaime Escalante and Stand and Deliver there was Dr. Numerica, the ultimate unorthodox, inspiring, innovative math teacher. There was nothing Numerica wouldn’t do, no matter how unconventional to drive mathematical concepts into his students’ heads. To illustrate the concept of whole numbers, he once peeled 2 dozen onions as tears cascaded down his cheeks. To familiarize them with the idea of fractions he would bring a whole large pizza into class, slice it first into fourths, then eights, then sixteenths, then thirty-seconds, and then, without a word proceed to eat the whole thing in front of his salivating students.
Dr. Numerica’s most memorable, and last, teaching moment came when he demonstrated the concept of negative numbers by bringing a .357 Magnum to class and relieving each of his wealthier students of their money and valuables before disappearing. Dr. Numerica’s whereabouts are unknown to this day, but there is some credence being given to the theory that he changed his name to Alan Greenspan.

Dennis Dumkopf – known as the Dan Quayle of the teaching profession, Dumkopf achieved everlasting fame as the teacher least knowledgeable about his subject area, World History. Space considerations prevent the listing of all of Dumkopf’s teaching bloopers, blunders, falsehoods, distortions, and straight out lies, but here’s a sampler:
---The War of 1812 was fought over cheese.

--- Wilson ’s 14 points” were his output in a basketball game against Duke.

---Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants and as a result got a very strange species of animal.
---The main cause of World War II was Hitler’s anger over people “Making fun of comedian Charlie Chaplin’s moustache."

---John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln because the president was sitting in his seat at Ford’s Theater.

---Plato was on of the Marx Brothers.

---The Louisiana Purchase was accomplished over the Home Shoppers Network.

---The Japanese surrendered in 1945 after Godzilla stomped on Tokyo.

Francis Scott Key wrote the Miss America theme song.

---The primary weapons used by the colonist during the Revolutionary War were pea-shooters, slingshots and the hotfoot.

---Montezuma’s most famous quote was “Someone get those damn Marines out of my hall!”

---The Hundred Years War was basically a gay rights issue.