My Teacher Murdered Someone/Transcript


 * Rebecca Parham: You should expect a certain level of stability in your educators. I think we're all entitled to that. There are bad teachers out there, but there is a huge difference between bad and seriously dangerous. Many of you may remember I mentioned my mentally unstable vindictive theater teacher in a previous video, and I may or may not devote an entire video to her later on but she was nothing compared to who this video is actually about. So, for this story, I think we'll call him "E", although I guess I could use his real name, considering he's, you know, dead. Yeah, he might come back to haunt me. We'll stick with E. He was my communications teacher in college. His class was required for my business minor so there was no getting out of it, so I arrived first day to this class and immediately, like I set one foot in the door and something about this guy just doesn't sit right with me: Just his general demeanor and mannerisms in the way he talked it set off so many red flags. Weird fact about me for years now, I've had deadly accurate intuition when it comes to bad people. For my entire life, I've never been wrong. If a serial killer in disguise walks into the room, I'm shamelessly baring my teeth and hissing like an irate cat and E was just setting off all of the alarms in my head. He gave us the syllabus the first day but I might as well have just torn it up right then and there because he never followed it, and listening to him try to explain an assignment was like listening to Tom Cruise talk about Scientology, and when everyone showed up to class with their assignment completed, he would be furious that no one did it right. Very often, contradicting his own previous instructions, the smallest things would upset this guy. I was once handed back a test that had a nasty note written in the corner because he didn't like the pencil I'd used, and yet half the time he would teach the class dressed as a popper and drop cuss words and lewd topics into the lecture like it was nothing. A lot of TMI personal stuff too, like, seriously, dude, keep your love life to yourself! And part of the problem with him being a bad communicator despite being a communications teacher, he refused to stay after class to help anyone or answer any questions or clarify his nonsense and then later would throw a fit about nobody asking for his help. His ego needed to be fed so badly that he would fish for compliments by constantly asking for feedback.
 * Eric Paul Engel: Let me know what I'm doing right or wrong, especially emphasis on what I'm doing right.
 * Rebecca Parham: Because God helped the poor soul who offered him polite constructive criticism. I got so sick of this guy that I went to the head of the department and complained. Turns out so did most of the class. And when the head of the department approached him about it, he took it out on us the next class, saying "We should have come to him with our grievances". So my big incident with this guy came on the last day of school. One of these policies was if you got a low grade on an assignment, you could correct it and turn it back in for a better grade. On the last day, he was handing back some of these assignments. He gave me back a paper I had corrected that was originally a B+. But when he handed it to me, he said the grade had gone down to a C. Did you get that? The CORRECTED ASSIGNMENT, went down a grade. Yeah, I was kind of pissed, to the point that I asked this jerkwad to meet me in the hallway so we could discuss it. I explained to him what I would think would be basic human logic for any functioning adult that a paper that was more correct than the previous version should have a higher grade. Well, E started throwing out every excuse in the book and I just kept debunking this idiocy over and over again with the same argument. Until finally, after like 15 minutes of talking and running around the issue, I had him backed into a corner. He started getting physically angry making threatening gestures at me. I think the only reason he didn't touch me, was because my friend Mary was sitting at a table in that hallway watching and listening to everything, and then, it all just kind of caved. He said:
 * Eric Paul Engel: Rebecca, I think I'm just gonna f*cking quit teaching.
 * Rebecca Parham: He basically had an emotional breakdown in front of me almost started crying. It was very strange, and embarrassing.. Several times, I told him to calm down and take a breath. Admitting his defeat, he agreed to fix my grade, but then left class early right after that, his tail between his legs. Same day, I went back to the department head and told him what happened. Not like it did anything because he taught for another two years at that school before leaving. So now, I bet a lot of you were wondering well what happened to E? And as you might have read by the title of this video, something not very nice. Something very unfortunate, actually. About two years after I graduated, someone sent me a link on Facebook to a news article and it was pretty shocking what I read. He had been teaching communications at a different university, when he murdered someone in one state, fled to another state and shot himself during a police standoff. Kind of hard for me to add anything more to that. I mean, a man that my gut told me was dangerous, ended up being dangerous. Though, I will say it is a rather chilling notion that I was standing in a hallway poking a would-be murderer with a stick over a paper. And I do sometimes wonder how differently that situation would have turned out if I didn't have a witness. Alright, explainers an entertainers. Sorry for that downer of an ending, but that is the story of the worst teacher that I have ever had. But if you have a funny bad teacher story then let me know in the comment section below. This has been Rebecca Pahram, thank you so much for tuning in, but now I got to tune out. Bye!
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