HA HA HA HA HA HA yes. Oh god yes.
There were the usual teachers everyone considered *****y or uptight all throughout school, but one of the ones in seventh grade really stood out to me as the worst. He was about as awful of a teacher as he was a person; his class was supposed to be some weird filler amalgamation of reading and math, which was really just a much less effective algebra class that occasionally doubled as a "read this and talk about it, I guess" class. (His book choices were very hit-or-miss; they ranged from The Outsiders, which I really liked, to The Hobbit, which I couldn't make it through two chapters of without my eyes glazing over.)
He was very half-assed about his teaching; I can't really describe it, but the effort he put into trying to have us learn something substantial was negligible, honestly, and it really showed when we came out and basically had nothing new to show for it. I heard later from another teacher, one who I respected a hell of a lot more (and who I actually consider one of the best teachers I've ever had now that I'm long graduated), that he was always the first to leave teachers' meetings and planning sessions, and that none of the teachers really liked him.
And I can see why, because his personality was hardly better. He tried to come across like he had an "endearing" wise-guy sense of humor, but it fell on its face when most of that sense of humor was spent making jabs at people and ultimately trying too hard. He did actively single out a handful of the students in his classes, and never in a good way -- instead, they'd become the butt of his horrible jokes, even though I know he didn't mean to seem insulting. I happened to be one of them, which was hardly good for me; at the time, I was wrestling with a steep, imminent drop into depression.
I doodled a lot in class during idle periods (and... less idle ones, but that's besides the point), so he gave me the wholly unwanted nickname of "Picasso". After I realized the rest of my classmates had caught onto him mocking me and were starting to follow suit, I confronted him after class and asked him very nicely to please stop calling me that, to which he gave a (rather dismissive) wave and said "yeah, okay" or something like that. And yet, the very next day, about halfway through the period, he started doing it with renewed force. Once I felt all the eyes in the class fall on me, I swiped the hall pass off his desk without even asking permission -- unlike me at the time, but **** if I was going to ask permission to get myself the hell out of that situation -- and made my way to the girls' bathroom across the hall for refuge, but I pushed the door so hard that I accidentally pushed out one of the glass panes on it. Like, shattered it. And then I basically had a meltdown in the doorway right there.
Needless to say, a lot of my classmates never let me live it down. On the bright side, he apparently got a stern talking-to by the principal at the time, so that made me feel a little better that maybe he'd start taking what people say seriously about "hey, don't make fun of me like that". I only found out much later that other people had done similar with him in asking him to stop, but he hadn't listened to any of them. The first class after that day was hellishly awkward, and you could tell he was grumpy at one particular person in the class (hint: it was me), but at least he'd seemed to sober up a bit.
I have no idea if he still works there, but I can only hope he doesn't put other middle schoolers through that **** anymore.