06 Jul 2017

The excitement of getting your new timetable for the year and sussing out all your free periods is ruined when you look at your teachers and find you’ve got a dud. They might be dead boring, drone on about irrelevant things, not understand the content themselves or overall just suck at teaching. If this sounds familiar, and you know you’ve landed a dud teacher, there’s a couple of things you can do.

1. Is it you?

Before taking any action, figure out if the teacher is actually bad or if the blame is on you. Are you spending most of class asleep, on your phone or talking to your friends and then using your teacher as an excuse for why you’re not learning anything? Is your teacher expecting you to have done homework that will give you background on the topic and the reason you’re struggling because you spend the night watching Netflix instead of working? If yes, save this article, sort yourself out and if you’re still having issues, come back and read on.

2. Swap or drop

If you get onto this early enough, switching into another class with space shouldn’t be an issue. You might have to move around some of your other classes to make it work if you’re not lucky enough to be able to do a straight swap. Some schools will let you do this in the first couple of weeks with no problem but others will ask for a legitimate reason for why you can’t be in that class. Talking to your parents and getting them to write a letter is your best bet in this scenario. If you can’t swap, weigh up whether you can afford to drop the class altogether.

3. Find other ways to learn the content

If all else fails and your stuck with a crap teacher, you’re going to have to find other ways to make the class work. Scab notes from your friends, look up definitions online, watch explainer videos and find past papers. Sometimes you’re going to be stuck with a dud and you’re not going to have the option to swap out or drop the class. Just like group assignments with shit people are an inevitability, so are crap teachers and you’ll need to self motivate to get yourself through it. There’s a tonne of resources online to help you out and if all else fails, memorising and rote learning is a pretty safe bet for some marks in your exam.