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When we grew up and went to school
There were certain teachers who
Would hurt the children any way they could
By pouring their derision
Upon everything we did
Exposing every weakness
However carefully hidden by the kid...
— "The Happiest Days of Our Lives", Pink Floyd, The Wall
"What is this place, douchebag high? What kind of teachers talk like that? You'd get your ass fired if you talked like that!"
So you made it past the evil bus driver, avoided the cafeteria lady with her Mystery Meat, and dodged the bully in the schoolyard. You're safe now, right?
Guess again.
Now it's time to face... that teacher.
You know which one. The teacher who singles you out for ridicule and humiliation. The one who openly mocks you in front of the rest of the class. The one who tells you he wants you to fail because you don't deserve to get into high school/college/grad school. He'll flunk you for breathing, then craft you a make-up exam that no one can pass, just to get you coming and going. He's the Sadist Teacher, the education system's answer to Drill Sergeant Nasty.
Sometimes he hates all children and sometimes it's just one special child who becomes the target of his rancor. Of course, if he hates all children, why he got a job involving them so much is never explained. Either way, he is as cruel as he can possibly be and not leave marks. In extreme cases he actively tries to destroy a child's spirit and reputation, sometimes going so far as to falsify evidence that the student has done something absolutely horrendous. And because he's a teacher, it would take a miracle to make anyone doubt his word.
They're also almost always the most suspicious of the Ordinary High School Student with a Secret Identity and determined to uncover the Masquerade. Worse, maybe they have discovered it, and in addition to all your other problems of saving the world, you have to keep them from proving it.
For a child, he is possibly the worst enemy one can face.
Principals, counselors, and coaches are no exceptions to this trope. And don't think you'll escape him/her upon graduation — waiting for you at college or university is Dean Bitterman.
Obviously designed to tap into the hatred every student feels for those given charge of their life for eight miserable hours of tedious torture every day for twelve years; just making a character a schoolteacher is a good Kick The Dog (unless they're playing into an audience teacher fetish), so why not take it as far as possible?
Sadly, all too often the Sadist Teacher is a case of Truth In Television — even inspired by the writer's own personal experiences — but some examples are more intense than any actual teacher could be without the Board of Education having them sacked within a matter of weeks. (Well, the real problem is the fact that getting rid of these guys may take months or years in America at least, thanks to the absurdly powerful teacher's union...)
Although, sometimes, it's a bit of a stupid plan, because if you flunk, he/she'll have to see the student's face again. Not really bright up there, right, Mr(s). Sadist Teacher?
See Stern Teacher for their more reasonable counterpart. May overlap with Evil Teacher. Contrast Hippie Teacher, Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher, and Badass Teacher.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- The Kirby anime series has King Dedede setting up a school. The teachers are required to wear this hat while teaching. Their lessons included math (throwing students across rooms for wrong answers), science (splitting plutonium!) and so on... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18X_EOpdIrI&NR=1
- Played with on Yu-Gi-Oh GX with Professor Chronos. In addition to being as biased as Snape to the students in his dorm, Chronos has a personal grudge against Judai for publicly defeating him in a duel and thus devoted Season 1 to trying to get Judai kicked out of school. However, Chronos has had his moments that prove deep down, he really cares about his students. He also manages to combine a Heroic Sacrifice with a Rousing Speech to raise his students' morale, just before getting beaten by one of the Shadow Riders.
- Professor Cobra (or Thelonius Viper), on the other hand, is a total wanker, forcing students to duel so he can steal their life energy to resurrect his son.
- And honestly, Principal Samejima/Chancellor Sheppard isn't much better, since he employed said person. At least he knows and regrets that Adults Are Useless.
- Brilliantly subverted in Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack. A sadistic Maths teacher terrorizes his "weakest" student to the point of traumatizing him, but is actually a good person at heart who only wants to toughen the kiddo up. Actually, the boy almost dies in a street accident that he got in because he was too distraught by his phobia of the teacher, and the man feels so guilty when he finds out that he attempts to kill himself and give the money of his health insurance to the kid's mother so Dr. Black Jack can operate on the boy. In the end, Black Jack saves both of them.
- Mr. Iwamoto and Mr. Akashi from Yu Yu Hakusho. Why Mr. Takanaka, the principal (and decent guy) hasn't fired their asses, the world will never know.
- Sister Grace, the St. Paul College principal in Candy Candy, straddles the line between this and Stern Teacher.
- Subverted in Rosario to Vampire by Kagome Ririko, a lamia and literal sadist along with Hitomi Ishigami whose sadistic tendencies really shine after she's fired.
- In Kodomo No Omocha, Sengoku-sensei has an almost obsessive hatred of Akito, going to great lengths to make the kid miserable, even hit him once. Turns out it's because Akito reminds him of the kids who used to bully him when he was younger.
- The Dreaming's Avril Merriweather, the first headmistress of Greenwich Private College, punishes her students by locking them in cupboards and coffins.
- Just before the Trunks saga of Dragon Ball Z, ChiChi hires a private tutor for Gohan who turns out to be one of these. Mr. Shu is a raging asshole who repeatedly Kicks The Dog by calling Goku worthless as a father and even makes poor Gohan bleed. When ChiChi finally finds out about how much of a sadist he is...let's just say it doesn't end well for Shu.
- Played for laughs in Full Metal Panic with the gym teacher. He genuinely hates Sousuke, but Sousuke mistakes his malice as respectable boot-camp teacher behavior. Whenever the teacher goes on a tirade against him, Sousuke treats him like an officer, which in turn is taken like smart aleck behavior. Their mutual misunderstanding is quite entertaining to watch.
Film
- In the more recent Jamie Lee Curtis/Lindsay Lohan version of Freaky Friday, Lindsay Lohan's character had a mean teacher who always put her down in class even when she gave an intelligent answer. Curtis' character didn't believe her until they get body swapped... and suffers at his hands, only to recall that he is a guy she rejected back in the day.
- Miss Edelson, Agent J's 3rd grade teacher in Men In Black, who turned out to be an alien from one of Jupiter's moons.
- Professor Terguson in Back To School, harassing college students over the Vietnam War.
Prof. Terguson: Is she right? 'Cause I know that's the popular version of what went on there. And a lot of people like to believe that. I wish I could, but I was there. I wasn't here in a class room, hoping I was right, thinking about it. I WAS UP TO MY KNEES IN RICE PADDIES, WITH GUNS THAT DIDN'T WORK! GOING IN THERE, LOOKING FOR CHARLIE, SLUGGING IT OUT WITH HIM, WHILE PUSSIES LIKE YOU WERE BACK HERE PARTYING, PUTTING HEADBANDS ON, DOING DRUGS, AND LISTENING TO THE GODDAMN BEATLE ALBUMS! AAAAAAAAAAH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! AAAAAAAAAAAAH!
Literature
- Professor Snape from the Harry Potter stories. Half of it comes from a bias for the Slytherin students and against the Gryffindor students, and half of it comes from disliking Harry personally, due to a rivalry with his father during their school days. Of course, he's gotten Pet The Dog moments. Although it was put into strong doubt in Book 6, it was finally revealed in the final book that Snape is an Anti Hero with Stalker With A Crush tendencies for Harry's mother Lily.
- He's more a Heroic Sociopath than an Anti Hero, regardless of how many Pet The Dog moments he gets.
- Snape's entire personality as shown 99% of the time is summed up by a single line in Michael Gerber's parody Barry Trotter and the Dead Horse:
"Cyril Broadbottom," Barry heard Snipe sneer, "What do you think you're doing, being smashed beyond recognition by Lord Valumart hurtling through the floor? Five points from Grittyfloor!"
- Another literary/film example: Principal Trunchbull of Matilda, reputedly used by Roald Dahl as a surrogate for all the cruel tutors he had over the years. Her treatment of children is so extreme and outlandish, no kid's parents will believe the truth when they are told. Not to mention the way she treats her own niece, the more benign teacher Miss Honey...
- In the film, IIRC, it's implied that Trunchbull had a hand in Miss Honey's father's death. In a flash back, Miss Honey says that all the reports say that he committed suicide, which is followed by a scene of little Honey sitting on a swing with Trunchbull walking up behind her. During this scene, you hear a voice over of Matilda say, "I don't think Magnus killed himself." Then you hear Honey say, "I don't think he did, either." I never read the book, though, so I don't know if it's the same.
- Not exactly the same but that implication is definitely there.
- Captain Lancaster in Danny The Champion Of The World is a more realistic example. He's obviously based on one of Roald Dahl's actual teachers, Captain Hardcastle, described in his autobiography Boy.
- The unnamed Head of Experiment House in The Silver Chair, inspired by C.S. Lewis' own unfortunate experience with his first headmaster.
- More than an actual Sadist Teacher, the Headmistress seems to be a Shout Out to the Hippie Teacher type. She thought that everything could be solved by merely talking to the kids, even the bullies.
- And the book is even older than the hippie movement.
- Taken to its literal extremes in the different teachers for the book, manga and film versions of Battle Royale. In the manga version at least, the "teacher", who is also the host of "the Program", shoots one student twice when he raises a furor over the fact that said teacher raped his caretaker, then sinks a knife into another student's head for talking. In all three versions, when some of the students are about to escape the island, they make a point of finding and killing the "teacher".
- In the manga, there's an interlude during the Sugimura/Kotohiki section that talks about Jaguar, a gym teacher they had. Jaguar was a total jerk, challenging the students to martial arts duels and humiliating and/or hurting them when they wouldn't fight back. He eventually challenged Kiriyama, who plucked out and squished his eye.
- Mrs. Gorf in the first book of Louis Sachar's Wayside School series turns her students into apples when they do anything wrong. Including sneezing in class. The students manage to outsmart her by forcing her to turn them back into humans and tricking her into turning herself into an apple, which Louis then unknowingly eats.
- Wendy Nogard in Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger is a more subtle (but even more insidious) example: while she appears to be a sweet, considerate teacher, she uses her mind-reading abilities to humiliate and turn her students against each other — all without ever compromising her "nice teacher" facade. An example of this is when, during a homework-checking session, she deliberately calls on the one student who has the incorrect answer for each question, and using the resulting slew of wrong answers to retract her promise of no homework for that day. Every student ends up hating all the others for being idiots who cheated him/her out of a homework-free afternoon, even though in reality none of them missed more than two questions on the assignment.
- The tormenting teacher is also present in Ingmar Bergman's aptly named movie Torment from 1944. The sadistic Latin teacher is even nicknamed Caligula.
- This troper once studied Latin under a teacher who in turn had studied Latin during the 1960s. He confirmed the story was indeed true.
- From the same corner of the world Danish author Hans Scherfig's novel The Stolen Spring takes place in a school where almost every teacher is a sadist, the worst being the main characters' Latin teacher, Professor Blomme.
- Lucy Maud Montgomery's heroines almost always fall victim to this teacher. Probably the worst offender was Miss Brownell, of Emily of New Moon fame. Her worst offense was taking Emily's manuscripts in class and reading aloud Emily's poems in a mocking voice, with snide comments, and occasionally accusing Emily of passing off other author's works as her own. When Emily refused to apologize for writing poetry in class, Miss Brownell came to New Moon and tried to convince Emily's guardian to force the girl to kneel to Miss Brownell and apologize.
- The TV series topped her with an even worse male teacher who made racist remarks and beat an Indian boy for not answering him fast enough, then beat Emily when she tried to stop him.
- Miss Heaton ("Hawkeye"), Miss Simpson ("Slim") and Miss Stamp ("Adolfa") in the Confessions Of Georgia Nicolson series.
- Schoolteacher from Beloved. Owns. This. Fucking. Trope.
- Brother Leon from The Chocolate War. He fails David Caroni, a straight-A student, to show Jerry what he's willing to do if the chocolates aren't sold.
- If your kids ever think Dame Snap from the Faraway Tree books is unnecessarily mean, tell them she originally was known as Dame Slap.
- Mesaana from Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series turned to the Dark Side sometime after being turned down for a respected research position and was relegated instead to teaching.
- In Chip Kidd's novel The Cheese Monkeys, Professor Sorbeck straddles the line between this and Stern Teacher. A notable example: the class is Graphic Design, the assignment is to illustrate a word with appropriate form for the word's content. A student presents his rendition of "HOT" made of match-heads stuck to posterboard with rubber cement. Sorbeck scowls at this and has the student touch it. Is his finger warmed? No? So it's not very hot, is it, which would make it an F. The student loses some composure — at which point Sorbeck tosses him a cigarette lighter and points out that he can remedy the situation. After a little browbeating, the student lights his work, resulting in a brief, intense conflagration and a large scorch mark on the wall. Sorbeck blandly comments that it was an A while it was going.
- Eliza Jane Wilder from the Little House books, whose pet was The Libby Nellie Oleson. Nellie helped foster a dislike of the protagonist Laura, partly because they were girlhood enemies and partly because she was smitten with Eliza Jane's brother, Almanzo. She starts out sickeningly sweet, but Eliza Jane was apparently very bitter that Pa Ingalls, who was on the school board, had very little to say about her school. Her bitterness towards Pa manifests itself as bitterness towards Laura, but when she punishes Carrie unfairly (even though another girl was equally guilty, Eliza Jane let her off) and Carrie looks as though she's about to faint, Laura gets angry, offers to do Carrie's punishment herself, and her popularity with the boys at school basically leads them running her out of town. Then Laura marries her brother.
- Most, if not all, of the teachers in the Captain Underpants books. The most notable ones are Mr Krupp, the principal, (who's also Captain Underpants, due to a prank gone wrong) and Mrs Ribble, George and Harold's teacher, who undergoes a Face Heel Turn in the fifth book after becoming the supervillain Wedgie Woman. At the end, George and Harold hypnotise her into being nice, which sticks. There was also Professor Poopypants, who was actually a nice person until the teasing about his name drove him to construct a giant robot and force everyone to have silly names like his.
- In the Stephen King novella "The Body" (and its movie adaptation, Stand By Me), Chris Chambers tells Gordie how he stole their class's milk money, had a change of heart and tried to return it, only to have their teacher steal the money in turn and then blame it on Chris, whose reputation for criminal mischief came back to haunt him.
- Subverted in The Demon Headmaster — the writer claimed that the reason the Headmaster can hypnotize people is because it's the only way she could think of to ensure that the parents never realized what was going on.
- Mr. Jonas, in Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley.
- Wackford Squeers from Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens, who makes this trope Older Than Radio.
Live Action TV
And:
Mother 2: My daughter Cindy so enjoyed reading The Little Prince. Is there anything else you could recommend for her?
Tedesco: Yes, I'd recommend she lose about forty pounds. You could lose about thirty yourself.
Music
- Pink's teacher in the Rock Opera The Wall by Pink Floyd, as quoted at the top of the page. Also, by his own admission, Roger Waters' experiences were something like this.
Theater
- One presumes that Mrs. Thistletwat in Avenue Q is no better to her students than she is to her teaching assistant.
- Can you blame her, with a name like that?
- In A Chorus Line Diana Morales recounts the story of her acting teacher at the High School for Performing Arts, Mr. Karp, who turns on her after she questions his approach, and allows the other students to humiliate her.
- According to This Troper's theatre contacts, "Mr. Karp" was a thinly-disguised version of a real teacher under whom Priscilla Lopez (the original Morales) suffered, making this also a Real Life example.
- All of the teachers in the musical Spring Awakening are caricatures of this trope.
Video Games
- Ishikawa-sensei from Yumeria.
- Souichirou Kuzuki from Fate Stay Night is just a strict history teacher by day, but at night, he turns Badass Normal and kicks ass for his Servant, Caster. It doesn't help that he was raised and taught to be a perfect assassin and can shatter swords with his fists (though they were magically empowered by Caster).
- He's not actually sadistic in any sense though. The game actually makes a point to note that the students respect his impartiality and seriousness. It turns out he's actually completely amoral and has no qualms about helping Caster kill pretty much everyone in the city, but he doesn't enjoy it either. You might even go so far far as to call this a subversion, considering his popularity with all the students, including the main characters.
- Several members of the faculty at Bullworth Academy in Bully, Mr. Hattrick being the worst.
- Persona 4 has Mr. Morooka, a.k.a "King Moron", a rather snobbish (and hideous) man with a grudge against women as well as the main character. He treats his students rudely (putting the main character on his "Shit List" within minutes of meeting him), and has a tendency to get drunk on school fieldtrips. Still, his accusations of the Main Character being a horny bastard may actually have some truth behind it.
- The teacher seen in the intro movie of Heart of Darkness, wherein he puts Andy in a hole and asks him if he's afraid of the dark...
Web Comics
- Mr. Dover from College Roomies From Hell!!! There's more to him than the trope, but he certainly enjoys nurturing his students' impressions of him.
- Kat from Sequential Art is a photographer by profession; she was once hired to take school photographs — and horrified to discover that the teacher who had put special care into humiliating her in fifth grade was the principal of the school. Their adversarial relationship was promptly renewed, and it's highly probable that Kat may have driven the woman to her fatal heart attack.
- Though considering that it was the teacher who did all the renewing of hostilities, up to and including trying to threaten Kat's job, Kat's satisfaction at the teacher's demise is fairly understandable. (Though the woman's current students were far more overjoyed.)
- Keiko Keshin from Triquetra Cats is an evil vampire sadistic Principal, using her position to torture students, those who survive the torture are made into vampire henchmen.
- In El Goonish Shive, the science teacher (who hasn't actually been seen in a while) quite likes watching his students suffer.
- Likewise, this history teacher giving Grace a hard time, starting here.
- Every time I see the latest comic (You Mess With The Raven, You Get The Beak) I hate that guy more and more.
- Update: He's snapped. I mean, seriously, he's lost it. Go look. It's up now.
- Update update: he's probably some kind of vampire, too.
- Update Update update: While he is sadistic, he's mostly just really really weird due to being half human, half immortal (called an "elf" in-story), and his sadistic nature comes from that.
- Conversely, the math teacher offered a subversion — although he initially seemed like he was going to be one of these, he revealed he was actually fooling around and in fact turned out to be quite nice.
- In a surprising move, the titular character from Dominic Deegan is a subversion of the Sadist Teacher trope; yes, he teaches a very difficult class, but his reputation precedes him, and he's in fact a very approachable person.
- The Sadist Teacher in Yu Me Dream is actually a nun.
Web Original
- Usually subverted and/or averted in the Whateley Universe, even though the stories center around the Super Hero School Whateley Academy and some of the teachers are retired supervillains. Erik Mahren, the ex-Marine range master on Range 4 (the heavy weapons range) was notorious for being absolutely ruthless when it came to weapons safety, but the net result of that was that no students were hurt or killed on the ranges in his entire tenure as rangemaster. The Reverend Darren England has gone after a couple students when he sensed their connection to planet-threatening evil...but went way over the line when he hired Syndicate hitmen to help some of his minions try to assassinate one such student (who happens to be one of the good guys).
- The closest thing to the "sadist teacher" archetype seen at Whateley so far would actually be Amelia Hartford, though she ends up being more of a highly placed Obstructive Bureaucrat or Dean Bitterman due to not actually having a teaching position (that we've seen thus far).
Western Animation
- Mr. Crocker from The Fairly OddParents. Besides his fairy-hunting obsession, he also takes a sadistic glee in handing out "F" grades to his students. In The Movie, he actually manages to use magic to change history and make himself Evil Overlord of a Dystopian world.
- The Teen Titans episode "Mad Mod" took this to extremes, in which Mad Mod traps the heroes in a school that's constantly trying to kill or brainwash them.
- Ms. Bitters from Invader Zim is an extreme example. She's a Nietzsche Wannabe who not only hates her students (especially Dib and Zim), but everyone and everything in the world. "Children, your performance was miserable. Your parents will all receive phone calls instructing them to love you less now."
- Inverted in Beavis And Butthead Mr. Van Driessen, the boys' overly spiritual social studies teacher, apparently can't bring himself to discipline anyone and gets steamrolled by their pranks time and time again.
- The Gromble from AAAHH!!! Real Monsters, who at one point forced two students into the same body as a punishment for their bickering. One episode hints that his mistreatment is him projecting his pain from the overly tight high-heeled shoes permanently wedged on his feet.
- Mr./Ms. Garrison of South Park sometimes slips into this trope, openly mocking his students if they get some question wrong. The rest of the time he's just plain incompetent, or perhaps this week he's trying to get the school to fire him so he can sue them, not caring about the mental damage he might inflict on the children in the process.
- This is subverted in an episode where Mr. Garrison hires a masochistic leatherman named Mr. Slave as the teacher's assistant, thus becoming a literal Sadist Teacher.
- Mr. Lancer from Danny Phantom both uses this trope straight and subverts it. He had the terrible tendency to pick on the unpopular main character Danny by choosing the popular kids over him, harshly criticizing his schoolwork, and doling out punishments, yet a few episodes have shown he does care for all his students, even Danny.
- Subversion in Mr. Ratburn of Arthur: Ratburn is feared as the strictest and toughest teacher in the school, so his reputation lives up to the trope. However, he is an excellent teacher in spite of, or indeed because of his strictness, and several episodes feature him outside of school in order to humanize him.
- One episode revealed he had an even worse teacher, who was also very competent for the same reasons, when he was in school (he was taught Latin in 3rd grade!).
- A couple of the teachers in Daria: Ms. Barch hates all her male students, and gives them terrible grades. The unfairness of this is only slightly mitigated by the fact that often they deserve them. Mr. Demartino likes to see all his students suffer, but in his case it's because he feels it's payback for the pain they put him through with their stupidity.
- Vice Principal Chakal of El Tigre fits this trope. He has it in for Manny and Frida, and enjoys setting harsh punishments for them. However, said students are often troublemaking kids, so this troper can't really blame him.
- In the animated Peanuts New Year's special, Charlie Brown's elementary school teacher decides to give the kid War And Peace as a reading assignment. War And Peace. To a normal elementary school student.
- The Simpsons' Edna Krabappel seems to alternate between being one of these and, more sympathetically, an unfairly put-upon foil to Bart.
- Mr. Agar from Carl Squared definitely has it in for Carl. Mind you, given Carl is the ultimate slacker and he had to deal with angry goth Chloe a few years earlier, a hatred of the Crashman bloodline might not be entirely unjustified.
- We haven't listed Eugenia P. Kisskillya from Detention already? This troper believes she's an Expy of the Trunchbull.
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