Sensei-chan

aka: Sensei-chan

If you are a teacher in Animeland, and you wouldn't fit on this picture, you probably don't exist.^note Pictured, clockwise from top left: Kuroi-sensei, Tsukuyomi-sensei, Taiga, Koigakubo-sensei, Sawa-chan, and Yukari-sensei, Center: Yukari-chan.

"Why do female teachers in anime always seem to think they're one of their students?"

— Sawyer Wallace

A common Japanese media character type, the female high school teacher who is fairly young, attractive, even cute, and on friendly terms with her students.

On the other hand, she is still unmarried and very conscious about it, as well as about the lack of respect she gets. She is usually extremely childish, such that even her own students appear more mature than her.

If the story's emphasis is on the female students, she will act like one of the girls, a teenager in spirit. If the protagonist is male, she's more likely to be a bit into a Teacher/Student Romance, as a comical side-character in a Harem Series. A common character flaw Played for Laughs is drinking enthusiastically.

Their frequent complaints about being unable to settle down in a proper relationship are probably based on traditional Japanese culture's conflicting expectations that a married woman shouldn't work and a woman over 25 should be married. For the intended audiences of many anime, schoolteachers provided the first childhood exposure to women with this dilemma, enforcing the stereotype that teachers are the sort of women who can never get married.

The trope's name is a combination of two honorifics, "-sensei" is used for teachers, like "Miss", and "-chan" is an informal affectionate diminutive. While the combined usage is grammatically correct, and it reflects the characters in spirit, it's unlikely that anyone would use it for a Real Life teacher either in this form, or as "-chan-sensei", since it would be about as conflicting and disrespectful as "Miss-baby", or "Teacher chick" in English.

On the other end, they tend to be on a First-Name Basis by their students, which is incredibly rare in real life. "-sensei", like its western equivalents, is normally associated to the last name, but these characters may as well not have one.

This trope can also overlap with Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher, Hippie Teacher, or Cool Teacher. May preside over a Wacky Homeroom.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Tsubame-sensei from Ai Kora mostly fills this trope. Young, unmarried, and hangs out with the girls in the dorm as well as part of the main character's harem. However, she does not want to get married. Her character development has her letting go of her deceased boyfriend and admitting interest in a new man.
• Tomita "Tonchan/Tom-Tom" Mari, from Air Gear, is so young that one of her colleagues, who's in his mid-40s at the most, was her teacher when she previously attended the school. She's also very immature and ditzy, and is somehow a little too into the idea of her male students wanting to take advantage of her.
• Assassination Classroom:
  • Aguri Yukimura, who was Class 3-E's teacher for a few weeks before Koro-sensei arrived. She was an adorable and energetic young teacher, with an endearingly bad fashion sense and a great eagerness to teach and help her students. It's eventually revealed that Koro-sensei decided to become a teacher to honor Aguri's dying wish. Furthermore, Kaede is actually Aguri's little sister who embarked on a revenge quest against Koro-sensei while falsely believing that he murdered her.
  • Irina Jelavic (a.k.a. Bitch-sensei) is a more volatile example due to her temper, but she qualifies nonetheless; she's young, seductive, beautiful, and slowly becomes close to her students. She's also an infamous Femme Fatale assassin and is only twenty.
• Chisato Higuchi from Asobi Asobase is a sweet, kind teacher who's also a pushover, has a huge complex about being unmarried, and still hasn't grown out of her love for romantic shoujo manga. The members of the Pastimers Club like her a lot, but at the same time they don't have much respect for her as a teacher since they're quick to bring up that she's still single.
• Yukari Tanizaki and Minamo "Nyamo" Kurosawa from Azumanga Daioh are widely considered to be the Trope Codifiers, especially Yukari.
  • Yukari is a temperamental Womanchild who gradually becomes One of the Kids (to the point of being on First-Name Basis with them as "Yukari-sensei"), can easily become bored with her own classes, and gets jealous when one of her friends gets married. She actually still lives with her parents and doesn't (or at least shouldn't) have a driver's license; she might as well still be 15!
  • Nyamo is more of a downplayed case, being more mature and getting more respect from the students than Yukari does, and often tries to keep Yukari in line. But don't remind her that she's still unmarried.
• Played for Drama in Boy's Abyss with Ms. Shibasawa. She started out as one of these and was close with all of her students, but seeing so many younger girls form sexual relationships only fuelled her fear of becoming an Old Maid and led to her starting a Teacher/Student Romance with Loser Protagonist Reiji, and becoming an Evil Teacher yandere out of fear of him leaving her behind.
• Downplayed with Case Closed's Sumiko Kobayashi. She does show some traits of the trope when she tries to be the manager of the Detective Kids whether they want it or not, but otherwise she's pretty competent in her job and the kids from the 1-B class think she's rather cool. And after she gets a boyfriend (or better said, a young man she met years ago "returns" to her life), there's nothing to worry about in regards to the Old Maid part.
  • Sumiko's assistant Rumi Wakasa seems to fit in more in the stereotype, as she's very gentle and sweet but also quite clumsy. She's actually a subversion, as she has a Badass Teacher side that only comes out when it's needed and implied to have had a Dark and Troubled Past linked to the murder of a chess and shogi player that took place 17 years ago.
• Subverted in Code:Breaker. The homeroom teacher is a ditzy Hot Teacher who seems to be one of these. Then it's revealed that she's actually The Handler, and the ditziness is an act.
• Mitsuka-sensei from DearS wants to be this. However, while she has the "young, attractive and immature" part down, she completely overdoes the Teacher/Student Romance part and the whole thing just leaves her students disgusted.
• The teacher in Den-noh Coil is not as extreme as some examples, but she's clearly regarded as The Baby of the Bunch by the rest of the faculty, was the one to organize a sleepover at the school for the kids, and after she gets drunk (on whiskey bonbons!) she insists on joining in on the kids' games.
• Mika-sensei from Doki Doki School Hours (whose original manga version predated Azumanga Daioh by a few years) is probably one of the more extreme examples: Despite being 27, she looks and (for all intents and purposes) acts like a twelve-year-old, and as such her students have a hard time taking her seriously.
• Hina Tachibana from Domestic Girlfriend. A young teacher who still lives with her mother and younger sister and acts like she's still a sorority girl in college, flirting with her students and drinking constantly. After getting caught having an affair with a student, she eventually decides she isn't fit to be a teacher anymore and quits.
• The teacher from FLCL is trying to be this... not especially doing that well, though. She best exemplifies the trope when she's teaching her students how to use chopsticks. And failing. Horribly. A grown Japanese woman who can't use chopsticks. To underline the ridiculousness, every single member of her class of elementary-school students has zero difficulty using chopsticks.
• Food Wars!: Jun Shiomi is this in spades. Is 34, looks like 16, acts like 12. In spite of being Tootsuki's resident spice expert and a leading authority on the chemistry of aromatic compounds, as well as the Shiomi Seminar's leader, she is excitable, scatter-brained, tends to ramble and holds a grudge against the main character for things his dad did when they were at school together. In fact, her 16-year-old adopted son Akira takes care of her as much as she takes care of him (if not more), something she is deeply emotionally conflicted about.
• Miho Amakata from Free!. She is referred to as "Ama-chan-sensei" by her students (or simply Ama-chan by Nagisa) and is usually upbeat and quirky but tends to get quite mad when suggested to wear a swimsuit. She uses old and confusing literature phrases to make a point to her pupils and fellow teachers. It was implied that she was once a swimsuit model called Marin Nishikujo in her youth, but she became a teacher instead, which is why the boys initially asked her to be the swim club's advisor (though they don't know what she did exactly).
• Mayuko Shiraki in Fruits Basket, teacher of Tohru's class, invokes this when some of her female students address her as "Mayu-chan-sensei", and she demands (jokingly) that they call her "Mayuko-daisensei-sama" ("Great Teacher Mayuko") instead. Aside from that, she's actually more of a downplayed example, often acting as a usually-stern Cool Big Sis towards her students (while also frequently getting on Kyo's case about his orange hair, which she thinks is dyed) rather than an immature Womanchild like most examples.
• Usami-sensei in GA: Geijutsuka Art Design Class, like, more afraid of blood donations than her students. This is kind of justified in-universe as she's just in the second year of teaching.
• Naru-chan from Girl Friends (2006). Actually referred to AS "Naru-chan-sensei," though not to her face. She's actually somewhat annoyed that her students don't really respect her.
• The self-proclaimed Great Teacher Onizuka is a Rare Male Example. Onizuka spends more time goofing off with his students and even cutting class with them than he does actually teaching. Despite the overly familiar relationship, it doesn't stop him from being a Papa Wolf when it comes to his students.
• In Hitoribocchi no OO Seikatsu, Teruyo Oshie, the main characters' homeroom teacher, tries to be respectable, but her rather meek personality gets in the way. Most of her students call her "Teru-chan" despite her insistence that they call her "sensei." Nako shows Teruyo the appropriate respect, but Teruyo is irrationally scared of Nako. Her personality ends up causing her problems during the fire drill, since Teruyo's students don't take her seriously and thus take the longest time to get out of the building, resulting in a senior colleague chewing Teruyo out.
• How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift? has Satomi Tachibana, the World History teacher at Koyo Women's Academy. She's often seen hanging out with her students and exercising together, to the point she can easily be mistaken for one of them. On top of it, she secretly loves to cosplay under the name Riko Yuria, but constantly frets about being found out since she tries to keep her work life and private life separated.
• Kyouko Ono from Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple. She's very young and rather inexperienced, looks very cute when she cries, and she really doesn't know how to handle her rowdier students, but she's very caring and is able to help Boris come out of his shell.
• Karasuma in Kiniro Mosaic, which gets lampshaded in Alice's "cast as a family" dream in Episode 11. In the dream, Karasuma was Shinobu's sister, while Aya is the mother and Youko is the grandfather. Aya and Youko are her students.
• Kyouko "Boin-sensei" Houin from Kodomo no Jikan fits most of the characteristics. She's definitely the most popular teacher (especially among the boys), but the students don't respect her much. She has more success on the net, though. From here, she also learns the dichotomy between "What parents/society expect from children" and "What is the best for children".
• Sawako "Sawa-chan" Yamanaka from K-On!, who is actually addressed on occasion as "Sawa-chan-sensei" (the original title was cooked up by Ritsu and the “Sawa-chan-sensei” name from Yui). To most of the students, she's a kind, mature and responsible teacher, but when she's alone with the main characters she shows a completely different side as an immature Cosplay Otaku Girl who often laments her lack of a love life. In this case, there’s a bit of justification: Ritsu and the rest of the club are holding Sawako’s past as a hard-rocking light music club member over her head, which would spoil the serene image she’s trying to portray to the other students. So in exchange for their silence on her past, they get to enjoy a more casual relationship with her.
• In Laid-Back Camp, Minami Toba, a teacher who becomes club advisor for the OEC, is reasonably polite and professional while on the clock, but also is a rather hard drinker who turns out to be much less professional when she's drunk.
• Little Witch Academia (2017): Despite her façade of maturity, young Professor Ursula Calistis often gets wrapped up in the hijinks of main character Akko Kagari, such as covering for Akko when Akko accidentally flushes a teacher down the toilet (said "teacher" being a sentient goldfish). At episode's end, Akko specifically praises Ursula by saying, "You almost acted like you were our teacher!" to which Ursula sternly reminded her that she is their teacher. Further justified because "Ursula" is actually Akko's idol, Shiny Chariot, in disguise, and Akko & Chariot are very similar personality-wise.
• Nanako Kuroi from Lucky Star is the main characters' world history teacher (as well as Konata, Tsukasa, and Miyuki's homeroom teacher). She's also attractive, fun-loving, and spends a lot of her free time playing MMORPGs. Unlike Konata, who she plays the same MMO with, she's at least mature enough to not sacrifice sleep for gaming time, and she'll even use the MMO's chat function to remind Konata to do her homework. She's also secretly insecure about still being single at 27 years old, and mistakenly assumes Konata's cousin Yui is single as well while trying to bond with her over it.
• My Monster Secret has Akari Koumoto, who gets caught up in her students' wacky hijinks fairly often; when she's not sharing protagonist Asahi's role as the Only Sane Man, she's calling on her past as a Delinquent to be utterly badass and intimidating. Her primary sources of humor are the clashes between her and her Trollish great-grandmother Akane (who's also the principal and, oh yeah, a demon), and her inability to get a boyfriend, which mostly comes from her unrealistic fantasies about being swept off her feet by a prince on a white horse. Once Asahi's friend Sakurada admits he's got feelings for Akari, the entire cast (minus Akane) becomes Shippers on Deck and does everything they can to help get the two together. They ultimately succeed — complete with Sakurada confessing while on a white pegasus.
• Negi Springfield from Negima! Magister Negi Magi is a gender-inverted exaggeration of this, being a ten-year-old male teaching a class of 31 fourteen-year-old girls. In some areas, the trope is inverted entirely as he's far more mature than them, while in others he acts his age (he has the work ethic and emotional maturity of an adult, but still avoids taking baths and is easily flustered). The "-chan" suffix is actually never used for him, but the masculine "-kun" and "-bouzu" are often used by some of his students, even when addressing him directly.
• The alternate universe scenario in the final episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion put Misato into this role, rather appropriately. This is later carried over into both Neon Genesis Evangelion: Angelic Days and Shinji Ikari Raising Project.
• Sakurai-sensei from Nichijou, who seems far too timid to be in a teaching job. She's also the school guidance counselor so she can improve herself, but that doesn't seem to work out for her most of the time.
• Yui Kanakura in Nisekoi. To list just some tropes concerning her: Childhood Friends, Teen Genius (she is one year older than her students), The Don (not really), part of a Balanced Harem; luckily, she can only make gyouza. And she can't sing. She keeps a teacherly attitude during class, but only because she believes that's the proper thing to do.
• Kazuho Miyauchi from Non Non Biyori is the lone teacher of the main characters' one-room countryside school, and she's also the elder sister of Renge, who is the youngest student in school. While she's fairly young and attractive, she's also not very mature and prone to sleeping on the job (though since she also manages her family rice farm, it's implied that she's just tired out from working both jobs). However, the only person who calls her "Kazu-chan" is the Hoshigaya siblings' mom.
• Sumire from Osananajimi wa Onnanoko ni Naare is a bitter but no more mature variant. An attractive woman in her late twenties whose boyfriend recently left her for a young woman, Sumire tries to use her class (or anyone else) to feel better about her looks. Usually this leads to her resenting Iori for turning into a cuter girl than her and wasting all the class time on personal frivolity.
• Rebecca "Becky" Miyamoto from Pani Poni Dash! is another exaggerated parody; she's already graduated from MIT and teaches high school, but she's only eleven years old. While she tries to be mature, she'll sometimes break down and act as immature as a kid her age would.
• Mizuho Kazami of Please Teacher! and Please Twins! is an odd case of this, though much of her characterization seems to stem from the fact that she's a half-alien who is rather new to Earth's customs, and circumstances forcing her into a marriage with one of her students. It becomes more prevalent during the second series.
• Power of Hope ~PreCure Full Bloom~: As an adult, Nozomi Yumehara has become a teacher at a private elementary school. In class, she makes jokes about ice cream during a lesson about climate change, and many of her students are on a First-Name Basis with her. She's even more of a Womanchild off the clock, as shown when she's hanging out with Rin.
• Kazuko Saotome in Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Her Establishing Character Moment is complaining about her love life to her class before introducing the New Transfer Student... Too bad the poor "girl" lives in a Crapsaccharine World. Which costs her her life in the Alternate Universe Puella Magi Oriko Magica, as she's eaten alive by a witch's minion.
• Played with by Hinako Ninomiya from Ranma ½. She's got a weird condition (caused by Happōsai doing something odd to her when she was a sickly child to help alleviate her illness) where she oscillates between a sweet-cute child form and a voluptuous adult form depending on how much battle aura/ki she's drained from her students recently. The interesting part is that she undergoes a personality change with the size change — she's mentally a child when in child form, and far more sophisticated as an adult. If she stays in her adult form for too long, though, she starts acting like her child form.
• Yomiko Readman of Read or Die occasionally becomes this, given her cover identity as a substitute schoolteacher. This doesn't turn up in the OVAs or anime, though she had been one to Nenene.
• Shizuka Nekonome from Rosario + Vampire. She's excitable, cheerful and friendly, often hanging out with the protagonists (mostly justified as she's also the Newspaper's Club advisor), and giving in to her feline instincts.
• Ayane "Ayanecchi" Tezuka from Rouge Noir is the very rare protagonist example. She's also quite more tragic than the standard example.
• Haruna Sakurada from both Sailor Moon and The Cherry Project is a good and early example. The DiC English dub of the anime turned her into another cranky teacher, so this aspect of her personality was gone.
• Megumi Sakura from School-Live!. The protagonists even call her "Megu-nee", instead of "Sakura-sensei" like she wants. She's a cute, young teacher with giant Idiot Hair. However, Megumi is less of an immature Manchild than other examples, as she sacrificed herself protecting the three main characters from zombies and generally acts as a responsible adult figure. Almost all of her childish Butt-Monkey moments are due to Yuki's delusions and aren't a real indication of what she was really like.
• Yokoshima-sensei from Seitokai Yakuindomo, also from the perverted Teacher/Student Romance kind.
• Remi from Sket Dance, who is a cute, cheerful, and ditzy teacher, formerly a children's TV show host, who insists that the students call her "oneesan".
• The art-club advisor Kasugano-sensei in Sketchbook. A energetic teacher, who is just as quirky as her students and has Womanchild tendencies.
• Namie Sasaki from Smile Pretty Cure!.
• Marie Mjolnir from Soul Eater fits the bill in most respects. She's so insecure about being single at her age that she tries to marry a toilet! She does have a dose of Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass, though, and makes an effective Team Mom.
• Tamamo-chan’s a Fox! is about a kitsune who poses as a high school girl. While the student body can see right through her magical disguise, most of the adults at school don't notice anything out of the ordinary except Reiko-sensei, who's described as "a kid at heart".
• Kisaragi-sensei of Umi no Misaki, another teacher who looks and acts like a twelve-year-old and constantly hits on the main character. She is rather brighter than she acts.
• Manabu from Wandering Son is a friendly, somewhat immature (but not in a Manchild way) young teacher. He also can't get a date (though one student likes him, much to his dismay).
• We Never Learn: Played with in the case of Mafuyu Kirisu. As a Stern Teacher, she averts this normally despite her age (mid-late 20s), but when she first became a teacher, she tried to be this and a Cool Teacher, which led to her breakdown for harming a student's future.
• All the teachers in Why the Hell Are You Here, Teacher!? are young, attractive, and (mostly) get along with their students (the first teacher, Kana Kojima, was known as "Kojima the Demon Teacher" among the students, but she mellows out).
• Downplayed in Yuri Moyou. Ryou, the eldest of the Sakimiya sisters, works as a teacher and tries to be "a respectable adult" for her students. Despite that, she often gets held back by her personality and her crush on Hikari, one of her students.

Fan Works

• A Certain Unknown Level 0: As said in the sixth chapter, Tsukuyomi Komoe is a teacher who doesn't look like one:
  as she was a short girl of 135cm
• Fate/Reach Out: This story deconstructs the trope with Taiga Fujimura. Taiga became a teacher in her old high school because she didn't really fit in anywhere else after graduating. Unfortunately, her childish behavior didn't earn her the respect she wanted from her students and Taiga felt mocked anytime they called by her nickname.
• Y/N, the main character of Toward A Bright Future is a young woman who becomes the TA to Class 1-A (and the rest of the school to a minor extent). She is well-liked, gives out tutoring, snacks, and stickers to her students, and is perfectly willing to play video games and make pillow forts with the two that are living in the same dorm as her. It's mentioned that she is an Amnesiac Hero, so she doesn't know her exact age other than being around 5 years older than her class.

Literature

• Played with in And You Thought There Is Never a Girl Online? with Yui Saitou. While she is fairly good at her job, her mannerisms as "Nekohime" (her Online Alias at playing MMORPGs) would occasionally seep in, such as her unconscious habit of sometimes ending her sentences with "~nyaa~".
• Aiko Hatayama from Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest is a twenty-five-year-old high-school teacher that looks like a middle-schooler, and who appears more childish the more she attempts to do her job. Her students love 'Ai-chan' and consider her the class pet.
• Komoe-sensei from A Certain Magical Index definitely seems like this, since she looks like a ten-year-old girl who sleeps in cute pajamas, is friendly with her students, and is implied to be a bit hot for her "Kamijou-chan". However, she also smokes heavily, drinks beer heavily, is implied to be at least in her 30s (and possibly much older), and most importantly of all, is an actually smart and competent teacher who acts as a mentor for Touma.
• Maria Takayama from Haganai is an exaggerated version of this trope, since she's only ten years old (with the immaturity to match) and yet somehow she's a teacher at a high school. Subverted when it turns out she's not even a qualified teacher at all. There was nobody to take care of Maria at home, resulting in her older sister Kate taking her to school with her and Maria just began calling herself a teacher. Then double subverted when, in a ploy to save the Neighbors Club from Aoi, Sena calls her father to have her officially declared as a teacher.
• Yukari in Haruka Nogizaka's Secret. Acts very immature, constantly hits on the male students — particularly the main character, who's the younger brother of her best friend and drinking buddy — and they all completely ignore her.
• Rossweisse in High School D×D becomes a civics teacher at Kuoh Academy after being reincarnated as a Devil. She hits pretty much every box for the trope: attractive, barely a couple years older than her students, and fretting over not having a boyfriend. Oh, and she gets Hot for Student when she falls in love with Issei.
• Kaori Iba from Maburaho is the young and attractive teacher of the main characters' homeroom class, but she's also rather apathetic and would rather play video games than teach.
• Chihiro-sensei from The Pet Girl of Sakurasou, who decides that making one of her students look after her Idiot Savant cousin is a good idea...
• Oka-chan of So I'm a Spider, So What? wanted to become the kind of teacher that her students could relate to, so she got involved in hobbies such as manga and video games. Students found her easy to befriend but deep down she worried that she'd built a fake persona and was failing as a teacher.
• Koigakubo Yuri-sensei from Toradora!. Frequently referred to by her students as "Yuri-chan", she often laments about her lack of success in love at her age, and she becomes increasingly bitter about it as the story goes on. Her students even go so far as to write a play in which her Red String of Fate was to be cut, causing her to go berserk.

Live-Action TV

• Kamen Rider Fourze:
  • Sonada Sarina. Subverted in that her Sensei-Chan personality is just an act to hide her true identity as the Scorpion Zodiarts
  • Gentaro Kisaragi becomes a teacher five years after the series ends (as seen in the crossover Movie Wars Ultimatum; he's mellowed out a little since his days as a student...but only a little.
  • Ohsugi-sensei is halfway between this and a Sadist Teacher: nobody takes him seriously, he's chronically hard up for dates, and eventually admits that he has no friends. Once, he even tries to force Gentaro to hang out with him because he's lonely.
• There is also the character of Miss Titley in The Grimleys, who has all the described qualities of sensei-chan about her and who takes a strong (platonic) pastoral concern in young Grimley.

Video Games

• Persona:
  • Isako Toriumi from Persona 3 is a downplayed example; though she's fairly understanding and talks surprisingly casually to her students, she's still fairly strict as a teacher. Her immaturity mostly emerges outside of school, most noticeably through her Digital Avatar Maya.
  • In Persona 4, Noriko Kashiwagi seems to think she's this, right down to a tendency to flirt with her male students, despite being apparently in her 40s. She isn't. Her students think it's pathetic. And it makes the murder of Mr. Morooka sting that much more.
  • Also downplayed with Sadayo Kawakami in Persona 5; as a teacher, she's fairly professional, if somewhat laid-back and outspoken. However, as you progress her Confidant, she becomes a lot more casual with the protagonist, in part because he's the only one of her students who's aware of her moonlighting as a "health delivery" girl.
• Chloe Genus of Conception 2: Children Of The Seven Stars is this, mainly because she's super popular with her students, the same age as most of them (she graduated from college at age 14!) and is a very cheerful person. She does get a little miffed about being this trope though.
• Quistis Trepe from Final Fantasy VIII. Justified by the fact that she's the same age as her students, but managed to graduate several years early, and was insane enough to get a job teaching her former classmates soon after. She ends up losing that job early on in the game due to failing to properly discipline Seifer.
• Towa Kokonoe from Tokyo Xanadu does her best to avert this, given that she's 23 but looks much younger. It doesn't help that she's the main character's cousin, and he just so happens to be in her homeroom. As a result, she sometimes slips up and refers to him as "Kou-kun" during lessons, much to both of their embarrassment.
• A female Byleth from Fire Emblem: Three Houses zigzags this. On one hand, she's barely older than her mostly teenage students ^note At twenty, she's younger than Mercedes (22), Balthus (26), and Flayn and is rather popular with said students, to the point of even being able to invite them over for a casual tea party. On the other hand, she's a rather stoic and stern ex-mercenary who commands genuine respect from her students even after she technically stops being a teacher.
• Instructor Sara in The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel fits the bill being a young Hot Teacher, however it is a bit of a Deconstructive Parody in that Very much so. She is lazy, childish, manipulative, and tends to remind her students to pick up the pace in class or not cause problems else she'd get blamed for them. Naturally, her students have frequent sweat-drop actions and comment how they have little respect for her personality. However, as a combat instructor, she is quite the Badass Teacher being a former Bracer and Jaeger. At one point when two of her students refuse to cooperate despite her instruction to, she personally forces them to work together by going against her in a sparring session. This is a Hopeless Boss Fight that puts the fear of God into both students and firmly establishes her authority among the class.

Visual Novels

• Misato in Snow Sakura.
• Ms. Walsh from Double Homework is young, not a very good teacher, and according to Dr. Mosely, she’s not well-adjusted. She gets into an insult contest with Lauren upon running into her at a nightclub, and she opens up occasionally to the protagonist about her struggles, asking him for suggestions about how to fix things with her class. She becomes more of a friend than a teacher to the students as the year goes on.
• Muv-Luv: Played with:
  • Jinguuji's students in the Extra part all call her Marimo-chan, and the usual Old Maid jokes get played. In the Unlimited alternate universe, she is not amused by the protagonist addressing her as Marimo-chan and demands to be addressed properly.
  • And then there's Alternative, which not only plays with this trope but uses it as part of a horribly soul-crushing plot twist. Twice.
• Wakaouji from Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side 2 is very carefree and playful when it comes to his students so that many (including the protagonist by default) refer to him simply as 'Waka-chan'. Some take it even further, teasingly calling him 'Waka-chan-sensei'.
• Taiga Fujimura from Fate/stay night plays with this trope; while she's rather immature when off-duty at home, she's generally responsible in her duties as a teacher. She plays it dead straight in the alternate universe spinoff Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA though where she's teaching Illya in primary school rather than Shirou in High School.
• Ringo Tsukimiya from Uta No Prince Sama is a subversion (as well as being a male Wholesome Crossdresser). He's cute, friendly, and even tells his students to call him "Rin-chan", but he takes his job as a teacher seriously and he won't easily grant his students special favors.
• Sonou Tsukuyo from Kindred Spirits on the Roof is a 24-year-old classical literature teacher, but has the appearance of a girl half her age. This is what ends up drawing the affections of her 16-year-old student Kiri, who is obsessed with cute things. Surprisingly, she notably averts the childlike mannerisms of similar characters, and other characters note throughout the game just how mature and responsible she is. That doesn't stop many of her students from calling her "Sonou-chan" (or in Kiri's case, "Tsukuyo-chan") when they should be using "-sensei" on her.

Web Animation

Miss Binnie Bivvins from Ollie & Scoops is Ollie's 29-year-old teacher, and she's one of the friendliest and most attractive characters in the series. Her crush, Miss Wendy Whippleworth, also qualifies.

Web Original

• Cody's mom, Judy from SuperMarioLogan has this role in The Substitute Teacher.

Western Animation

• Miss Grotke from Recess has some shades of this trope. She's pretty much loved by all her students (and takes a Cool Big Sis role to Spinelli), young and unmarried (not really a Old Maid, but it's hinted that she's in her early 30s).
• Sun Park from American Dragon: Jake Long is on a First-Name Basis with her high school students, is young and pretty, and is a gentle mentor to Haley.
• The Simpsons: When she's not portrayed as an Apathetic Teacher, Mrs. Krabappel comes across like this, particularly when outside of the classroom (though occasionally in it), mostly with her angst about being divorced. Or at least until she married Ned Flanders.
• An odd equine example of this is Cheerilee from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. To illustrate her status further, she's one of the biggest Ensemble Dark Horses in Japan.
• Miss Deer Teacher from Kiff is a young, spiritual and unmarried teacher, although Kiff has mistakenly assumed her to be significantly older, to which Deer Teacher defensively responded that she's 33.

Other

• In April 2016, the "tutor character" Ellen Baker from the Japanese New Horizon English textbook became a trend on the internet due to her surprisingly moe design and personality, especially when compared to the blander designs that the earlier versions had.

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