- Already in the 19th century Charles Dickens wrote about sadist teachers.
- Wackford Squeers from Nicholas Nickleby. He runs an orphanage full of unwanted children and asks for a large fee. Then he starves and mistreats them while using the money sent by their parents to pad his own pockets. He and his wife regularly beat up the children, while spoiling their own son. The character was rumored to have been based on a notorious English headmaster, William Shaw, who once beat a boy so badly that he turned blind. Dickens denied the claims, however, out of fear of libel.
- Mr. Creakle, of David Copperfield. He is a harsh boarding school headmaster who singles out David for extra torment. Later in the novel, he does have a change of heart, though.
- L. M. Montgomery's heroines almost always fall victim to this teacher. Probably the worst offender was Miss Brownell, of Emily of New Moon fame. Her Establishing Character Moment shows her slapping Emily across the face right in the middle of class as a way of scolding Emily for asking a question out loud and not doing her arithmetic, which any person can agree was Disproportionate Retribution. 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.
- Also in the 19th century, on the other side of the pond, Mark Twain gave the world an equally memorable example, one Mr. Dobbins, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Even given that Corporal Punishment was the standard in all schools of the time, Twain's descriptions make it clear that Dobbins is just a little too quick and a lot too harsh with the hickory stick. Twain's detail, "His rod and his ferule were seldom idle now—at least among the smaller pupils. Only the biggest boys, and young ladies of eighteen and twenty, escaped lashing," implies he's also cautious about "disciplining" students who might fight back.
- In All Men of Genius, Bracknell, the substitute astronomy teacher, seems to consider mocking and denigrating his students to be the only thing in his job description.
- In the Tomie DiPola book The Art Lesson, the teacher discourages Tommy and the other students from using their imagination and being creative while in art class, strictly telling the students which crayons for them to use while berating Tommy for using Crayons that came from a large pack (he got them for his birthday). She then forbids Tommy from ever using his crayons again, which he does anyway by sneaking them to school.
- In Ascolta il Mio Cuore, Mrs. Sforza is a very cruel example. She acts like a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing with rich students, but is openly abusive (both physically and verbally) with poor students, using humiliation and Corporal Punishment. The book is set in 1949.
- Mr. Click of A Bad Day for Voodoo. He gives Tyler an undeserved F, and announces to the class when a kid gets a bad grade.
- The Baby-Sitters Club features one in a Little Sister book where Ms Colman has to take extended leave. The new teacher, Ms Hoffman, doesn't allow students to talk even before school starts, makes a chore chart, moves students with glasses to the back of the class because she wants them in alphabetical order, makes them line up silently in two straight lines to walk anywhere despite seeing other students making fun of them, and then decides to enforce a dress code. She loosens up as soon as the children put on all their clothes backwards in an act of rebellion and stops forcing so many arbitrary rules on them.
- Mr. Gaston from the Betsy-Tacy series, although most of it is in Betsy in Spite of Herself. He studied to be a science teacher but got stuck teaching English, and can't stand Betsy's flowery writing style, which he finds too hung up on details. It's even mentioned that he was alright to Betsy during her freshman year, but after a song she wrote for a school assembly becomes popular and is constantly sung in the school halls, he begins going out of his way to antagonize her in class and mock her work in front of the other students.
- 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.
- Bruce Coville's Book of... Nightmares: Miss Wockenfuss in Give a Puppet a Hand, and she knows it. It's even lampshaded when she tries to punish Jeremy for being happy at one point, claiming that nobody has a good time in her class.
- With the exception of Mr. Fyde, all of the teachers in the Captain Underpants books go out of their way to make George and Harold's lives miserable. The most notable ones are Mr. Krupp, the principal, who blackmailed the two into becoming his slaves in the first book, and Ms. Ribble, George and Harold's teacher, who started out by forcing her students to perform in a lousy retirement party (including having one kid stand in a corner for making his picture too happy), planned on failing George and Harold for a small prank gone wrong, and then undergoes a full Face–Heel Turn after becoming the super-villain Wedgie Woman. At the end, George and Harold hypnotise her into being nice, which sticks (Until the 12th book that is. Ms. Ribble goes back to being a jerkass for unexplained reasons).
- In Charlie Lewis Plays for Time, the third book in Gene Kemp's Cricklepit School trilogy, Mr Marchant injures himself during the holidays and is replaced by Mr Carter, who maintains a very old-fashioned approach to teaching, refuses to make allowances for students who learn differently, including outright bullying the neurodivergant "Rocket" Moffatt, and punishes Rocket's sister for daring to argue with him about things like Assigned Reading and only boys playing cricket. He also plays favourites, and to Charlie's horror he becomes one simply for having a famous mother.
- 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.
- Mr Large, the chief physical trainer at the CHERUB campus. Partly justified in that he has the job of ensuring ordinary children develop special-forces levels of physical and mental toughness, so shouting at exhausted children and forcing them to run laps until they vomit or making them spend the night outside in thin clothing in December is expected, but the fact is he A: enjoys it and B: picks on specific children who anger him unfairly. He at one point takes the children in basic 100 day training out on Christmas day, lines them up outside the campus canteen so they can see the other children inside having Christmas dinner, and makes them do push-ups. When this fails to break their spirit he blames it on specific children he has a grudge against and punishes them for little reason.
- 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.
- In Ramsey Campbell's short story "Cold Print", Strutt makes up excuses to punish his students so he can enact his sadomasochistic fetishes upon them.
- Captain Lancaster in Danny, the Champion of the World is a more realistic example. He wants to be called captain instead of mister (which was his rank during the war). He is described as spying on the children while rustling his moustache hairs in order to catch them on tiny mistakes. In the book, he hears Danny and his schoolboy friend talk while finishing an exercise. He immediately orders them to come forward and beats their hands with a very thin cane. Dahl based this teacher on one of his actual headmasters, a certain Captain Hardcastle. The incident described in the novel is almost word-for-word a real anecdote between Hardcastle and Dahl, described in Dahl's autobiography Boy.
- Osip Senkovsky is portrayed as this in The Death of the Vazir Mukhtar when asked to preside over an exam in the School of Oriental Languages. He is passive-aggressive, demanding, perfectionistic and hammy as he bombards hapless students with questions about and demands for translations of Arabic and Persian poetry. The main character is eventually compelled to intercede, after which point Senkovsky considerably mellows out.
- Professor Mericet of the Assassins' Guild (teaching Strategy and Poison Theory) in Discworld. Rumour amongst the students is that if you get him as the examiner for your final exam, you might as well kill yourself immediately and save time. The events of Pyramids show this isn't entirely true, although he does expect the student to identify a thiefsign he's "accidentally" holding upside down.
- Apparently, Fitz, from the Doctor Who Expanded Universe, attracted these; it seems he's had several, which may explain why he's fairly Book Dumb:Scraped-back grey hair and a snotty manner; this woman reminded Fitz of his old maths teacher. One of the ones who used to say things like, ‘that may be how you used to do things in Germany’ really sarcastically, knowing Fitz’d never been further than the other end of Southend pier in his life.note
- In the Erebus Sequence, Giancarlo (a maestro di spada, or sword instructor) is a complete Jerkass, particularly towards Lucien. He's open about wanting Lucien to fail as completely and permanently as possible, and uses Lucien's conscience against him during the final testing by ordering him to execute an unarmed man rather than give a real challenge.
- The nuns of A Girl Named Blue, who run a school/orphanage in 1960s Ireland. The head nun Sister Regina humiliates an especially young orphan called Molly who keeps wetting the bed and cuts off the hair of all the girls when head lice are discovered. For a costume party where the girls get to make their own, Blue is beaten for choosing to dress like an African tribal woman she saw in a National Geographic magazine (and the magazine is then taken from her, despite it being her only comfort). When she's caught trying to find out her mother's identity in Sister Regina's office, she's beaten so badly she has to go to hospital - where she's too afraid to tell the doctors or police how she got the injuries, worrying she'll be punished even worse. When she makes a final attempt to escape, her punishment is to be taken out of the dormitory and put into a tiny room on her own, where she'll stay for the rest of her time there.
- In the scary childrens' story Good Bye Miss Patterson by Phyllis McLennan, the title character is such a teacher. When the students forget to assign anyone the bring the class hamster home for March Break, accidentally leaving him in the classroom, Miss Patterson decides to deliberately let the poor creature starve to death as a way of teaching the kids a lesson about responsibility. Then she keeps the empty cage in the class as a constant reminder of their guilt. She also shames and insults students who get bad grades in front of their classmates, but makes the mistake of picking on the wrong kid, and then it's Good-Bye, Miss Patterson.
- Goosebumps:
- Mr. Murphy from Monster Blood II mocks Evan for falling asleep in class, doesn't give him a second thought when he ends up being trapped inside a locker by bullies, forces him to sit down in his chair (which is covered with goo) without giving him a chance to explain himself, and scolds him for lightly tapping a student on the head.
- Mr. Saur from Say Cheese and Die — Again!, who even goes as far to make a lot of cruel fat jokes regarding Greg's weight (thanks to the evil camera) that even the rest of the class was disgusted with.
- Deconstructed in The Great Brain. In the first book, boys' old teacher retires and is replaced by Mr. Standish, who paddles students over the slightest infraction (paddling was a common punishment in schools at the time). After Tom himself gets spanked, he decides to take revenge by setting him up to look like a closeted drinker and nearly gets him fired as a result. While it's firmly established that Tom went too far when the truth gets out, Mr. Standish does end up experiencing something of a Heel Realization and eases up on the class.
- Harry Potter:
- Severus Snape is an example of this, given how bad his mood is or if your name's Harry or Neville or Ron or, to a slightly lesser extent, Hermione (he seems to respect her intelligence) or, to a somewhat even lesser extent, anyone who is not a Slytherin. The fact that he indirectly orphaned Harry makes it even worse. Highlights include testing potions on Neville's pet (which, it should be pointed out, would have killed the toad if Hermione hadn't helped Neville) and verbally abusing him even outside the classroom. Harry and Neville find the OWL exams from Potions less stressful than a class because Snape isn't overseeing them. Grand prize probably goes to when Draco and Harry duel during Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Their curses rebound, causing Goyle and Hermione to get hit. Goyle is sent to the hospital wing, and points are taken off of Gryffindor. When Ron shows Snape that Hermione's teeth have grown like those of a beaver's, he looks at the fifteen-year-old girl and says coolly, "I see no difference." But even he can't compete with...
- Dolores Umbridge. She's a Smug Snake who makes at least two students (the two confirmed are Harry, who runs into it immediately, and Lee Jordan, who was punished for trying to turn one of Umbridge's rules on her because Fred and George attracted her attention) write lines with a quill that magically cuts their lines into their hands each time they write until they scar (more than two in the films) and briefly takes over Hogwarts in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. She emphatically crosses the Moral Event Horizon, all the while maintaining a very annoying Stepford Smiler pretense.
- After Voldemort takes over the Ministry in The Deathly Hallows, Death Eater siblings Amycus and Alecto Carrow are made professors at Hogwarts. They force the students to practice torture curses on students who got detention—including 11-year-old first years. Snape's punishment of the students who tried to steal the Sword of Gryffindor for Harry Potter was very mild by comparison to the Carrows' punishments for far less severe student misbehavior. In Neville's words, they make Umbridge look tame in comparison, but most of that is Offstage Villainy.
- Horrible Histories: A Running Gag in every book is that all teachers are sadistic, cruel, and shouldn't be pitied. Author Terry Deary had very bad memories of his school years and feels he never learned a thing. In the book about the Second World War Deary claims that Hitler survived the war: "He was my teacher in secondary school. I know this for sure!"
- In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Both Alicia's first teacher and her younger sister's teacher are nasty diehard Nazis who don't shy away from corporal punishment and psychological cruelty toward students who irritate them.
- It's Not the End of the World: Karen believes Stern Teacher (and former Cool Teacher) Mrs. Singer is also a Sadist Teacher, because she never gives Karen a break on anything (including forgetting lunch money and giving her a bad grade on a book report for which she hadn't read the book). Karen's friend Debbie rightfully points out that Mrs. Singer's behavior is reasonable and that the teacher doesn't appear to have any vendetta against Karen.
- Famously Mr Brocklehurst of Jane Eyre. He's a sadistic schoolmaster who at one point makes a girl have all her hair cut off for the "sin" of curling it (ignoring the protests that it's naturally curly). He also keeps the school cold and poorly rationed - with many students dying of a typhus epidemic as a result. He also has the cruel Miss Scatcherd as The Dragon. Both are based on real teachers Charlotte Bronte had to endure at Cowan Bridge School (the former of William Carus Wilson, the latter of Miss Andrews) - and two of her older sisters died as a result of the poor conditions. When the real man tried to sue her for legal action, several other former pupils came forward to verify her story; most of whom said she'd actually toned his behavior down!
- Ms. Murphy in A Kind of Spark. Addie's current teacher and Keedie's elementary school teacher, was mercilessly cruel to the both of them during their time in her class. When Emily destroys Addie's thesaurus, she is quick to assume Addie's violence was for no reason before hearing the whole story and refused to believe otherwise, even when presented with evidence to the contrary (even attempting to silence anyone who tries to tell her Addie's side). Her very first scene depicts her ripping Addie's assignment and telling her to rewrite it because she herself couldn't make the effort to read it due to Addie's writing coming across as illegible. She also keeps trying to get Addie put into a special school because she doesn't want to deal with her, even though just about all of Addie's former teachers liked her and considered her good at working independently. After Addie’s parents learn what she put their daughters through, they file a complaint against her (with the implication that she’ll be investigated for discrimination against disabled children) and Addie is put in a different class. Keedie points out to her that she shouldn’t be working with any children, let alone autistic children. She displays absolutely no remorse for her actions and puts on a friendly facade for Addie’s parents while subtly insulting their child, making her a borderline sociopath.
- Arena in Kroniki Drugiego Kręgu, who never made full mage and so hates those who still have the chance. Up to and including beating, which is where the line was (finally!) drawn.
- Eliza Jane Wilder, the idealistic but ineffectual new De Smet schoolmarm from the Little House books, whose pet was the Alpha Bitch Nellie Oleson, Laura's longtime rival. After Laura taunts Nellie with the fact that Mr. Oleson isn't on the school board and Laura's dad is, Nellie retaliates by convincing Miss Wilder that Laura is fomenting all the trouble in school because she thinks she's untouchable. Miss Wilder's growing spite, as the class' rebellion gets more and more open, eventually leads to her imposing far too harsh a punishment on Laura's sickly little sister Carrie for a minor offense (and though another girl was equally guilty, Eliza Jane let her escape the punishment). Things eventually get so out of control that the school board is called in, and Miss Wilder takes the opportunity to triumphantly denounce Laura to her father... except that Laura, oblivious to any of this subtext, has actually been trying her best to discourage the mischief, and is stunned. We never do find out if Miss Wilder learns the truth, but apparently when she became Laura's sister-in-law a few years later their relationship was notably strained. Go figure.
- The first season of the TV series also had an episode that featured a sadistic substitute teacher.
- Little Women has Mr. Davis, Amy's teacher at school, though he is more of a borderline example. He does whip Amy's hands for bringing pickled limes to school, a common punishment at the time, but the narration states the swats "weren't many or hard", as well as stating that if Amy had not acted so prideful, Mr. Davis would have let her off with a warning since she is one of his favorite students, as well as when Jo was sent to get Amy's things by Marmee, who decided to take Amy out of school for a while, he feels completely awful about the whole ordeal. His punishment and attitude afterwards varies depending on the adaptation; the 1933 and 1949 films have him make Amy stand on a platform with a slate reading "I am ashamed of myself" for drawing an unflattering caricature of him on her slate during class. In these versions, he is about to whip her hands after class, but has a change of heart and lets her go home. Other adaptations (including both the 1981 and 1987 anime series) keep the punishment in tact, though a few versions have him apologize to Marmee. Played straighter in the 1994 film, where Amy says he believes that educating girls as is useless as bathing a cat, and the 2017 miniseries Mr. Davis is his most sadistic, since he pulls Amy up by one of her braids before he whips her hands hard enough they bleed, as well as feeling no guilt whatsoever until Jo gets Amy's things and scares him, even then he tries to justify whipping Amy.
- Professor Mayakovsky of The Magicians walks a very wobbly line between this trope, Bunny-Ears Lawyer, and Stern Teacher. The lone instructor presiding over the dreaded fourth year of study, his first scene features him performing a Groin Attack on Quentin just to make a point, and soon after, the students are magically muted so they can't be distracted - a process that nearly drives them insane over time. Those who complete his grueling tasks are slapped in the face for doubting themselves, and that's not even getting into the humiliation of the shapeshifting lessons. And the final exam requires students to walk to the South Pole, naked. Turns out this isn't compulsory, but the students who participate are the only ones who earn Mayakovsky's hard-won respect. It's later revealed he's not allowed to leave Brakebills South, having been Reassigned to Antarctica following an affair with a student, and it's implied his sadism is due to a combination of bitterness and extreme isolation.
- The Goldfish Robot uses electric shocks on children who refuse to study in Sophia McDougall's Mars Evacuees. It also falls under the Badass Teacher and Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher tropes.
- Agatha 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, as Matilda deduces, is deliberately so extreme and outlandish that no kid's parents will believe the truth even on the off chance any child got up the courage to tell. It is also explained that the parents are just as terrified as the kids. She cites Wackford Squeers from Nicholas Nickleby as inspiration: "He knew how to handle the little brutes, didn't he!" Plus the way she treats her own niece, the much more benevolent teacher Miss Honey.... It's actually implied that Trunchbull even may have had a hand in Miss Honey's father's death. Made even more explicit later, when Matilda uses her telekinetic powers to write on the blackboard, pretending to be the ghost of Miss Honey's father: "[...] or I will come and get you... like you got me." Trunchbull is appropriately terrified, and the illustration shows her reflexively grasping at her throat.
- Viola Swamp from the children's picture book series Miss Nelson, a cruel substitute teacher who makes students shudder in dread at the mere mention of her name. In a twist, she turns out to be the secret alter ego of Miss Nelson, a normally genuinely sweet teacher who assumes the Viola Swamp disguise/persona whenever her students start misbehaving too much.
- According to molesworth, the masters at his school "are all teddy boys and would slit you with a broken botle for 2 pins." At one point, he also imagines the school as it was in the time of Christopher Columbus, run by one Doctor Kurdling, who during a lesson canes random pupils every few minutes.
- In Mysterious Ways: A Divine Comedy, Ms. Slaphappy is well-known for slapping (read "assaulting") students with a ruler whenever she thinks they're sleeping, talking back, not paying attention
, or just not doing well in class. Made way worse because it's a school for angels, and the class is all about learning to meditate and use magic, both of which look like sleep and are hard to do when under attack, leading to a Catch-22. - In the Sidney Sheldon novel Nothing Last Forever, Dr. Paige Taylor deals with an attending physician who criticizes her endlessly for everything she does or doesn't do. Only when he's almost broken her spirit does he finally admit that he actually regards her very highly as a doctor and was so hard on her because he wanted her to be perfect.
- The One Who Eats Monsters: Downplayed, but still present. Ryn wears dark sunglasses to cover her Glowing Eyes of Doom, and has a valid prescription for them. When she first goes to public school, a teacher says she doesn't care and tries to get her to take them off. Ryn doesn't care what humans think and ignores the teacher.
- In The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System, the original Shen Qingqiu cruelly abused his disciple Luo Binghe at every turn and Binghe ultimately inflicted a Cruel and Unusual Death upon him in revenge. When Shen Yuan gets transmigrated into Shen Qingqiu's body, he makes a concerted effort to avert this trope as much as possible.
- A Series of Unfortunate Events:
- Vice Principal Nero, a Small Name, Big Ego type who mercilessly butchers the violin every night but considers himself to be a genius. He forces the students of Prufrock Preparatory School to attend six-hour concerts, and punishment for not showing up is having to buy him a large bag of candy and watch him eat it. He also loves mimicking the Baudelaire siblings every chance he gets, forces them to live in a horrible little shack infested with crabs and fungus, and makes Sunny (a toddler) his secretary.
- Olaf as Coach Genghis, who purposefully makes the Baudelaires run laps all night in order for them to do poorly in class. Nero praises him as "the greatest gym teacher in the world" after Olaf praises his musical "genius".
- Subverted with Mr. Remora and Mrs. Bass, who are not evil so much as they are very, very bad teachers. Remora's class consists of him endlessly telling short, boring stories while eating bananas, and Bass is obsessed with measuring things. When they are forced to give the Baudelaires "special exams" for sleeping in class (which they studied for thanks to notes collected by Duncan and Isadora Quagmire), by the third question they realize Violet and Klaus are actually very smart students, and only continue the exam because of Nero. They ask Nero if they can give an extra hard exam to Carmelita Spats instead because she's so awful, and when Nero decides he's going to expel the Baudelaires anyway for skipping gym, Remora and Bass state it's not cheating if you're trying to make sure athletics don't affect your schoolwork. They aren't in a position to do anything since Nero is their boss, so they prove to be just as useless as the rest of the adults in the series.
- She Who Became The Sun: Master Fang, the monk in charge of the novices, believes that Misery Builds Character and hands out painful, humiliating Corporal Punishment for the slightest infraction with sadistic pleasure. Consequently, when he goes after Zhu, she frames him for gross misconduct and gets him expelled from the monastery without remorse.
- The unnamed Head of Experiment House in The Silver Chair, inspired by C.S. Lewis' own unfortunate experience with his first headmaster. Though interestingly in this case, the Head's cruelty is a case of neglectful lack of discipline that coddles a Gang of Bullies who take over the school and terrorize the other students. The Head indulges the bullies because they are "interesting cases." (At the end, when the other teachers finally realize the Head is incompetent at her job, they get her a promotion to the Ministry of Education. And when she turns out to be also useless at that, she eventually gets into Parliament.)
- In Louis Sachar's Someday Angeline, Mrs. Hardlick is one of the sixth-grade teachers, and the titular Angeline, an eight-year-old child genius, has the misfortune to be sent to her class. Mrs. Hardlick frequently gives the class wrong information and gets angry when Angeline corrects her, and takes immense delight in telling students that they answered incorrectly. On her first day of class, Angeline is driven to tears and sucks on her thumb to console herself, prompting Mrs. Hardlick to taunt her about it in front of the whole class (who start laughing at her), and gleefully tells her "Only babies suck their thumbs!" After Angeline's father forces her to resign from being "Secretary of Trash" (meaning she empties the garbage bin), Hardlick refuses to listen or to let her resign, and then says she'll send a letter to Angeline's mother about her—simply tossing an uncaring "Too bad," when the girl tries to tell her that her mother is dead. When Angeline later reads said letter, she finds Hardlick didn't even bother writing to her father, but wrote to her mother even after being told her mother was dead, then made it sound like Angeline was loud, disruptive, and destructive—all lies. (Even the other teachers know how horrible Hardlick is—the fifth-grade teacher, Miss Turbone, admits "If I were in [Mrs. Hardlick's] class, I'd [skip school], too.")
- Danish author Hans Scherfig's classic schooldays 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.
- The teacher described in Michael Rosen's poem "Strict", who forbids students from breathing in her class. Those who didn't keel over and die from not breathing were sent to "school prison" if they slammed the desk lid while snatching a quick breath under the desk, where they'd be strung up in a dungeon with rats nibbling at their toes."Ma'am? Can I go out and do some breathing?"
"No! You've got all playtime to do that!" - An extremely mild case of this trope applies to Fudge's first kindergarten teacher in Judy Blume's Superfudge. While actual deliberate cruelty is not shown, she refuses to call him "Fudge" even when this sends him into screaming fits, and her students behave like little robots without a spark of individuality. "Fudge" actually tells off the teacher at the very end of the chapter by calling her 'Rat Face'.
- The children's picture book series Teachers From The Black Lagoon. They all follow the same formula: the main character hears terrifying rumors about a teacher (or librarian, janitor, cafeteria lady, etc.) at school, such as "The principal keeps cages under her desks for bad students!" He spends the whole book being scared of them until he actually meets them and finds out that they're perfectly nice. Strangely, he never seems to learn his lesson between books. A later book inverted the trope with "The Class From the Black Lagoon", where the main character is a new teacher worried about meeting her students.
- Professor Reinhard Ezel in To Shape a Dragon's Breath is known as a beast among the student body. He comes off as this from his very first interactions with newcomer Anequs, giving her a timed test on skiltakraft—which she has never studied—as part of her educational assessment, but not before lecturing her on how exacting and perfect it all must be and that any mistake in skiltakraft could mean failure. He grades it in front of her—laughing at her poor results—then gives her a introduction book and demands the whole thing be read in its entirety before she attends her first class. Unlike his Foil Professor Ulfar (who gently encourages her and gives her opportunities to speak and interact in class), Ezel regulates Anequs to the back of the class with Sander—another of his disliked students—and tells them both they are merely being tolerated and are not to speak or ask any questions at all, not allowing them to participate. To the rest of the class, he says anyone who doesn't arrive on time will be barred entrance, and three misses is class expulsion—and likely complete expulsion from the academy, as mastering skiltakraft is required for a dragon license. He doesn't approve of Anequs—or Theod, who he has failed repeatedly, or Sander—but it's not just them even though they get the worst of it; they just get the worst of it. Marta tell Anequs Professor Ezel he doesn't approve of anyone he's teaching and is bitter to be training dragoneers when he never bonded with a dragon himself.
- Universal Monsters: Downplayed in book 5, where Captain Bob runs into one of these who gives him detention for not having a hall pass... despite it being very visible in his shirt pocket the entire time. She even has a slight smile on her face as he's on his way to detention later.
- 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. In the end, listening to the pure mind of Mrs. Jewl's newborn daughter helps cleanse her heart of the hatred inside and she ends up praising Mrs. Jewls's class.
- Wayside School had terrible luck with their substitute teachers.
- Their first one, Mr. Gorf, was actually the son of Mrs. Gorf and had the freakish ability to steal the voices of people through his nose! Which had three nostrils! Then, when he had stolen the students' voices, he called their parents up and used their voices to say terrible things, making their parents think the kids hated them.
- Their second substitute, Ms. Drazil, seemed very nice at first but turned out to be the yard teacher Louis's old teacher and according to him had humiliated him over the state of his nails and put a wastebasket over his head so he couldn't read the board and failed him as a result of not being able to answer the questions. While she never does any of this to the Wayside kids, she does resume her tyrannical control over Louis which is enough to make the students hate her. Oh, and it's later revealed that she kept a blue notebook with information on various students she held grudges with and upon getting a lead on a girl who escaped, tracks down said girl (now a successful dentist) and breaks into her house yelling that the girl has homework to do. And the girl was expecting something like this to happen, even keeping a suitcase and getaway boat for the occasion!
- Oddly, it's implied the reason Ms. Drazil was so nice to the Wayside kids because she was trying to atone for her former strict tendencies. The unexpected arrival of Louis and the dentist force her right back into her old habits when she chases the latter down.
- Even the regular teachers aren't always safe. One chapter in Wayside School is Falling Down comments that every nice teacher has a mean teacher wanting to break out and illustrates this by showing a class in which Ms Jewel's "mean teacher" breaks out and threatens to dump pickle brine on a student for being unable to answer three questions (to be fair, the questions were "what's seven plus five", "what's the capital of England", and "how do you make pickles" and she is cured by having brine dumped on herself).
- The principal, named Mr. Kidswatter, is apparently a holy terror and students dread going to his office. At one point, the intercom catches him going on about how much he hates kids.
- Mr. Nagy from Vampire Academy, "legendary for his ability to humiliate students by reading notes aloud". He seems to take pleasure in revealing their embarrassing secrets in public.
- Villains Don't Date Heroes!: Night Terror takes over a class on how to survive a super battle when you're a civilian. Since she's just there to draw out Fialux in her secret identity, Night Terror spends the time psychologically torturing the students by threatening them with all manner of very dangerous weapons and demonstrating how they could be killed in horrible ways. When CORVAC attacks the school, everyone in her class survives due to her training, which leads to the school hiring her to teach the class for real despite the fact that she still has no actual credentials (she only got the job in the first place due to mind controlling the one in charge of hiring).
- Warrior Cats:
- Warriors has Brokentail, who punishes his apprentice by making him hang from a branch by his teeth. His crime? He was talking too much during training. Later in Yellowfang's Secret, he trains kits far too young who accidentally kill their former denmate, another kit.
- During Tigerclaw's exile from ThunderClan, he trains his group of former ShadowClan warriors with unsheathed claws so that they sustain injuries during their training. He and several others use this same method to train Dark Forest recruits, which leads to several cats being killed during training sessions. Even before this, when he was still seemingly one of ThunderClan's most honorable warriors, he ruthlessly bullied his apprentice Ravenpaw.
- The principal, Mr. Payne in The Year My Parents Ruined My Life is an asshole in general, biased against the protagonist because he crashed into her parents' car (and is now faking a neck injury) and is racist to boot, which he does not make a secret about, in regards to one of the fourth-grade protagonist's friends, a Japanese-American girl.
