About

Unhelpful High School Teacher is an advice animal image macro series featuring a stock photo of a woman standing in front of a map of the world and a chalkboard. The captioned text describes lazy or irresponsible teaching methods, as well as cliche expressions and retorts frequently used by teachers in interacting with students.

Origin

The base image comes from a Corbis Images^[9] stock photo titled "Teacher Pointing at Map of World." The first Quickmeme^[1] submission was uploaded on September 3rd, 2011. The image was posted to the advice animals subreddit^[2] the same day in a thread by Me_bender titled "Unhelpful High School Teacher." It received 2163 upvotes and an overall score of 665.

Spread

Several examples were posted in a thread in the Mabination^[6] forums on September 4th, 2011. The first single topic blog on Tumblr titled "Fuck Yeah Unhelpful High School Teacher"^[7] was created on September 5th. On September 6th, derivative round-ups were published to BuzzFeed^[3] and Memebase.^[4] Smosh.com^[5] published a "best of" collection on September 8th. Urban Savior^[14] included it in their 25 Most Hilarious Memes of 2011 list and in January 2012, a series appeared on humor site Runt of the Web.^[11]

As of February 2012, there are 370 submissions related to "unhelpful teacher" in the advice animals subreddit^[8] and over 6600 instances on Quickmeme.^[10]

Notable Examples

Derivative: Teacher's Rebuttals

On September 10th, 2011, Tumblr user and English education student angewe posted a series^[12] of 10 Unhelpful High School Teacher instances with her response placed in red text in between the captions, receiving 333 notes. The series was linked on Buzzfeed^[13] two days later.

Template

Search Interest

Search peaked in September and again in December, coinciding with end of year lists. It is currently on the rise

External References