The demotivating example I have is about my math teacher’s teaching style in my high school. It is not just a personal demotivating example, rather affecting the whole class and potentially the students’ future interests in math.
My high school math teacher’s teaching style or lack of any style, is anything but inspiring. He will randomly pick a few problems in each class and solve it on the black board without really bothering about whether any of the students understood or not. He would simply keep writing down steps on the board and we will all be frantically copying before erases part of it to write more. The worst of all is that he will just solve a few problems and call that the “remaining all problems are homework”. This was his way of saying, I am done with this chapter and it is up to you get the rest of the chapter. He was such a nightmare that asking any question during the class wasn not an option.
This style had big effect on how I learnt math later in both positive and negative ways. On the positive side, it made me a more independent learner. On the negative side, since high school was such a crucial time, to catch up with the class, I started to use solution manuals to understand/solve a problem. This habit had big negative effect in college where I had to solve problems on my own without any solution manuals.
What could have been done afteward to fix it?
Later on I learned that he either had a PhD or was doing PhD; was not happy teaching high school kids; and was in the job for convenience.
I am not really sure what I could have done to fix it. May be the school could have done something.