Hmm, let me see if I can contribute. Well, there’s always the typical professor haircut. Usually in the sciences with long hair and a ex-hippie now professor wardrobe. But I gotta say VCO3 that the “this is a 101 but…” professor kind of has a point. College shouldn’t be easy, and even if you are majoring in a completely different discipline, I am really happy that I had a few tough 101 classes. There’s a reason for that. It’s so we can get a good education. College is really just a gateway to a good job nowadays, but originally it was expected that you liked learning things. But my 101s in Senior year were always tough. I expected my 300 levels to be easier, and they usually were in terms of homework, etc.
well I have a good one here:
Professor I make things more difficult sounding than they are
This was my macro econ teacher. Near the beginning of class, he made a huge point that the true nature of understanding was that you could explain your point to someone who had no previous idea of the subject. He also went in detail about how he required simple explanations for things that made sense. So in my first test, I tried to explain economics in very simple terms, so an idiot could understand them. “The demand curve shifts because if fewer people are interested in buy something, then blah blah blah, etc, and that’s why that happens” I did poorly on the test. The second test I did a mixture of that and a basic approach. What happens when you impose a minimum wage? “Demand curve shifts this way, Supply curve shifts that way, etc…so the price rises to p2” I didn’t say “The intersection of S2 and D2 is the point at which both parties find it in in their interest to make the deal, which means this is the price at which business will take place” I did a lot better and in the end I did only the basic approach, and I may have missed 2 questions in the rest of the entire class. Now had he given an example of the kind of thing he was looking for then that would be much easier. I think he may have mentioned it, but after I started doing well I didn’t really pay attention.
Professor Ornery Dutchman This is probably not an archetype, but he possessed the reputed Northern European trait of not sugar-coating his opinions about other peoples ideas or work. But in the end we all kinda loved him. He would cut you down and use mild curse words, but he was an excellent lecturer and didn’t take the bullshit spat out by the self-important, egghead, would-be teacher pet. You know they type, the only speak to bring up some totally irrelevant point that nobody actually cares about only to get a “interesting point, that” pat on the back from the prof. He also had the ability to say, what we all really thought. His incivility in social situations was kinda admired by us. I remember in this lecture in a big auditorium, the speaker (pretty distinguished, I believe) was saying something, and all of a sudden we hear “LOUDER!” from the back. Yeah, that was Prof. Ornery Dutchman. I got chewed out by him in Amsterdam and Belgium for being too wild (on a trip), but we were still friends.
Professor Entertains too many stupid ideas
Unfortunately I ran into that way to often here in my Masters program. My program was based, to a large extent on class participation. I’ve always hated that in a big way most of the time because it’s usually filled with people whose opinions I don’t give a shit about. I know you aren’t a good student, so I don’t really care what you say. Discussion is great, don’t get me wrong, but devoting a large part of class to a discussion with someone of a differing opinion than a noted expert isn’t interesting to me. Yeah you may have a point, and its fun to discuss, but really, I don’t care what you think.
Come to think of it, I’ll start a thread on students.
