Sadly, this pretty well describes my mother, and describes me almost as well. 
Is it a bad thing to be an ornery smartass?
I didn’t take his class but I knew of a professor who was almost that bad. He was in his late 20s, looked younger, had a Ph.D. but still wanted to be a student. REALLY CUTE- wore hip “urban vagabond”- and was of ambiguous orientation so both she-students and gay he-students had crushes, but he partied constantly with his students. There was never rumor of him dating them, but it was still much gossiped about for being “unprofessional”.
On the What do you Mean 101, I didn’t have one of those, but I took a 200 level history course where the professor was like this. She was a crossover or variation on this archetype, the
I Did Post Grad Work at a Really Prestigious University In Case I Haven’t Mentioned it in the Last 5 Minutes so I’m Gonna Assign You Ridiculously Labor Intensive Projects As If You Were an Ivy League Grad Student Instead of an Undergrad
Typical reading assignment for a week would be (I swear I’m not exaggerating) 100 pages of text (primary sources) and 150 or more of additional readings (articles, books, etc.), and you had better read it because it was taught seminar style and contribution to discussion counted 25% of your grade. Then there were constant papers- a 10 page paper every two weeks or so and a 40 page final paper. In her defense I really enjoyed her class- she was a great teacher- and I got a lot out of it, but the assignments were just damned near impossible to keep up with if you worked full time (which I did and so did some of the other students) and took a full load of classes that quarter (which I also did). Sometimes you just had to skim and wing the readings.
**The Hair Shirt Very Loud Vows of Poverty Professor **
Had this one for Marine Biology. Resented the hell out of the fact that he wasn’t out on some big expedition but was stuck teaching. Almost every class he told students not to major in marine bio or go into the field because the only job you get would be cutting up fish for the dolphins at SeaWorld and the dolphins are treated better than you are.
It was a terrible class and he took sadistic delight in making us go into the ocean up to our chest in the winter for samples that he’d throw away.
SPACE CASE
Physics professor that would stare out of the window in the middle of a lecture and just stop talking. For five minutes. He’d do this a couple times in each lecture. I felt like snapping my fingers or throwing a book on the floor to get him to snap out of it.
The anecdotal professor
Lets pretend David Attenborough is doing the commentary: “This is the anecdotal professor. He start his lectures with a interesting topic and lots of flashy illustrations. But there is a catch to this display, every illustration is followed by a long anecdote either about the man behind the discovery, or what happened to the wife of the man of the discovery on a specific cruise, and the chef. At the end of the lecture the topic has been so riddled with anecdotes that the intended topic is as easy to remember as being blindfolded and spun around fifty times before released into a pen full of sheep being sheared.”
No experience with college types yet, but in high school and elementary schoo, I’ve had:
The Pharisee:
This is almost certainly pretty much restricted to Catholic schools, but this guy looooooves to talk about how good he is. How he only make a Catholic schoolteacher’s salary and STILL gived 10% to the church. How he wakes up at 3 AM EVERY MORNING to pray to Jesus to make him a better man. How he adopted a one-eyed mentally retarded baby with no legs and cerebral palsy and now that baby is all better! he usually teaches religion or history, which are perfect for him because they give him LOTS of opportunities to tell you how he does exactly what Jesus says he should or how he’s a good Catholic and the puritans and quakers or ancient romans or whoever did all kinds of sinful things.
The Nursing Home Escapee
Now- everyone always expects me to think that people who are like my parents’ age are nursing-home ready and so exaggerate people’s oldness. This isn’t what I’m talking about. The Nursing Home Escapee is REALLY old and has lost a good bit of his mental facilities. He can’t remember ANYTHING. He’s usually either nearly blind or nearly deaf. He’s still asking people’s names at the end of the year, even in small classes. When you try to tell him something, he gives you this glazed-over stare and nods and you just know none of it is getting through. He’s agonizingly permissive and almost never actually teaches anything. He gets around it in various ways, but it always turns into, like, lunchtime with no food. The worst part is, he usually teaches a class people normally like with subject matter people want to know, or one that people had to fight to get into (like a music class or an acting class) so, for the majority of the students, it’s not a fun party. It’s frustrating and tense.
The “What Have You Been Taught Your Whole Life?” teacher
This one generally teaches a specialized class. Either they take over from another teacher or they teach it at a begining level. This teacher has decided before they come in that you should know one certain aspect of whatever it is you’re learning and that, since you’ve been learning a different aspect all along, your previous education has failed you. Usually this aspect is pretty arcane or irrelevant. Like taking a French class with the same teacher for three years and being perfectly able to read, write, and speak the language and then having a teacher come in and realize you know nothing about popular French children’s games and ask, “didn’t your last teacher teach you anything?” If it’s a beginning course, the teacher will behave as though everything you’re learning shuold be common knowledge. Particularly the random little factoids. “Does anybody here know what the nine eskimo words for snow are? what? NOBODY? How does anyone get to tenth grade without knowing that?!?!?”
The Pet Lover
This one, near the beginning of the year, picks a few students (or sometimes just one) and decided that they’re special. They make little-to-no effort to hide it and will give them special breaks or special advantages. What makes them different from other teachers is that the pets don’t ask to be pets. Some will take advantage of the teacher’s favor once they have it, but it’s the teacher who’s the prime player in the situation.
Coach
Coaches a boys’ sports team (could be girls at other schools, but not at mine.). All the boys call him “coach” (occasionally, “coach lastname”, but usually just, “hey coach”) and he gives anyone on his team big breaks. He often winds class down fairly early and stands around chatting with the boys about sports. If he possibly can, he makes every analogy in class sports-related. If he teaches any class where word problems are involved, they’re all about things that happen while playing sports. After a class with him, you’re SO ready to go to music class, even if it is taught by the Nursing Home Escapee
I had two doozies of these.
One liked to smoke pot with the students. AFAIK the prof (Hair Shirt of Poverty, but one of my favorite professors) was cool with it, and probably would have joined in. This TA told me he thought I would probably benefit more from psychotropic drugs than anyone else he knew. Still haven’t taken him up on that …
The other one may have been worse. As a freshman, I scheduled my classes so that I was booked solid 8am to 2pm and thus couldn’t get to the cafeteria when it was open, and was too desperately broke to eat anything but my meal plan. So a few times I wound up skipping my computer science lab so I could eat. Once after doing that, I found the lab assignment to be absolutely incomprehensible. I just had no idea where to even begin. So I tracked down the very Asian TA’s office hours to ask for help with the assignment. I was totally expecting to have to learn everything from scratch through his thick accent. He just handed me the answer on diskette (you young whippersnappers may need to Google to find out what diskette is…). Somehow we wound up going out to lunch sometime after that, and he then offered to give me a ride to the airport for Christmas break and pick me up afterward. He then goes into this long conversation about how I am the first women he’s really “had courtship” with and how he liked me because I “wasn’t too pretty or too rich.” I communicated “thanks for the ride, but just friends” to the best of my ability. I was dating two other guys throughout that whole semester (one long distance, both knew relationship was open) and had no idea this TA and I were just one pushy mother-in-law away from an arranged marriage.
The Golden Boy
The Golden Boy is everyone’s favorite professor. He’s super intelligent and students whisper with awe when discussing his credentials, yet somehow, he is still a decent human being. Speaks clearly on the dullest, most arcane subjects while incorporating delightful tidbits from psychology, particle physics, and American Idol; students are both intimidated and fascinated by his erudition. Although he is not good-looking, women want him, men want to be him, and parents love him.
Dr. No
Dr. No hates admitting that a students’ answer might be correct, so he seizes on the tiniest deviance from perfection to declare an answer categorically wrong, generating much confusion until everyone figures out his little game.
I had to do that! It must be thing with cataloging profs. I mostly did the assignment in good faith, but couldn’t resist entitling the entry for one particular day, “In Which I Am Introduced To Tomato Aspic”, which I was that day.
The Celebrity
This professor has managed to achieve sufficient fame in his field that people outside academia have heard of him. There will be lines across the campus to sign up for his class. You will not get in. If you get in, you will taught entirely by the TA. The reading list risks being made up entirely of the celebrity’s own work. Don’t even think about office hours. Ex: Stephen Jay Gould, Alan Dershowitz, Spike Lee.
At U of AL that’s Rick “All Over But the Shoutin’” Bragg. Zealously proud of his “Alabama po white” upbringing he’s written numerous articles lampooning academics over the years and said of the students at Harvard when he was there that “these were kids whose worst memories involved wilted arugula” (which, never having been to Harvard, I still somehow doubt). Before the end of his first semester he gave a reading I attended in which he said “for the first time I’m starting to think of teaching as… hard work!” He also expressed how amazed he was at how much time outside the classroom it took to design a lecture- apparently he honestly thought professors worked exactly how many hours per week they were in class and the rest of their time was free.
My astonomy professor was one. He seemed like a nice guy but we couldn’t understand a word he said. Fortunately his handwriting was neat and he wrote on the board a lot.
Hivemind Queen/King
If you would like to pass this professor’s class, all you have to do is listen carefully to their theories on the subject and then reguritate it. Actually, that’s the only way you can pass the class - if you dare write a paper that suggests another school of thought, or god forbid disagree(!!) with him/her be prepared to get a low mark for not “understanding” the piece of literature you’re studying.
The ultimate irony is that HMQ was my professor for Critical Analysis of Literature.
Lion in Winter
Unlike Professor Counting the Days Until I Get Full Pension, this professor is old and hates you. Not just you in particular, but all of you whiny snot-nosed undergrads he’s put out by being expected to teach; it’s the bane of his declining years. You can’t write anything of interest to him because you’re an infant. He practically has to change your diapers! All your attempts at civility are an obvious angle, and he’s on to you. Hopefully, once he finally reaches nirvana, the college will burn to the ground and take all of you undeserving pests with it.
Nah, Alan Dershowitz taught all of my Criminal Law classes himself. Of course, they mostly consisted of anecdotes about his famous clients, with occasional tirades of, “Every one of you is smarter than any of those nine old farts!” (I did learn the areas of criminal law and procedure that he found interesting - and then I picked up the rest from Bar/Bri.)
All Of My Classes Are The Same Class
Teaches the same material no matter what course s/he is assigned to. There are at least two of these in my translation department, one of whom turns everything into Specialized Translation: Commerce, and another of whom turns it into Terminology, complete with minutious assignments calling for the production of paper terminological fiches (which at this point are to translation as paper card catalogues are to library science) even in the Computer-Assisted Translation class.
True, I was looking from the undergrad side. I remember he did a sort of “thinking about thinking” course on a rotating schedule with Gould and philosophy prof whose name escapes me. The celebrities would go on about their own topic, and then the nuts-n-bolts discussions would be entirely in the TA sections. There simply wasn’t any other way to do it with the huge crowds that packed into the lectures.
This is rather amazing. I don’t have a sweep, but…well:
The Completely Unintelligible Professor/Professor Who Doesn’t Speak English–Note “doesn’t”. Not “can’t”. This particular professor was already old when dirt was a little kid. He mumbled and had an extremely thick Chinese accent, despite having lived in the U.S. since before any of his students’ parents were born. We started to catch on when some of the Chinese students tried to get some information out of him in various dialects…only to learn that he was equally unintelligible in every language they could speak. One day my roommate finally caught him at it. The professor had been ranting on incomprehensibly for a while (spitting everywhere), but when he turned back to the chalkboard, roomie heard him mutter, “Like they give a shit.” in perfect English. He had been faking the accent for years.
The Professor Who Reads From The Textbook–This guy taught my first C Programming course. There is nothing more useless than someone reading a programming textbook to you.
Crazy Ivan–Assigned a book he couldn’t read for the class textbook. “This book crrrosses the level of my understantink. We will not use.” <clang> He threw the book in the trashcan, and started writing power equations on the board. With Cyrillic characters for the variables. He didn’t even have any interesting stories.
Fast Eddie–My Fast Eddie was the math prof for a summer calculus course. Two hours a day, five days a week. He didn’t freak out until he heard that the prof teaching the other section was a chapter ahead of him, but his obsession with catching up with the other guy drove him into Fast Eddie mode.
The Lullaby–Professor K was a really nice guy, and he tried hard. But he taught a statistics course. And he was a poet. An Indian poet who did readings of his own work and others in his native language at the café–it was really quite beautiful, even if I didn’t understand a word of it. He had cultivated this wonderful sing-song voice for it. A student with an iron will and a medically-hazardous amount of caffeine in his system could last maybe 15 minutes in one of his lectures. We took notes in shifts.
Obsessive Research Interest Professor/Passion Professor/Golden Boy–A weird mix, but Dr. H was a weird guy. His was the very first lecture I attended in college, a survey of ancient Western Civ at 8:00 AM on my first day. He spent all but the last five minutes of class talking about a possessed washing machine he once owned. In the last five minutes, he somehow managed to connect his story to animism and the ancient Greek worldview so clearly that everyone in the class actually got it, then told us to read The Iliad for discussion the next day. He lived for history, any history. He didn’t just read footnotes in historical texts. He went and read the referenced works in their entirety. He came across a footnote in a book on (IIRC) the Three Kingdoms era once, but the book it referenced was only published in Chinese. He immediately signed up for a course and learned to read enough Chinese to puzzle through the referenced work. He said that the tangents this kind of behavior took him on were the true joys of scholarship.
And my archetype contribution:
Professor What If They Find Out I Don’t Know Anything–This was my first CompSci prof. She was trying to teach Pascal, but she didn’t really understand it. In fact, she didn’t really understand programming at all. If anyone asked a question or offered a correction for anything she said or wrote, she panicked and went into “They’re on to me!” mode. It didn’t do anything for her composure that several students in the class were actually holding down jobs writing real code at the time. She actually ran out of the classroom crying once because she couldn’t fix a code example she wrote on the board.
Ooh, I wanna play!
I’ve had a Hivemind Queen try to teach me communication theory and research. All of her work in the past ten years at least had been on disseminating information about breast cancer and checking to see if anyone retained it. I bet the boys were uncomfortable in that class. In her own way, she was also sort of a Professor What If They Find Out I Don’t Know Anything – her class was supposed to include some basic stat work. I spent half the semester sitting in the back of the class trying to explain about summations to other people. She seemed to think this “alpha” thing was a magical property of her data that emerged when it was typed into PHSStat, and determined whether some of the numbers were red or not.
Just last fall I had an instructor who was an example of What Do You Mean This is 101, but she wasn’t actually a professor – she was a former elementary level instructor of Navajo who had been hired to teach NAV101. The class did not have a textbook, only a Kinko’s-printed “course packet” of semi-connected suggestions, and she was incapable of completing a sentence unaided in either language. Out of a class of 10 people, 2 of us were not native speakers of Navajo, and we had to rely on the other students to explain to us what in the world was going on. I am capable of picking up useful Romanian from terrible boy-band music, and I left that class without a single clue.
I’d like to add The Smiling Buddha to the list. He’s the professor who hands a question to his “discussion” class and then sits back to watch the students viciously tear one another apart. No matter how lopsided or off-topic the debate gets, he says nothing. People could be beating one another with the textbook and he would sit at the front of the room and smile. I’ve had two; one was an anthropologist that I think was just going senile and taught too many seminar courses in the '60s, and the other was a sociology professor who used to work for the CIA. That latter class was the one where I was dogpiled for venturing the opinion that not all porn is automatically degrading to women; after that, any opinion that was not slightly to the left of Timothy Leary and extremely PC was stomped mercilessly. It very quickly turned into the twice-weekly meeting of the Radical Marxist Feminism Club. I spent most of the semester showing up solely for exam days, and emailing my homework in.
Most of my instructors are crazy-brilliant but have to commute to Earth in order to teach their classes. This is purely a selection bias – I do my damndest to find a way to ditch classes whose instructors aren’t like this. The extraterrestrials are usually best at answering my strange questions, as they have usually also read something, anything outside their field. 90% of the sociology department here is like that, about 50% of the anthropology department, and 100% of the Japanese and German faculty (my two language minors).
I’m pleased to say that I haven’t had any of these professors! Yeah, an over-sexualizing guy or two, and a naricissist here and there, but most of my professors have been excellent.
Oh my, how could I forget!
Prof I don’t understand my subject
I had several of these in math. Many mathematical proofs begin by defining several of the symbols, for example “Given three real numbers Xa, Xb and Xc…”
Since he doesn’t understand the logic behind the proof, or even half the symbols, if your own proof starts with “Given three real numbers X1, X2 and X3…” you’re flunked.
There was also that prof who had a BS in Physics, MS in Physics (Tunnel Effect), PhD in Chemistry (Tunnel Effect) but who didn’t understand energy levels or probability. After all, it was only the whole basis of his students’ work (he must have done some monkeying at some point, but I really wonder).
Related to my Professor who switches off the earpiece upon entering the class.
Does anybody know how to type an infinity symbol? That’s the distance between any question asked by a student and the answer obtained, give or take a couple feet.
Combine the ** Idiot Mathematician ** with the The professor who cannot speak english, and you have my second semester calculus professor.
This guy was Chinese, and apparently straight off the boat, because he was extremely hard to understand. And, mind you, I grew up in a hugely Asian part of Houston, and am generally pretty good at deciphering heavy Asian accents.
This guy would baffle the majority of us, then when we kept asking him to repeat what he said about the cryptic looking integral on the board, he’d get upset and tell us we were stupid.
Needless to say, I bombed that course.
There needs to be a variant of the The Mono-Manic/Obsessive Research Interest Professor that describes the professor who just doesn’t understand why the students in a required course are not interested in the course subject matter, and gets angry when people are not interested in his field of study.
In MBA school, we had to take a course in “Internet Economics”. The majority of my classmates were either finance or accounting dorks, and had no use for the course, and weren’t shy about it. Our professor apparently didn’t realize that it was a required course, and only about 3 out of 50 of us would have actually taken it if given a choice. He’d alternate between seeming depressed about our lack of interest, and being hostile because we weren’t interested in what he was excited about. I actually was one of the 3 who would have taken it, so I noticed how he reacted a little more than the conscripted classmates.