I’m taking a 400-level math class (for those in universities with strange numbering systems, this is a senior-level course), and I happen to be in it with a bunch of dolts. They may be nice dolts — I don’t know, I haven’t really met them — but they are dolts nevertheless. The professor, an older French gentleman, becomes noticeably more irritated with their general mathematical ineptitude by the day. So he’s started to rail abuse at some of them. Here are some of his more memorable comments (read them in the not-particularly-heavy accent of a frustrated Frenchman for maximum effect):
“How many parameters are there? What, don’t you know how to count? Ok…” He circled the parameters on the board in red chalk. “This is Kindergarten 101…”
“It’s not a trick question. It’s not even a math question. It’s a question of you understanding the English language.”
And, best of all, referring to a group of girls who have obviously worked together on homeworks (which he discourages but admits he is powerless to stop):
“When you work together, try to have in your group someone who is smart.”
This guy never fails to crack me up. So, what memorable derisive things have your instructors said?
There is a sulking rapper-type fellow in my theater history class, who does nothing but slouch there the whole time. We had one class meeting where we met at the ampitheater to perform scenes from the Bacchae. Unimpressed with his lack of enthusiasm, the professor barked, “Get up here, pull your pants up, and put your hat on straight”. The student meekly complied :eek:
Wow, that’s the first time in quite a while that I’ve laughed out loud to a post … it’s not even that funny I suppose, but I’m a CS student and it just hit me strangely.
This didn’t happen in a class I was in, but one a couple of friends of mine had. This was in the late 80s when rap was just starting to become popular in this area. The class was a recording industry one and the students were playing the tracks they’d recorded in their first 4 hour session in the studio. One of the guys in the class was a white kid who was very heavily into rap, and when he played one of the songs he’d recorded, the professor asked the guy where he was going with the track.
Guy: Well, I don’t. You see, I got the boom beat going on over here in this song, but in this other song, I’ve got the boom beat going on over there and I kind of like that. So I’m not sure if I should do this song with the boom beat here, or the song with the boom beat over there. I’ve also got twenty other songs, that I’m really digging on. So, I don’t know if I want to do these two or one of those.
Prof: Twenty songs? Did you record all of those in one session?
Guy: Yeah, man.
Prof: Are you sure this is what you want to do? I mean, twenty songs in four hours, it’s kind of hard to do any quality work in such a short amount of time.
In an introductory physics course two years ago:
“How many of you think the answer is A?” A good number of students raised their hands. “All right. How many of you think the answer is B?” More students raised their hands. “Hmm. How many of you think the answer is C?” Again, several students raised their hands. “What about D?” A few students raised their hands.
The professor rolled his eyes and stared at the ceiling. “Well, variety is the spice of life, I suppose…”
One evening I was running late completing my paper for a poli. sci. class that was due the next morning. After finishing it, I went to print it out, and found my printer was running out of ink in the ribbon (yes, I know that dates me, just leave it). I didn’t really have a prayer of buying a replacement before class the next morning, so I decided it would have to do.
When I got the paper back, the prof had written: “Your argument, like your print, is too faint to be found…”
I took intro statistics at a community college, which might begin to explain why half of the class didn’t have a clue what we were doing. Our teacher would regularly ask someone a question, wait through a few seconds of silence then, not in a shout but in a clear projecting voice, say “What, are you people STUPID? THIS IS EASY!”, then he would scrawl the answer out on the board.
I was one of the few students that understood the work but in the end it didn’t matter; he blew off grading the finals, gave everybody a B and probably headed out to a bar.
I took a practical mathematics course at Ball State. This was after I had successfully completed Calculus, but I had changed my major to English and the registrar required basic math to graduate. I couldn’t talk them out of it :rolleyes:
That poor professor. If I had met him on the street I would have thought he was a math professor just from the way he dressed. He wore the suit jackets with the brown patches on the elbows and everything. He even had the posture of a math professor.
In the class there were a bunch of theatre majors, art majors, and me. After the first test, I managed to get an A+ on every assignment. Maybe it was because I was just so good, or maybe it was because everyone else was just so BAD.
The professor would spend half the class trying to explain why he used the letter X instead of a number. Then he had to explain how 2x and 3x became 5x. It was like trying to teach how to make fire to to bunch of chimpanzees, and seeing them try to eat it.
It was never anything he said. He was too understated to say anything that amounted to abuse. But he grew more and more slumped through the semester, ignored hands from particularly troubling people, and sighed and rolled his eyes a lot. I thought he was killingly funny, but the rest of the class didn’t even catch on.
For Differential Equations I had a professor from Greece. He had his tics (quite literally–I think he must have had a mild form of Tourette’s). He insisted that Greek letters in equations be pronounced the way Greeks pronounce them, which is sometimes quite different from the way they’re normally pronounced in an American math class.
He announced the format of the final exam by stating, “This test will separate the sheep from the goats!” To this day, I’m still not sure which set of farm animals I was supposed to aspire to.
I’m taking that class right now. Its college algebra. Is night school - the prof has a day job as an engineer. And I am clueless how we will complete the required coursework.
In a complex variables class, the professor was simplifying an equation that contained a lot of trig terms.
At one point, he noted that two of the terms cancelled each other, because they were cos(theta) and cos(- theta). They were on opposite sides of the equation, and since cos(theta) = cos(-theta), they cancelled.
A few moments later, a guy in the front row spoke up, claiming that another two terms cancelled each other out: they were theta and -theta, also on opposite sides of the equation.
For a second, I agreed with him, until I realized I’d been confused by the similar simplification the professor had done moments earlier. It was an easy mistake to make. The professor told him he was wrong.
But the guy, either still confused (or just stubborn) persisted: Theta and -theta (on opposite sides of the equation) cancelled out.
The professor paused.
“You’re saying that theta equals negative theta?”
“Yes”.
The professor paused again, then asked, “Could I borrow some money from you?”
Third year engineering thermodynamics, taught by a grizzled emeritus from Hungary who could not have given a fractional shit about the academic needs of any undergraduate.
On an almost daily basis, he would get PURPLE in the face from anger, and mutter under his breath, “Such ignorance, such lamentable ignorance…”
To one particularly mixed-up student: “The wealth of your stupidity astounds me!”
The one time he broke out of his standard, heavily accented flowery prose: “If you are not able to accomplish even this basic manipulation in time for the final exam, you are truly fucked.”
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First year algebra: “If you find yourself unsatisfied with the way this course is taught, please feel free to bring it up with the first year cirriculum coordinator.”
In my High School German class, Dr. Gurganus was a very tough teacher. On the other hand, out of all my high school teacher, he prepared me for college the most. The last I heard he was teaching at The Citadel.
On day, a young lady in class would not stop yammering. He looked at her dead on and told her, “Frau:lein Green, if you do not stop talking, I am going to reach down your throat; rip out your larynx; and run up and down the halls screaming, ‘Look what I got! Look what I got!’”
Ms. Greene didn’t open her mouth the rest of the class.
This is kinda abuse, kinda misogyny: The professor I had for Statics and Dynamics (kinda a pratical application of physics required for engineers) was a grumpy old guy who’d been at the university since before women were allowed to take engineering. The rumor going around was that one not-particularly-bright girl had gone to him for help and he’d told her that maybe she should consider just marrying an engineer…
In a high-school Chemistry class, the teacher was demonstrating the polarity of water molecules, using a stream of water and a lucite rod. By rubbing the lucite rod with silk, he was able to build up a considerable negative charge on the rod, and this charge would deflect the water stream, which normally fell straight down from the tap.
His first attempt didn’t yield a dramatic enough effect, so he bagan to stroke the rod harder, and faster. The natural association was made, and one couragious class clown began moaning and grunting softly from the back row, growing louder with each stroke of the rod. The teacher was aware of it, but tried to ignore the first few seconds; however, his limit was reached fairly quickly, after which he glared at the offending student and snarled: “What you like to do in your free time is your damn business, but *don’t[\I] bring it into my classroom, you understand me, you little deviant?”
