Best professor abuse?

In My Humble Opinion
61

All last year, I had to put up with the fellow grad student from Hell. He had no social skills, his hobbies were coming to class 15 minutes late and asking questions purposefully designed to infuriate the professor, then bragging about it afterwards. He was so horrible in class that a professor from another department whose class he was taking had to come meet with our department chair and tell her to restrain her student. The whole year was a nightmare, and the rest of us grad students practically threw a party when we were told he had been “asked to leave.”

One day, in the middle of a class on Cicero, he interrupted the professor to note that Thedor Mommsen considered Cicero “an unprincipled opportunist, a mere rhetorician, in his treatises a flabby journalist and in his speeches a shifty lawyer.” The professor is a respected Cicero scholar, btw.

She just stared at him for a good 30 seconds, and then she asked, quite calmy “So why should we read Cicero?”

Oh-so-witty asshole says “So we can understand Mommsen better.*”

Wrong answer, bitch. The professor spent the next 30 minutes calmly explaining why Cicero is a key figure in Roman history who is worth studying even if one does not like him as a person, carefully exposed the biased techniques which Mommsen used to “prove” that Cicero was such a horrible person (turns out she had researched the topic thoroughly once for a possible paper) and concluded with “And if anyone here still doesn’t feel that Cicero is worth studying, they can get out of my class.”

So, no witty zingers here, but considering how I felt about this asshole, it was one of the best classroom moments I’ve ever experienced. Unfortunately undermined by the fact that she apparently regreted it later and sent out two emails apologizing for losing her temper in class. She was perfectly calm and reasonable throughout, IMO. I almost emailed her back and said “Don’t apologize!”

*Note; He may not have been kidding, as he did have a tendency to exalt secondary sources far above primary ones.

62

5th thorough 7th form English teacher to young student Gary Gray: “Gray, you blithering idiot!” (more often than not accompanied by beaning Gray in the head with a piece of chalk from across the classroom).

63

Re “Teacher displays porn during exam” (in which a teacher accidentally projected porn from his computer onto a screen):

When I was in high school, some kids were goofing around and found a copy of Playboy in the history teacher’s desk. They thoughtfully taped it (centerfold facing out, of course) onto the pull-down map, which they rolled up again. Next class period, teacher pulls down the map to illustrate a point. Hilarity ensues.

64

In the sprit of Melandry’s post:

I had a classmate that had fully persuaded himself that all “modern” (post-1960) pedagogy was a waste, that everything promulgated by the Church since Vatican II was probably heresy, and that he had provided himself a far better education that the rest of us had by going back to earlier texts.

He was also a bit misogynistic, believing that women should probably not worry their little heads about collegiate courses.

So one day, after being a complete PITA through most of a theology course taught by a woman, he tried to demonstrate that her “modern” point of view had already been refuted by Thomas Aquinas.

At that point, she interrupted her presentation to quote the relevant section of the Summa verbatim in Latin, translated it to English, demonstrated how his translation was corrupt and that his understanding of the text was in error even if his translation had not been, and provided a clear link from Thomas’s actual text to the theological point that had been reiterated in the Second Vatican Council. All this without referring to a single note.

The class cheered.

65

Not abuse i]by* the professor, more like abuse of the professor:

I was taking International Economics (at this point, I can’t for the life of me remember why I was taking International Economics, but I was).

The professor was, as economics professors tend to do, tossing out glittering generalities, and the students were all faithfully copying them down in their notebooks, without a shred of cognition.

Not being a real big notetaker, perhaps I was paying a bit more attention to the content of the lecture. Or maybe I was just bored and wanted to be a pain in the ass.

Anyway, something struck me as odd, and I raise a hand.

“Professor”, I said, “you said so-and-so, right?”

The professor agreed.

“OK,” I replied, “that is equivilant to saying such-and-such?” (I have long since forgotten the specifics of the lecture.)

Again, the professor agreed with my reformulation.

“Which implies this-and-so?”

“Yes”.

“Which is another way of saying this-and-such”

“Mm-hm” (He’s getting a bit impatient at this point, perhaps wondering where all this is going).

“So what you are saying is that inflation causes unemployment?”
I had him. I had, with precise logic, proven that the entire thesis of his lecture for the day was equivilant to a contradicton, which any mathematician (or even math major) would tell you proved that his entire thesis was invalid. I anxiously awaited his response.

Increadibly, he elected to brazen it out: “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”

At this point, even the most dimwitted of my classmates were uneasily looking around, saying “Wait a minute…” under their breath.

I ultimately got a “D” in that course. Never before or since have I ever felt pride in such a grade, but I have always valued that grade as a badge of honor, in the fight against ignorance.

66

Not my story, but it happened to a friend of mine:

He had gotten an exam back, and had done less well than he had expected. Looking closely at the test he found that he had made a small error on one question (something along the lines of mistaking a poistive sign for a negative sign in the middle of a long series of calculations); and he had recieved no credit for the question even though the rest of his calculations were correct.

He approached his professor with the test, to see if he could get some credit for the question. The professor (Dr. Shu I still remember; and he wasn’t even my teacher!) looked at the exam, said “You build bridge. Bridge fall down. Answer wrong.” And handed the test back.

67

This kind of response has always bothered me. I know for sure that I wouldn’t ever drive on a bridge that had been designed in 50 minutes with no references.

My story comes from Calc II. We had a series of exams through out the year covering the material. On one particular exam, every one bombed. Seriously, you passed with a D if you got 17 percent.

Fast forward to the final review. We get to the section that was covered on the aforementioned exam, and the professor announces:

“This section won’t be on the final.”

A hundred some students breathe a sigh of relief, before he goes on:

“The purpose of the final is to show me what you know, and you’ve already shown me that you DON’T know this stuff.”

Ouch.

Take care,

GES

68

Yup, that’s him. And he was indeed funny. And a prick sometimes. But words cannot describe how cool it was to hear him refer to a student’s prevarications as “Horseshit!” and move on to the next.

Heh. 'Nother example: once when he did that to me, I wrote up a formal logical proof of my conclusion, and presented it in the next class.
Rea: “Yup. Still horseshit.”
Me: “Formal logic is horse shit?”
Rea: “When it’s you doing it.”

69

Read… Cicero… to understand… MOMMSEN?

If that isn’t the most misguided thing I’ve heard all week.

(PS: You’re a grad student in Classics?)

70

Well, he was German, so maybe he was really keen on Mommsen…I still have no idea if he was serious or not, this is the same guy who once told us that there’s no evidence for worship of Athena outside Attica before the 5th century so Athena’s role in the Odyssey must be an interpolation (of the so-called "Athenian Recension’). He could say all kinds of crap with a straight face.

Yup, 4 years into a PhD program. Do you do Classics also?

71

This guy knows how to do the smackdown.

72

“alright you little shit-heads, we’re going to do something different today and maybe 3 or 4 of you are going to think ‘hey that was pretty cool’ 5 of you will say ‘that was okay’ and the rest of you are gonna say ‘that was the stupidest thing i ever did, he is a asshole!’ but i don’t fucking care, we’re doing it!”

the immortal crazy calculus teacher…

73

He sounds like a weird, weird man. Yes, I’m in Ancient History, finishing up my BA and applying for grad school this year.

74

I had a very bizzare Physics Professor for Wave Mechanics sophomore year. The following exchange was probably the best:

Student: Whats on our midterm?
Professor: Uhhh, exactly 29 questions.
Student: Multiple choice?
Professor: Yeah, you can choose to suffer or you can choose to die.

We actually wrote down all his more interesting quotes - most are more strange than abusive though.

75

My 11th and 12th grade English teacher was named Mr. Dietrich. He liked to style himself as an old-school type, but he was pretty quirky about it. For most of those two years, he would penalize students for all sorts of minor infractions and tell them as he did it. Since this was high school, chewing gum was probably number one. He did chew gum himself, but explained that none of his rules applied to him “because I have a high school diploma.” He never said a word about college, and sometimes denied having gone to at all. Late senior year, he finally admitted he’d attended St. John’s. The two incidents I remember best:
[ul]
[li]Once, my friend Wasim fell asleep in class. Wasim’s last name started with an A, so he sat in the second row. When Mr. Dietrich noticed that Wasim was asleep, he quited down and moved toward his desk. The class noticed what was going on and fell silent. Finally Mr. Dietrich was directly in front of my sleeping friend. There was a pause. And then, at the top of his lungs, he bellowed “WASIM!”[/li]My friend woke up with a frighted start and almost fell out of his chair. Great laughter ensues.
[li]In high school, I imagine every school had that one girl who, while not being the smartest, prettiest or most talented, convinced herself that she was all of those things and more. This made her very unpopular, so she considered herself everyone’s victim. She was in the class too. One day, while we were reading The Crucible, Mr. Dietrich began explaining Abigail Williams. A girl who was self-centered, needy, felt persecuted… and very slowly, a remarkable thing happens. Every eye leaves Mr. Dietrich. And finds this girl. By the time he’s finishing up his explanation, everyone in the room was looking at this one girl, who didn’t have a clue what the 25 us were thinking. We’ve never been sure if this was the most brilliant and subtle abuse in history, or a bizarre coincidence.[/ul][/li]
My 12th grade AP Physics teacher had to be the best at being mean. The year before I had him, he refused to accept a student’s lab. He said there were mistakes on it. The student protested, because of course he knew better than his 50-something-year-old Physics teacher.
“Anyway,” Mr. Young said, “there’s a hole in your paper.”
“No there isn’t,” the student said. Mr. Young immediately took his pen and stabbed a hole in the paper.
“There is now.” Later on, for reasons I forget, he threw the student’s pen out the fourth floor window.

I fell asleep in his class once and was told “Marley, the next time you fall asleep, I’ll set your beard on fire.” No repeat performances there.

One student in the class was accepted to UPenn early, which basically mooted his entire senior year. So he never paid attention and often went to sleep. One fine day, Mr. Young stopped writing on the blackboard when he saw the man sleeping. He took a piece of chalk, threw it, and hit the young man between the eyes. Good afternoon!
Some time later, he repeated this trick with a friend of mine who was talking instead of sleeping. After he threw the chalk, he told my friend to stand up and turn around so the class could see. There was a yellow chalk spot right over his heart. Mr. Young, you see, was an artilleryman long ago.
But the most fun was the long-running antagonism he had with this same friend. My pal thought he knew everything about physics, and by high school standards, he was probably very close. So he would often tune Mr. Young out and play games on his graphing calculator. You could do some fun things with those. Whenever Mr. Young caught him, which was often, he would erase the calculator’s memory, which didn’t do anything except require my friend to get the games from someone else’s calculator again the next day. Near the end of the year, Mr. Young got tired of doing that, and decided this calculator was going to pay the Ultimate Price.
He confiscated it again, as usual, and deleted the memory. Then he turned the calculator around and pulled out a small screwdriver. He took something small out of the back, then returned it to my friend. I wish I remembered the details, but in so many words he explained he’d deleted the calculator’s memory. He hadn’t just erased the games this time- he’d erased everything. The numbers were gone. The TI-85 was now completely useless, none of the buttons did anything except On and Off. The year still wasn’t over, and we had finals to do.

76

Ah, no references. I had a high school calculus teacher that told us everything would be open book, but that 50 minutes would not be long enough to finish the test if you had to look everything up. It was great when there was just one thing you needed to check, but you certaintly couldn’t coast.

He uttered one of my favorite lines I ever heard from a teacher: “Ten years from now, you won’t remember most of these formulas. If you remember where to find the formulas, though, I’ve succeeded.”

Then, in my first year of college, I had a physics prof who wouldn’t allow any books or references at all. He handed out three sheets of blank paper with each exam, and we had to do our work on those sheets and hand them in. On one of the tests, we had to calculate the volume of a sphere. I couldn’t remember the formula, but since I was a year ahead in math, I knew how to derive it. I was mighty proud of myself, but he marked the question wrong. I was outraged, figuring being able to derive the formula was more important than just remembering it. He disagreed. He said that we were told to memorize the formula, and I hadn’t.

4/3 pi-r-cubed. I still remember it 20 years later.

77

We had wrestling bouts with our history teacher in high school. No joke.

My seventh-grade math teacher threw chalk at us…

I think one of my elementary teachers pushed a kid down a stairwell.

78

:eek: :confused: :frowning:

79

Not real abuse, but my pharmacology teacher is such a boring speaker. He constantly yawns and looks out the window and generally just looks bored as hell to be there. He’ll launch into a lecture, walk over to the window, stop talking and look outside for a few seconds and then continue again. Sometimes he will practically sleep on his podium and gab on. He’s also a very slow speaker who will constantly pause to gather his thoughts. I just wanna shake him, slap him across the face, and yell “Get it together man!”.

80

you’re a johnnie?!