Haven’t had a particularly abusive professor [yet], but my basketball coach in high school was rather disappointed in our enthusiasm and (particularly) our running during practice, so he would bring his 12-year-old son to practice and say “If my son beats any of you, everyone runs again.” Worked like a charm.
Algebra II in high school:
“Latus because it’s a line, and rectum because it relates to you!”
“A matrix just sits there, like some of my students.”
I know there were other good lines from that teacher, but I don’t remember them.
My old band director:
“If I were a Marine, and I heard you playing ‘Semper Fidelis’ like that, I’d shoot you!”
“mp does not stand for ‘mounted police’!”
“I should have been a surgeon, to take heads out of butts!”
The math teacher I had sophomore through senior years was a very nice woman who would occasionally threaten to beat the crap out of people. “Don’t make me come back there and smack you guys around! I will if I have to!”
Tenth grade English teacher:
“My God, you were born faster than that!” -when it took someone a long time to answer a question
“They’re the cheap dictionaries–they’re not in alphabetical order.” -when someone was looking something up–she believed it, too
“This is not the Shakespeare 500! Slow down!” -when we were reading Shakespeare really fast
My 10th grade American history class only went up through the Civil War. First semester of junior year I had modern European history. Our teacher would keep referring to things like World War I, and we would have no idea because we didn’t get that far. So he said, “Do you remember—oh, I’m sorry, you’re the class that never learned American history.”
My philosophy teacher senior year was much with the snarky comments, but I can’t remember any.
This year, my French professor is very much with the snarky comments, and I do remember some (like in the OP, these should be read with a frustrated-Frenchman accent):
“I should get half the salary of whoever teaches your next class, because who woke you up? I did!”
“What does it mean when something is silent? It means it DOESN’T MAKE ANY NOISE!”
“Je travaille, et vous… dormez, oui!”
“Now you can go around and tell everyone you know that you’re wrong, and you can say it in French.”
“Friday you’re out of it; Tuesday you’re extinct…”
“Memory gets weaker as you get older, so I’m seriously worried about you.”
“Are you on downers or what?”
“Genève est en France? They must have moved the border last night.”
My probability teacher probably didn’t mean any offense by this, and it wasn’t really an insult, but it did sound odd:
“I don’t fail nobody, man! … [much later] … Hey, you were in my class last semester, tell them!”
Some people doodle. I’m not an artist, so when my mind wandered during lectures, I’d do such things as trying to list all the Davises I had ever heard of. During a discussion of Emily Dickinson one day, I decided to draw a grid, black out a bunch of squares, then fill the remaining spaces and construct a crossword puzzle. As Dr. Harkey walked around the room, he noticed my little effort, and deadpanned: “Mr. Sternvogel*, a four-letter word for ‘Student who does crosswords in class’ is F-A-I-L.” Fortunately, the prof had forgiven (if not forgotten) the little incident by the time I graduate. Not only had I aced the class, but I was voted the outstanding senior English major, and Dr. Harkey even announced the award by reading a bit of doggerel he had composed by explaining what each of the letters of my name stood for. “S because he’s studious, T since he’s tenacious”, etc.
- not my real last name
Heh… This is bringing back fond memories.
There was this kid in my Fluid Dynamics class that had the annoying habit of asking difficult questions that had nothing to do with the material at hand. One day he asked a particularly bizarre question and while the prof was thinking about it, made some kind of smug remark about it being too difficult. Dr. Leslie just looked at him and said, “You know, if you were one third as smart as you pretend to be, you wouldn’t be at a public school in Shitwater, USA.”
Everyone started to laugh, then a few of us stopped as we realized the implicit insult to the rest of us.