This is a night class. You should probably infer from that most of your students have day jobs, just like 75% of the students in the department at large. Starting the class at 5:30, instead of 6:00 like every other night class on this campus, makes it pretty tough on us who are trying to fucking get here after our day jobs. Not to mention hungry. Asshole.
I don’t care what the fuck you used to do for a living, or for how fucking long, or what position you fucking held before you retired to this pissant little glorified trade school posing as a four year University. You’ve been in academia for 15 years. You may have noticed that the IT industry has changed a bit since 1992. Asshole.
2a) “In the business world, people wear ties when they give presentations.” Are you fucking serious? The only time I’ve ever worn a tie was to a meeting a with a bunch of facilities managers. That’s right - guys who normally manage the HVAC guys and janitors. The short-sleeve-with-tie-and-brown-polyster-pants set. I’ve given a presentation to the CE-fuckin-O of my Fortune 50, old school, bricks-and-mortar employer, and we were both wearing khakis and polos. And you want me to wear a suit to my stupid-ass end-of-the-year presentation? Fuck you, asshole.
Who the fuck taught you how to use a word processor? I thought this was supposed to be an IT program. Haven’t you figured out fucking style sheets yet? All headings in 12pt Times New Roman bold? All subheadings? All fucking captions? Jesus, do you want these pages to look like unreadable garbage? Did it ever occur to you that the fucking defaults in fucking Word and fucking Open Office look perfectly good and presentable?
3a) Why in HOLY FUCK did you come up with your own citation and bibliography form? Don’t you think it’d be easier on us if we just used the goddam, I dunno, APA, or MLA, or Chicago, or what-the-fuck-ever style is built in to our fucking word processors? But nooooo… I mean, that way, I’d be able to auto-generate my bibliography and citations. Better that I spend a couple of hours formatting the goddam thing by hand and then wading through the text to make sure I didn’t inadvertently fuck the whole thing up after moving a couple of paragraphs around. Asshole.
Look, I realize that most of your students might as well be putting browneye to paper instead of pen to paper, but I write pretty well, and I am not turning my paper in to your fucking proofreader. It’s a waste of time. I know this, because every time I do it, they send it back to me with no corrections. Asshole.
You want five copies? On bond paper? SPIRAL BOUND??? Fuck Kinko’s, and fuck you, asshole.
Twenty more pages of performance analysis… or beer… twenty pages… beer… mmmm… beer…
Sounds like you got a real winner. One hears stories about professors like this–I never actually had one, though.
There are lots of things you could tell him, of course (such as, REAL bleeding-edge researchers give presentations in jeans and t-shirts, and if he was inhabiting the current century, you wouldn’t have to turn in any hard copies of anything), but he won’t listen–so just keep venting here.
Heh, that reminds me of when I signed up for Linguistics II in college, and the computer signed me up for Linguistics III, and I did not know that I could not drop the course without a professor signoff on it (probably because to do so, especially for a course you never meant to sign up for in the first place, is an idiotic notion.)
So I drop in 5 minutes before the start of Linguistics III one day. Or so I thought. No, apparently the entire class had agreed to start the class 1/2 hour early, and I got a reaming from the professor that I should have come in on time. Pardon me, but I never signed up for the course, and I came in before the scheduled start time, so you’ll just have to put up with the occasional person who doesn’t magically understand when the new start time is.
We sortof do, but it has to be backed up by student requests from those instructor eval forms and it takes at least 2 semesters to make the change.
But anyway, the OP has my sympathies. I try to be the antithesis to any of my fellow instructors who are like this (I am in the PE dept, I teach dance and aerobics, and some of my fellow instructors actually give weekly homework and physiology/chemistry based finals! sheesh).
Hmmm. Whenever we professors are given our course and time request sheets (this is for English classes), there are various days and times listed. We choose the ones we want in descending order of preference and do not mark the one we don’t want to teach. It’s not as if we have a choice. I don’t want to teach a class that starts at 7:30am, but I don’t always have a choice.
To be fair, I don’t know if the prof actually picked the start time. Since every other evening class in my department starts at 6:00, and he’s a giant douchebag in most of his other endeavors, I’m just assuming that he did it to fuck with us.
Sure, that means I get out of class a half hour earlier, but I’d really prefer to have time to do something other than suck down a double cheeseburger from Mickey D’s (ugh) on the freeway in between work and school.
He’s also a condescending asshole. It’s like he assumes that because he’s working with college students, he gets to treat us like a bunch of children. No matter that the median age of the class is probably thirty, and most of us come in wearing the official IT-guy uniform of khakis and polo shirts. Tucked in.
Oh well. I’ve recently discovered that my latest round of undergrad studies has brought my GPA up substantially, so I don’t need to spend two more years on this stupid degree. I’m a GMAT away from grad school. So long, asshole.
A number of classes at my university were night classes simply because that was the only time they could be scheduled so as to not conflict with other classes required by those in my major. A few other night classes I took were scheduled because the lecturer or professor actually had a day job elsewhere. There can be any number of reasons for the timing of the classes, with “students have a day job” being only one of them.
Regarding the auto-generation of the bibliography, did you ask him if he came up with his own format to ensure you don’t use an auto-generator? It strikes me as a good idea to be able to create one on your own. After all, the format may change between now and the next time you upgrade your word processing software or you may find yourself working for a firm with its own format that’s not supported by the auto-generation tool of your software.
I understand the idea of wanting five copies of the presentation and having a uniform requirement for them, but I just can’t grasp why he wants spiral. I imagine the sign-in register at Hell’s Gates are spiral bound.
The tie thing is easy to grok, though. Tie and Shirt = Professional Appearance in the eyes of many people, not just in the eyes of stuffy professors.
Is this one of those Profs that has spent his entire career in academia? From hell’s heart I stab at them! We’ve all had them: talking about how their workload is so hard with their pressure to write short articles to be published in trade journals or else have to teach MORE classes. Wanna know what’s pressure? A 3-star grilling you over projects that were started before you came to work but are massively behind due to the fabrication facility’s inability to properly order materials, all 2 weeks before your annual review (which determines if you’ll be there for a next review) while still trying to maintain a decent homelife on the 1/3 of a professor’s salary.
If the setup is anything like the colleges/universities I’ve attended, while yes the class officially starts at 5:30 the instructors usually built in a bit of leeway into the actual class start time to allow for students who were coming in from work. (Or at one place, there were a few day classes that ended at 5:15 - it was pushing it for a student to get from point A to B and take care of assorted bodily functions in 15 minutes.) Usually they’d do some combination of for the first part of class doing review and/or discussing non-critical information, and/or running the class slightly overtime with the understanding that students who couldn’t stay could leave without penalty.
Heck, I was even at one University where it was common for professors teaching in certain buildings to check and see how many of their students had class immediately before and/or after on the opposite side of campus, and then shift things around as needed to accommodate them. (Hey, you trying covering about two miles and dealing with traffic, traffic lights, etc., in 15 minutes. It helped that some of the professors had to make a similar trek as well, only include having to get their materials for the classes taken care of.)
<< DEFINITION: Computer—A device designed to speed and automate errors. >>
I had one that insisted that banks created their statements using 80 column cards for each line on the statement. He was not pleased when I pointed out that was definitely not the case even in circa 1982. (I think I got a D- in that class by the way).
No it isn’t. College classes aren’t meant to teach you how to dress yourself appropriately, at least not in my opinion. If you need help in that area, go get yourself a copy of Dress For Success (or whatever its current equivalent is) or go to your campus career center.
When I was in school full time (as of last year) we had several classes where we had to give presentations and had to dress in business attire for them as part of your grade (it wasn’t a huge part of the mark, but why pass up an extra bump to your grade? :dubious: ). You didn’t have to be full out suit, but at the least business casual.
The one class that was a group report, we had to have our reports bound. Wasn’t specified spiral-bound, but it had to look good not just tossed together into a duotang. Especially since this report took a semester to pull together.
Night class IME was different though, but then I took number crunching classes (which were much the same at night as during the day), not the ones based around reports. As for starting early, we never did that. The professor would usually ask us if we wanted to cut short our break and go home ten minutes early though (which we often did if we got through what was on the schedule for the night).
A college class is meant to teach you whatever the hell the professor/school WANTS to teach you. As someone who is working my ass off to get my teaching certificate and working 25-30 hours a week too, I have little pity for the OP. Got to wear a tie? Use the professor’s pet format? Get your reports bound? Boo-fucking-hoo. It doesn’t make much sense to deride the institution as a glorified trade school and then piss and moan about the standards the professor expects you to follow. Maybe his ideas about proper business attire are out of date, but let’s see how current the OPs are in a decade. The pendulum is already swinging back on that. Or was that CEO wearing khakis and a polo shirt himself?
Hey, there’s plenty of jobs at the McDonalds and Burger Kings of the world where you never have to wear anything nice, and nobody gives a fuck what you do. If you don’t like having to actually dress up and do some scut work to get an education, then quit.
Side note: What does word processing have to do with IT? I am not a computer expert, but I believe computer word processing predates the mass use of the Internet in the mid-90s, which makes the OPs expectation that the professor know all the ins and outs of MS Word a little dubious. Besides, he’s not the one writing papers for a grade, his students are.
I don’t think that’s the case, Lizard, although I agree with your post. Both McDonald’s and Burger King require their workers to wear a uniform. I don’t know if those who drive their trucks must wear uniforms, but I know those individuals who work in the restaurants themselves must be suitably attired.
Sure they are. Part of giving a successful presentation is knowing your audience and demonstrating respect for them. Dress is part of that. I agree that when you’re a sophomore heading to an undergraduate Poly Sci course at 8 a.m., no one should care if you’re wearing a T-shirt, pajama bottoms, and flip-flops (as they all seem to do). But for presentations, your teacher would not be giving you all the information you needed if they did not expect you to to dress appropriately. black rabbit may disagree with his prof as to what is appropriate dress in his area, and black rabbit may even be correct, but it is the prof’s class and if he or she says put on a tie, you put on a tie.