Oh, absolutely. By far the worst teacher I had in high school was a student teacher doing his practicum in my Physics 11 class. He had a PhD in physics, and I’m sure he was a very bright man, but he couldn’t explain even the simplest concept in a clear manner if his life depended on it. Plus he didn’t have the faintest idea of how to deal with a classroom full of bored adolescents who didn’t necessarily want to be there. Unfortunately, I don’t have any stories about him to contribute to this thread, aside from a couple of demonstrations involving eggs gone wrong, but I know I can’t do those stories justice at the moment.
Intermediate international economics. The first major exam has just been returned to the students.
Prof: Does anybody have any questions.
::the sound of crickets dominates the room::
Prof: turning to js: Do you have any questions, js?
js: like a deer in the headlights: er…um…
Prof: Of course you don’t, you were the only person with a perfect score.
::js surveys room to discover every student shooting him with hate rays from their eyes. Sinks down in chair and covers head.::
Oh, lord.
11th Grade, 79-yr-old World Cultures prof, to my group project partners and I after class: “I like you guys, come over to my place and we can play poker and have a few beers sometime.”
The german TA to my aerospace design class, mid-final-presentation to another student: “Excuse me! Shut up and sit down! You are far too stupid to continue presenting.”
And my beloved undergrad advisor after I switched majors, God rest him:
puts up a slide with a picture of two castles with a catapulted rock flying from one to the other “and this is what networking was like in the UUCP days–PTTHWANG! HAVE SOME DATA! WHUMP!”
projects a computer screen on which he has a few animated gifs “and we can liken hackers in this to …whoah, that shark I got up there is really bookin’ it in his little circle, ain’t he? You go, sharky buddy.”
“Hey, today is the fortieth anniversary of me showing up here for my freshman year…I haven’t left yet.”
“I used to work on the mainframe back in the early days. It was in the basement of the admin building, which hadn’t been renovated since sometime in the 800s, with lots of exposed masonry and timbers… you’d turn a corner and expect to see some bleeding guy chained to the wall like this spreads arms, hangs head, christ-like”
Mr. Matthew Stern, my 11th grade American history teacher cancelled his teaching plan, got a TV and had us watch the Watergate Hearings live - “real American History”. I’ll never forget him!
Actually you don’t. It’s pretty damn funny the way you write it.
It would have been even funnier if the teacher had let him present his entire proof, then corrected him.
If emails count as saying something, I’ll add a couple of fresh ones from just yesterday; they came from a colleague of mine.
-
It’s finals week, and one student had emailed him the following message: “Can you revise my essay? [ :rolleyes: ] It needs one more page. I really need an A on it.”
His reply: “Revise your essay using the tools we have covered during the semester. Good luck to you.” -
Another student via email: “What time is our final?”
Reply: “It’s about an hour from now.” :smack:
He also came to class dressed as a Ghostbuster for a lecture on a certain algorithm. Best Prof Ever.
This reminds me of something one of my professors told me: “Every time you think you’ve proved something new, it turns out a couple of Russians did it 25 years ago.”
I’m happy to report that I was once one of those teachers. Once. I had a great group of Chinese students who were completely into singing – they were so into karaoke you wouldn’t believe it.
Anyway, it was a conversation class, and I made some reference to a rock song that was fairly popular in the US at the time – like some Weezer song or something. Nobody had a clue what I was talking about. A student challenged me, their new teacher, to sing it.
I puffed my chest out and said, “What you don’t know about me is that my music teacher asked me to sing solo when I was in high school.” (Cue: light up faces of all 47 students.) I continued: “Yes, she asked me to sing so low that nobody could hear me.”
Based on the reaction, I think that that silly joke must still be the funniest joke many of them have ever heard.
[/patting self on back mode OFF]
I just remembered something else from the English professor I mentioned. We were reading a series of short stories, and the next few were a little racy. So he started joking and shouting things out as if he were an announcer at a monster truck rally. “THURSDAY THURSDAY THURSDAY!”
At the end of class, I had left and was half-way down the hall and heard him yell, “PORN PORN PORN!!!”
Basic American history class 20 years ago at a major state university. Huge lecture hall packed with freshmen. Old, bearded, don’t-give-a-shit-what-you-think professor.
The professor apparently was a bit bored by discussing history, so he generally turned his lectures into rambling discourses on whatever was on his mind. Come to think of it, he was kind of a fat George Carlin.
His target one day was Dr. Ruth and the ridiculous idea of an older woman discussing sex. “Man, that pussy has got to be all dried up by now!”
He was found dead in his apartment later in the semester. I believe he passed out (drunk?), hit his head and died.
It’s always history professors, for some reason!
I always write down quotes when I’m taking notes, because I like to remember them and they spice things up when I go over them when studying. 
From my English history professor last term:
On Celtic Christianity: “So these Catholic missionaries in England and northern Europe are running into these Celtic missionaries all over the place, and it’s very confusing for the Catholics, because the Celtics are all, [in Mickey O’Flanagan “Irish” accent] ‘Top o’ the morning to ye! Would ye care for a spot of a new form o’ Christianity, for we have one for ye.’”
On Lousiana: “It’s the only state that doesn’t have counties, because of the French. And the French are just…well, you know, you shouldn’t forget to plug the dykes.”
On the Bayoux tapestry: “So we don’t know if William of Normandy made this up, or what. We could, could I call it a … historical fabrication?”
(ME: “Stop it, you’re leaving us in stitches.”
HIM: “All right, I’ll stop needling you.”
ME: “I’m hanging by a thread.”
REST OF CLASS: “OHMYGOD MOVE ON.”)
On Catholicism vs. “popular” American Protestantism: “It’s just a very alien thing to most American Protestants, this salvation via the church thing. Here it’s [Southern accent] ‘I’ve got Jesus in my heart and that’s good enough for the Lord!’” [class laughs] “I’m not trying to be facetious! Well, yes I am.”
“And after nineteen years of really just a dreadful reign, Stephen was shot, through the skull, with an arrow. [pause for breath] Nobody cared.”
And from my world history professor two years ago (an intro-level class):
PROFESSOR: [writes on the board] “What are some problems faced on an exploratory ship?”
(class answers vaguely from textbook: scurvy, dehydration, cramped quarters.)
ME: Um, well, all those song-and-dance numbers have to be kind of wearing.
PROFESSOR: True. Although, after a few months at sea they probably help to break the monotony.
OTHER STUDENT: Will that be on the test?
PROFESSOR: I hope so.
PROFESSOR: Okay, come on, the difference between Columbus and the other guys. [pause] Someone besides Tracy. Pizarro and Cortez, they were something Columbus wasn’t…starts with a C. [long pause] Ends with an “onquistador.”
(a student is eating in class – only a problem in the carpeted classrooms, which this was)
PROFESSOR: You! You’re on probation.
(ten minutes later, same kid is still eating)
PROFESSOR: You! You’re on double secret probation.
STUDENT: Eh?
PROFESSOR: You heard me.
PROFESSOR: Not much is known about Henry Hudson, except that he liked ninepins and middle-aged New England men.
PROFESSOR: They poison him, shoot him, club him, shoot him again, and you know what he dies of? Drowning. But that’s Rasputin for you. He’s kind of a weird cat.
PROFESSOR: Ironically enough, guess who was the only Romanov left alive after the shooting?
STUDENT: …Alexei?
PROFESSOR: That’s right, the bleeder.
(playing “review Jeopardy!” for Russian history:)
Q: Who was the last czarina of Russia?
A: …um. Ala…na…drina?
Q: That might be her name in Russian, but no.
Q: Who was the dictator who stepped in after the Russian Revolution?
A: Lenin.
Q: No.
A: I disagree.
Q: Talk to the hand.
A: …you talk to the hand.
Q: Okay. [hand voice] Gee, Mr. J! [normal] Yes, hand? [hand] I sure wish these kids would study, don’t you? [normal] Yeah, hand, I sure do. [hand] And for world peace! [normal] They do seem equally likely. Next!
(on political motivation)
ME: Let’s just look at it this way. I’m Jinnai, and you’re Gandhi–
PROFESSOR: Huh. I’m kind of hungry.
(on class participation)
PROFESSOR: All right, who else? …he asked courageously.
(on homonyms and bad puns)
STUDENT: Hey, Tommy, you’re up.
TOMMY: I’m not up, you’re up.
STUDENT: Nuh-uh! You’re up!
PROFESSOR: Africa!
CLASS: …
PROFESSOR: I’m sorry, aren’t we playing “Name Continents?” Everyone keeps saying “Europe.”
(on homophobia)
PROFESSOR: So at about 9:30 in the morning, out of Hawaii flies the Enola Gay.
STUDENT: snicker
PROFESSOR: What, you think that’s funny? Planes are people too, you know.
STUDENT: Uh, no they’re not.
PROFESSOR: Hey! Read the sign.
[SIGN: “No sexist, racist, or homophobic remarks will be tolerated here.”]
(on Stalin)
PROFESSOR: Now, I don’t know how many of you are familiar with George Orwell. Are you?
STUDENT: I think so – didn’t he write Animal House?
PROFESSOR: Oh, sure. Some Deltas are more equal than others.
(on color symbolism)
PROFESSOR: So then the Soviets got pretty chummy with the Chinese, which sent the US a big red flag, pun intended–
ME: [laughs]
CLASS: [silent, staring at me]
PROFESSOR: Red flag? I guess you’d have to have been paying attention during the Russian Revolution unit to catch that one.
A few years ago, a Public Policy professor of mine was giving a spiel about the Korean War. He wraps up by talking about how at the end of years of fighting and so many deaths, everything basically returned to the pre-war status quo. He closes with: “And the only person to benefit from it was Alan Alda.”
A few chuckles, then silence.
Him: “That joke gets fewer laughs every year.”
Most of my university profs were pretty interesting, but nothing quotable. There were a couple of weirdos, like my Japanese Postmodernism prof, who had office hours in the local pub, and was odd for many reasons other than that.
In high school, however, I had a physics teacher who was one of the best teachers I ever had. He made jokes, bad puns, and challenged us to reason things out by saying things like, “Newton’s laws are a crock, rockets don’t work outside Earth’s atmosphere, and the moon landing never happened,” and expecting us to prove his statements wrong. I think he never really got angry, though he would get irritated sometimes when it was obvious that we hadn’t done our homework. That was rare though. Most of the time, because he expected a lot of us, we lived up to his expectations.
One day we showed up to class and he’s wearing some kind of grey animal suit.
“What’s the costume for?”
“It’s international mole day.”
“International mole day?”
“Why not? We have a day for everything else. I’ve got here a mol of salt,” he said, holding up a bowl with NaCl in it, “and in these other containers there is a mol of some other substances.”
“And what about the stuffed toys? Those are moles, right?”
“Yep,” he pointed to each in turn, “Fred, Ben, and Guaca.”
“Guaca?”
“Yeah, Guaca Mole.”
The first day of class, he told that old joke about understanding every language. . .except Greek. He did it in such an entertaining way that we all went along with it, except for one guy who good-naturedly punctured it at the last second with a preemtive, “And it’s all Greek to you.”
“And it’s all Greek to me,” he said, quickly continuing in a stage mutter while making ostentatious notes, “Minus fifty points for Green*, for stealing my joke.” Green must have had an old uncle or grandfather who was fond of the same kind of jokes because he knew most of the punchlines.
Another of their exchanges went something like this.
“Green, you are a pearl.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You know how pearls form don’t you?”
“Through constant irritation?”
“Through constant irritation. Dammit.”
He invited us to his place for a barbeque party at the end of the year. His off-stage personality was pretty much the same. Serious and joking at the same time, fun to be around. Great damn teacher. Wish every one was half as good as he was.
*I can’t remember his real name. Getting senile a few decades too early.
Some of my favorite professorial oddities:
Dr. C- he was born in China and was an impressive scholar I’m told. He certainly had a list as long as the Great Wall of scholarly publications and had been nominated for Pulitzer (didn’t get it). He was a nice guy and he wrote well. The problem was that nobody in the class could understand a damned thing that he said. In a class on Vietnam he talked at length about how JFK advocated “forty fighting juju bay dens” which only when he was asked to write it out did we know meant “fortifying rural bases”.
Once when watching a documentary on Vietnam there was a scene of an anti-American protest in Vietnam in which Vietnamese students were carrying signs written in Vietnamese over a picture of LBJ. He burst out laughing. When asked to interpret the sign he just said “Oh… I not lilly sure what it say…” and laughed again.
Dr. S- he taught history and had a lovely thick British accent. Several of the girls in the class were in love with him. He had a major reputation for dating former students who were half his age. Such a phony- he was from Wisconsin. He claimed he picked up the accent while doing a year of post-graduate study at Oxford. (Odd that I grew up in the rural south and don’t have a southern accent yet he and Madonna develop British accents overnight.)
Dr. J- every damned malady in history was directly attributible to “a bunch of young folks without any respect for their parents out to get some dope and have some good times”. He literally applied this theory of history to Lee Harvey Oswald, American defeats in Vietnam, the Kent State students (who “had it coming… remember, we don’t hear the National Guard’s side of that mess”) and, believe it or not, the Challenger Explosion.
Dr. S- actually prided himself on being the token black professor on the history staff and stated outright if they denied him tenure he would sue for racism. He once asked how many people in the class believed in predestination (a couple raised their hands- we were discussing the Protestant Reformation) and he told them “That’s just foolish.”
Dr. Mc- an Irish professor of astronomy. He looked a lot like Brendan Gleeson (most recently seen as Mad Eye Moody in Harry Potter) and had an Indonesian wife who looked like a femme fatale in a Bond flick. They had an unusual hobby- they tracked the plane numbers that came through the Montgomery airport so that they could determine if any were later involved in aerial catastrophes.
On the first day of class (and I understand he did this always) he asked if there were any English majors. A few raised their hands. He then asked “Why? I’ve never understood why anybody would want to be an expert on things that never happened.” Pompous ass, but a good professor.
Dr. B- I loved her, and her lectures were out of this world great, but she had some problems. One was that she could be a total bitch to people who came late to her class, and late to her class was described as “when she says it is”. If class began at 10:15 and she started teaching at 10:10 and you walked in at 10:12, she’d raise hell. I had to get a majority vote of the class once to demonstrate that it was indeed not class time yet.
Dr. G- in Graduate School- ooh chile I hated her. She had taught at Berkeley, Harvard and Columbia before coming to the University of Alabama, which to her unending shock and horror wasn’t Berkeley or Columbia or Harvard. She had the classroom demeanor of Severus Snape and never missed a chance to trash Alabamians as boring, cretinous “Third Worlders” (she called us this a lot) who had disdain for anything intellectual.
Now, there are people like that in Alabama, and I’ll wager there are people like that in Cambridge, MA and all over Manhattan as well. And there is much to criticize in Alabama politicans and political moves, but… you don’t make sweeping generalizations. When you do you’re insulting all of my family and most of my friends. Also, such a blanket statement about blacks or Jews or Asians (or possibly even gays) by a redneck professor would result in nationwide press coverage. It got old.
Finally one day in mid diatribe a she-student in the class who was middle-aged, had one of the thickest drawls I’ve ever heard and was/is exceptionally intelligent, could take it no more and asked her “Excuse me, but do you have an anklet on that will explode if you leave this state? Are you here as part of your probation or by court order or as a missionary? Because you can leave this Third World country anytime you damned well want!” She might as well have asked “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” because what followed was essentially an ass stomping. She’d opened the gates from within and several of us came storming in swords swinging and basically forced her to admit she was prejudiced and unfair. She had a totally different persona after that and became a ridiculously hard grader. She soon left the Third World.
I had several professors in several disciplines who just absolutely LOVED to make comments about us spending our parents money on keggers and good times and not caring about education. What was so ironic was that the college where I did my undergrad is famous as a “working students” school- probably 40% of its students are non-trads, many if not most of whom worked full time jobs and were making major sacrifices financially and of their schedule and family time to be there, and we got damned sick of it. I was working 60 hours a week in various jobs to pay for tuition and rent and rarely had a spare dime and was being told that I was driving a brand new car and having the time of my life on my parents credit cards (point of fact- my father died long before I started college and my mother was totally broke and couldn’t have made it if I hadn’t paid half the rent) and this also made me want to strike. There were some sparring matches over this but it rarely ended.
I hated as an undergrad student, as a grad student and now as a faculty member professorial poormouthing. If you honestly went through ten years of college to get a Ph.D. in a liberal arts subject and had no idea that English/History/Anthropology/Theater/Whatever professors don’t make a lot of money, then you’re the idiot here. I completely understand how irritating it is seeing kids drive $50,000 SUVs and think nothing of buying a $400 I-Pod on their parents credit card- trust me, nobody resents these kids as much as a college student who’s living on $2.00 frozen dinners and driving a clunker held together by Bondo and positive-thinking- but I really don’t give a damn if professors have a hard time financially. You’re doing a lot better than a lot more students than you seem to realize, and Hell- if every kid in this class has a million dollar trust fund it still doesn’t change the fact that you chose this field! Go talk to the custodian outside or to your student worker about how hard you have it and I’ll loan you a tablecloth to wipe their tears away.
But the point is that I just never can forgive Liz Taylor for what she did to that poor Debbie Reynolds.
PROF: How does that saying go? Boys are made of snips and snails and puppy-dog tails…
SEVERAL FEMALE STUDENTS: a little too proudly: And girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice!
PROF: Hmmm…sounds good enough to eat.
Junior High Catholic school: Sister Ann Catherine, stereotypical Catholic nun.
She and two or three of us are on the bus as it’s being loaded for a field trip. One of the students (a certifyable 12 watt mouth breather) does something particularly stupid, I don’t recall what.
She turns to us and says in a low voice, “He’ll be working with his hands when he grows up.”
Highschool Physics teacher on the ‘rumored’ submarine in the lake on-campus’. We might have one, I’ve bought a LOT of Army Surplus over the years.
That right there summarizes Dems and Reps perfectly.
I love this thread and I wish I went to college.
Isn’t it interesting how the vast majority of teachers that dopers loved were also their toughest.
I had an Anthro 101 prof who was just bizarre. The first day in class was full of odd pronouncements and questions, I think trying to weed out students that couldn’t handle weirdness.
All from the first day of class:
“I will figure your grades as if I believed in whole positive integers, which I do not, but the university seems to like them.”
“Everyone look under your chairs and see if there is any gum stuck to the bottom”
“How many of you found gum?”
A few hands go up and he points to one of the guys with his hand raised
“Do you play football?No? Ok. Would you eat that gum for $5?”
I wish I could remember more, it was very strange
kinda related. i had a teacher in high school that was hilarious. he was handing out scrap paper (it had old assignments on one side and the other side was blank) so that we could use it for a pop quiz. one of the kids (this kid was really dumb and obnoxious, he made fart jokes) asked which side we should write on. the teacher exploded and yelled “THE SIDE THAT DOESN’T HAVE A DAMN THING ON IT!” he then walked to the back of the class, then back to the front, and said loudly, “I didn’t say ‘son of a bitch’. I said ‘I have dandruff, and sometimes it itches.’” i also had a humanities professor that played earth wind and fire for the music section. she said it was because she couldn’t figure out what type of music she should play, so we had to listen (and sing along to, i just mouthed the words) what she liked. i don’t have much faith in “higher learning” anymore.