College professors say the darndest things

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

One of my history profs in college. Both were fun, but the one seemed to have more interesting things happen. Of course, when I started there in 1980, he was working on his doctorate so he could become a full professor. He is now the only tenured member of faculty at that school that still doesn’t have a doctorate. :dubious:

Medival history course, he is talking about the introduction of crossbows into warfare of the period. He asked how we thought the knights of the time would feel about crossbows being used. Me: “Well, if they were on horseback, they probably found it to be an… unsettling experience.” It was mildly humorous, but the prof started chuckling, then he started laughing. For 5 solid minutes until his face was bright red and we were afraid he was going to have a heart attack. (He was quite portly, and is more so now.)

Remember the chairs in high school and college? One piece, you slid into them from the side and there was barely room on the top for your notebook? During a class, this same professor was walking around the room discussing something with the class. Someone asked him something, he looked thoughtful, and hitched his leg up to sit on the edge of the desk beside him. Unfortunately, it was not the teacher’s desk at the front of the room, it was a student chair sitting beside it. I mentioned he was portly? Wham! right down. He looked kind of stunned for a second, then started laughing. It was a good thing he wasn’t hurt, because the entire class was laughing too hard to help him if he had been.

Same professor, same classroom, spring time. All the windows were open to let the nice air in. He is again walking around the room, and stops to expound on a point. He puts out his hand to lean against an audio-visual cart that another class had left there. Unfortunately, the wheels on the cart were not locked. It zipped across the room and hit one of the open windows dead center. Fortunately, it didn’t go through or break any glass. The overhead projector that was sitting on top of it slid right out the open window. :eek: 25 feet down to the asphalt, many little pieces of projector. Happily no one was going in or out of the door that was right under the window at the time.

82

Well, I had a professor talk about torturing the vietcong when he was in Vietnam. He said he and his crew would get two vietcong, the one he wanted info from and the one he didn’t want info from. he would then fly in a helicopter a few hundred feet above the ground and one of them would start beating up the unimportant Cong member, pumping him for information. After that didn’t work they’d throw the unimportant viet cong member out of the helicopter and he said that this was usually sufficient to intimidate the important vietcong into giving up information. I think he called it the helicopter trick, I’m not sure.
I had a fun criminal justice professor, he had a good sense of humor but didn’t insult the class with it. He once let his AI teach the class and the AI said 'lets assume Dr. C is arrested for selling crack cocaine, as his defense attorney I can try to get him a plea bargain by doing X,Y,Z". At the end of the class the professor says ‘before everyone leaves, I’ll be selling my crack by the double doors near the hallway if anyone is still interested’.

The AI in my organic chemistry lab had a good sense of humor so we’d kid him all the time

Student (jokingly): I messed up that latest synthesis, you were supposed to be watching me do it. This is your fault.

AI in a thick Russian accent: Sure you can blame me. You can blame Jesus too for all I care.

83

MrJackboots, may I use “Computers are very stupid. The problem is that they are very stupid, very fast.” as a sig line?

84

My astronomy professor. From the first day we knew this was going to be a cake class. She as said it on the first day. She’d drop a ball and ask “Why did it fall?” Yeah, gravity. In order to teach us about the solar system, she brought in a TV and played the intro to Star Trek: The Next Generation. She brought her 7 year old kid to clas and taught him along with us…sometimes he’d run and hide outside the room and she’d have to go find him. She was very religious in a way that she actually tried to explain why God had put certiain planets where they were…it was strange. When I think of more and am less sleepy, I shall return.

85

I had a prof in community college who taught Spanish (allegedly.) He was an old white guy who had managed to marry what he called a “hot Mexican girl” and he liked to invite the men in the class outside so he could give them a little talk about reasons they should also try to snare a Mexican chick (according to him, not only do they cook and clean really well, but are talented in bed :eek: !)

This prof would also come to class drunk, or on his way to being so. His idea of cultural context was teaching us phrases like “I just farted” and “you are a very lovely woman, would you like to sleep with me?”

Yup, I and much of the class filed a complaint about his so-called “instruction.” I noticed he was finally gone two years later.

86

6,084 views is a bunch for a thread that’s still only two pages long

87

Well, I’ve been in here 5 times. . .
Ok, freshmen weeding-out gen chem. I suck, but the professor is a riot. “Hydrogen [I think it was] is the slut of elements: it’ll bond with anything.” He had lots of bad jokes.
He brought in some dry ice one day and started freezing things-- he froze a hot dog and tossed it at the wall, and it hit the periodic table and broke into little chunks. So he brought in Spud, the departmental cat, who chomped away happily for the next hour.

88

“Has anyone explained to you why this is intuitively obvious?”

89

I don’t see anything wrong with that.

90

I had a professor who dismissed the Internet as a passing fad and one that “can yield absolutely no reliable information”. Had she made this comment in 1995 I might could have overlooked the “who on Earth would buy a radio for their home?” nonsense of it, but this was in 1999 in a course on Reference Sources! The woman remains a Luddite who detests the Internet and dismisses it rather than learn/teach how to winnow and reeve it and still has her students use obsolete print indexes rather than incomparably faster and more efficient databases. (I totally understand the need to know “the old magic” of information- if you’re looking for an article from 1951 or a book that was privately published in 1884 or other such items, you really are probably more likely to find them referenced/reviewed/indexed/etc. in print than on a database, but using a print index to find a newspaper article on the Starr Report? Get real- no librarian is ever going to do that, and most libraries have cancelled most of their print indices for new materials.)

91

I had a high school physics teacher who told us about leading an attack on a rival dorm in college. His team froze tomatoes in liquid nitrogen and then repelled down the evil dorm and threw them into any open windows they could find. He said there was really no way for the rivals to find all the tomato shards to get them cleaned up before they started stinking the place up.

I had an English prof in college who actually did the engraved invitation for one thing to a classmate of mine. She was beautiful and ended up marrying, for a few months, an Italian multi-millionaire she met while working on a film set. Years later, a friend sent me a book of travel essays. The beginning of one sounded awfully familiar; it was by this same prof bemoaning how this college student had dumped him in favor of the Italian guy, and how Puritanical the college was for frowning upon student teacher relationships. He ended up teaching English in Eastern Europe where, according to his essay, he was having the time of his life, because his students worshipped him.

I had an Old English prof in grad school who held Beorschippes in a local pub. Beorschippe is the Old English word for “beer drinking party.” I thought is was great this guy would come out and drink with us. I was even more impressed that the Anglo-Saxons had one word that meant “beer drinking party.”

One of my favorite professors was a biology prof in college who came across a my friends and me on a Friday afternoon in the snackbar studying. He stood and talked with us awhile and told us to make sure and have some fun since it was the weekend. He said, “You know, if you study on a weekend night, you’ll either go blind or infertile.” Then he pulled out his wallet and showed us a picture of his daughter…a lovely toddler who he and his wife had adopted from China.

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This thread is less than two months of age at this point so I feel no qualms about resurrecting it. Six months is the zombie threshold, IIRC.

Never before has a professor actually angered me but one did irritate me to roughly the point of anger yesterday afternoon…

I’m taking a course this semester in ceramic engineering. Don’t get the wrong idea; we do not make clay pots in this class. Ceramics have many engineering applications especially in machinery part. Generally, engineering ceramics are strong in compression even at high temperatures. One common example is tungsten carbide in drill bits. This class is very technical involving chemistry, calculus, process analysis, etc…pretty much what you’d expect in a senior level engineering course.

Thursday, the prof teaching the course explained in his broken English that our textbook is too easy and that we will not be using it anymore. Instead, we will learn from multiple sources through the class notes and the homework problems will involve more in depth equations compared to those offered in the textbook.

Here’s what makes my face contort like so :mad: :mad: :mad: :
It’s three weeks into the semester. Last week I still had the option to return this $130 used textbook to the bookstore for full refund. I don’t mind that he wants to shake up the curriculum and challenge us more but he certainly should do it before the fucking semester begins. I have not found this textbook listed for sale online (that’s why i purchased it from bookstore), but I doubt I could get more than $60 selling it. I can deal with the money…I’m more angry about the principle of this :wally breaking the contract of the syllabus.

93

That sucks (the textbook thing above). What I always hated was having to pay $150 bucks for textbooks when half of them were never used in the class and the tests came from the notes. Textbooks are such a freaking evil racket. (I have it on best authority that many of them come out with 4th and 5th editions for no other reason than to require you to purchased a new $60 copy rather than a used $25 copy- the differences between the editions of the 1000 page books would be minor enough to fit in an introduction.)

94

BTW, I was teaching a library instruction class the other day for an obnoxious gay male English professor who made the comment to the class “I’m required to bring you here for this session. It’s not by my choosing and I certainly wouldn’t if I didn’t have to, but give this guy your attention anyway. You might learn something useful.”

I have to say I kicked ass in that session (I have been called “the Elvis of Bibliographic Instruction” on more than one occasion I have to say) and at the end the students actually gave me a big ovation that seemed sincere. At the end of it the guy came up to me and said “You know, that was the first BI session I ever thought was worth a damn”. I smiled and said thanks while inviting him to go screw himself with a light saber with my eyes and I don’t think it was lost on him. Prick.

I have by my own admission an unconventional style when I teach library instruction courses, but that’s because it’s the most boring stuff in the world and you’ve got to do something to keep their interest. It’s totally Gypsy- “you can unh, you can unh, you can unh unh UNH!” but they’re never going to rememember which buttons you pushed or what that database was and I know that from the “by the script” first several sessions I taught where I went into detail about truncation and Boolean indicators and the referee process yadda yadda and got continual vacant stares from the few students not playing Texas Hold 'Em on the computer. Finally I realized that while they’ll never remember the buttons you can make sure they remember *you[/I as well as what librarians do, what interlibrary loan is, that there are all kinds of databases and all kinds of ways to manipulate each one and that librarians will help you do this and that if they wait until the night before their paper is due to start their research then the odds are good they’ll find the books they need have been checked out and the articles in the databases aren’t full text, etc… While I’m doing this I’ll toss candy into the crowd, I may quote from the Illiad or tell a quick story about a crazy relative while waiting on a clocking database to load or whatever, and I have to say I never get glassy stares anymore and I’ve been really pleasantly surprised several times at how much the students remembered (“Hey, I was using the parentheses and-or search like you said and I found the abstract here but I need to figure out if I need to request this through ILL or if it’s on that microfilm stuff you mentioned”) v. how little they seem to remember of other people’s classes (“that guy who taught our class I think he said there’s some database somewhere where if you put in an asterix or something you get history papers…”).

But I have had detractors. A totally humorless history professor accused me in front of the class of “pandering” by being funny and making the class recite “Not all articles are available in fulltext but we can get them through interlibrary loan” in unison and the like and towards the end of class, by which time I’d been over several databases, she said “I’d really rather you teach them about these databases instead of entertaining them.” (Snooty bitch.) I asked the class in front of the professor “What database would be most likely to have full text refereed articles from 1939 on the Battle of Vincennes?’ and the class said in unison 'JSTOR”, and "what are two databases would you find full text primary sources on the Missouri Compromise’ and the class, I think hip to what I was doing, enthusiastically said (in some order) “Lexis Nexis Serial Set and Proquest Historical’!” “If we have no biographies of Justice Taney in this library where can you look to find one?” “WORLDCAT!” And I told her “I think some attention has been paid.” She was pissed but had to sit her fat joyless ass down, and I’ve never loved a class more (if only fleetingly). Later one of the students told me “You made her look like a damned fool. THAT WAS FUCKING GREAT!” The student was a tiny very ladylike girl who this just sounded awesome coming from.

95

Two from my University of California Chinese professor. When I was in first year Chinese, he got fed up with the second year students. Evidently, one day too many in a row, the students were not properly prepared (and it usually required a minimum of 6 hours for non-Chinese speakers in the class to prepare). He said “I’m not teaching you ingrate losers any more” turned out the light and left the class.

His wife, the Chinese lecturer, took over the class for the rest of the quarter.

This same guy over used the phrase “now say it again in Chinese” after a student, often myself, managed to spead a sentence about 99% correctly but still had one little flaw. And he wouldn’t tell you what the flaw was. ARGHHHHH. Was it the tone on the third word, did I place the modifier in the wrong place, etc? So, the second attempt one would second guess everything and usually turn a 99% correct answer into about 80%.

He was a jerk in class and one of the nicest guys out of class. I still keep in touch 20 years later.

96

China Guy, your prof might be an object lesson that one can take oneself lightly, but still take one’s discipline too seriously.

97

It’s weird. Sometimes, just for a few fleeting moments, when I read posts such as #94, I wish I was a young good looking male.

98

I lived in an engineering dorm. Lots of CE, EE, ME, and CS folks. I got to experience how a meek, friendly, normal EE undergrad went into a cocoon and emerged a sadistic, heartless, Grad TA.

Wasn’t pretty.

99

The university where I got my undergrad degree in history was bursting at the seams with eccentric personalities – and I include faculty, staff AND students in this collective. If anyone doubts the truth of my words, Citizen Bob will back me up. We were roommates during my last semester.

One of my English professors was alternately known as The Sun God (due to his leathery countenance) and the Lifer-From-Hell (having received his BA, MA and PhD from the same university where he was now teaching). The first paper I wrote for his class was a comparison between the symbolism in the opening cantos of Dante’s Inferno and the divisions of the soul in Plato’s Republic. I was pretty proud of this paper, and was thrilled when the professor (whose voice sounded like a comically poor impersonation of Jimmy Stewart) singled me out and praised my work to the entire class. At the end of the lecture he handed it back to me with a smile and pat on the back. He’d given me a B-.

Another of our profs was notoriously devoted to the novel Moby Dick. The class I took from him was one which included several novels in addition to the aforementioned tome – Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, Light In August, and so forth. But there was not a single lecture that semester that did not include at least three distinct references back to Moby Dick. I started keeping a “whale watching” journal in my notebook, putting down a tally mark for every reference to that novel once we had officially moved on to other works. The count was well into 200 by the end of the semester.

My favorite prof was in the history department, but as he was a medievalist (and I was concentrating on the Greco-Roman era) I was only able to take one class from him. But for the beard, the man looked for all the world like a slightly overgrown hobbit. He was short, modestly plump, wore an eyepatch, and spoke in a booming basso profundo voice that was delightful to listen to. The class I took was on the history of the Renaissance, over the course of which we learned that the Renaissance never happened. The last two weeks were taken up by Dr. S’s slideshows of Renaissance art, taken from his own travel photos that must’ve been from the 1950s. One particularly memorable photo was of a gargoyle perched atop a cathedral in Germany. The sculpture was in the form of a nicely-proportioned naked woman who was clinging to the top of a column, holding on for dear life, as it were. In the act of trying to climb up, her legs were drawn up under her stomach and her rump protruded out into space. It was at this point that Dr. S reminded us of the original purpose of gargoyles – water drainage. Yup, you guessed it. The sculpture in question had a drainpipe that exited in an anatomically accurate location. As we all looked at one another and snickered at the image that was going through everyone’s mind, Dr. S hammered the final nail into the coffin. “I used to stand for hours when it was raining, just enjoying the view.” It was a good thing the lecture was almost over, because nobody could go on after that.

One of the most beloved denizens of the campus was a 90-something year old retired philosophy professor who used to putter about, just enjoying the company of the students. The more callous observers wrote him off as a senile old fart who told the same terrible jokes over and over again. Anyone who took the time to engage him in conversation, though, would quickly discover that he was a remarkable man who had been to the edge of hell and survived to tell the tale. This old man, as it turns out, had survived the Bataan Death March and then endured several years of indescribable misery in a Japanese POW camp. When he died a few years back, the whole campus plunged into mourning.

I could go on for days…

100

Really? That’s pretty much my constant desire :D.