So, in Intro to Psych class the other day, the teacher told us the story of how astudent caught cheating on an exam shoved his blue book into middle of the stack way back when he was first teaching this class. I snorted to myself, but figured that hey, legends have to start somewhere, and it might well have been his class.
Last week, he told us the story of how as a grad student, he nearly got the class to train the professor to walk off the stage. It’s at this point that I’m a little bothered. Now, it is certainly possible that the professor has had both of the experiences he has claimed to have had, but I find it doubtful. I’m really not liking the position this is putting me in; if he is repeating glurge as fact, then how can I trust him to tell me actual facts instead of nice stories?
Needless to say, I don’t plan on discussing this with the professor: freshman English taught me never to debate with a teacher unless you’re sure they have a firm grasp on reality.
I had an international marketing class with a grad assistant who spread the “Gerber baby food sold in Africa doesn’t sell because it is thought to contain mushed up babies due to the picture on the label” legend. I couldn’t remember why it sounded familiar when I first heard it, but then I remembered that I recognized it because it wasn’t true! I emailed her the link to Snopes, but I don’t think she ever checked into it. No reason to make sure you get things right as long as you get credit for teaching the class. :rolleyes:
Every teacher I ever had had previously worked in a school where someone lost an eye to a rubberband powered projectile and another student was crippled when their chair fell while tippin at back in the Homer Simpson manner. I have never met anyone who ever attended any of the schools where this regularly happens.
And then there’s the old chestnut about how if you shoot a paperclip twisted in half with a rubber band you can take someone’s eye out. We all know someone this has happened to, right?
Except…that I do. Andy. Owned the laundromat where I lived in Queens. I made a joke about that once. He became rather enraged.
When he and his brother were kids, he shot his brother’s eye out. With a paperclip, shot from a rubber band. I thought he might have been bullshitting me.
Then I met his brother, face to face. The man had lost an eye as a child. Just as described to me.-shudder-
If your psych teacher is glurging the entire class, then you might wanna spend a few dollars xeroxing up carefully cited proof of the glurging and hand it out to all the students in the class. Pop a few copies in his colleagues mailboxes, and in the Dept. Chair’s mailbox.
If I am told something by someone in authority, I wish to trust their word. Hell, if I TELL SOMEONE SOMETHING, I wish for them to trust my word. Elsewhere on the boards, I was accused of lying about shooting a music video. It took other Dopers to mention that that’s what I do for a living. Tough to disprove an accusation on the Internet. Easier, when you are facing a liar in class.
Are you sure this isn’t part of some larger demonstration experiment he’s pulling on all of you? Like showing how many students believed his stories as an example of quick people are to accept at face value whatever their told by an authority figure without doing any research on their own?
Because if I were teaching intro psych, I might do something like this.
Yes! In my second semester of college, my Intro Sociology professor was an extraordinary dork who, honestly, wasn’t very good at teaching and wasn’t particularly knowledgable. I guess he was at least subconsciously aware of these things, because he spent most of the first class trying to convince us that he was a good teacher and a clever guy.
One part of his plan involved his telling us the “Which Tire?” test story as if it was something that he actually did. The Urban Legend wasn’t merely an inspiration for him, either – he even copied the part about the first question (“What is Sociology?”) being very easy and worth 5 points. I hadn’t heard the tale at that point, so I thought it really was pretty clever of him. I found it odd later that a guy who could be so cunning would seem so clueless on a regular basis.
I ran across Snopes a year or two later, and the rest of the course suddenly made much more sense.
