Wipe those smug grins off your faces and quit acting as if you’re just trying to help. We can see through the bullshit, you highfalutin, ego-bloated, cockbag-fucktard bastards. When your explanations are obviously way too fast or are loaded with jargon you have yet to explicitly define, you’re not making any real attempt to connect to your students in order to help them understand the subject material better, you pricks.
No – you’re merely trying to hammer them with as much complex shit as possible so they think you’re a goddamned genius, since, after all, you’re the one who apparently understands all this stuff. Everyone else is just a drooling, blithering idiot in your presence, unworthy of drinking from your intellectually-dense verbal ambrosia.
If all your students are getting abysmal scores, that does not automatically mean they suck or that the subject material is inherently too hard for them. It may be because you guys have spent too much time auto-wanking your precious self-images, amounting to nothing but a big self-aggrandizing waste of everyone’s time and energy. Fucking assdicks.
Oh, no, I finished college a while ago (did very well academically). It just annoys me to no end when a professor or teacher is obviously more interested in tooting his/her own horn than educating.
While I do think this happens, I’m not sure it’s the motivation in a lot of cases. When I was in college, I had a few professors who weren’t there to teach but there to do research. There problem wasn’t that they were showing off but that their pet research project which seems so obvious to them because they’re buried in it all the time wasn’t really as obvious as they’d grown accustomed to believing it was. They had just lost touch with their audience. This is why I tend to think it’s often actually better to have a graduate student teaching a 100 level course over a tenured professor and particularly why taking the course with the professor who wrote the text book can often be daunting.
That all said, when I do run into people who act elitist as a teacher, particularly since it’s completely contrary to the purpose of education, I find it particularly more distasteful than elitism in other contexts.
I agree, actually. My organic chem professor was exactly like this. I am of the mind that if everyone fails your class, the problem was your teaching ability. Especially if a good portion of the class re-takes it with another professor and they pass, and now the grades are all over the place as they should be.
Given that I have gotten student evaluations of “she thinks she’s so smart she should stop showing off!” when I have used words of more than one syllable in an explanation, or when I have used the actual field-specific name of a concept that students should have read about before class that day, I’ll take the OP’s rant with a grain of salt.
This, of course, isn’t to say that teachers of the type described don’t exist. But some students (not saying that the OP is one) feel that if the teacher uses any word they don’t know, or describes any concept using the actual words used within that field, the teacher is “too hard,” “showing off,” or “not helpful.”
But that’s different than showing off. My orgo prof was a disaster of a teacher but not due to showing off. Just due to completely missing the fact that he’s a chemist BECAUSE this stuff was easy and interesting to him. He never figured out how to reach the students who didn’t get it the first time.
No doubt that there are plenty of teachers that are more interested in showing how smart they are. I just don’t know if it’s that easy to determine based on their inability to teach. Sometimes they just aren’t good communicators. It’s always difficult for me to disparage someone’s motives because motives, by definition, are unknowable.
I’ve also gotten “she uses big words” or “she goes too fast” on student evaluations. I know that some student complaints are reasonable,and I take many of them seriously, but I have a pretty good idea which students made those particular remarks. These are people who skip class for a week, miss the introductory lecture on some topic, and then come up at the end to complain that they didn’t understand the terms used. Or who tell me I’m going to fast when I have seen them texting, talking, or snoozing instead of taking notes all class.
There are definitely poor teachers out there, but there are also tons and tons of poor students. The prof isn’t there to spoon feed you information and make sure you do well.
The OP describes my bioinformatics professor perfectly. She spoke very, very fast, went on 86 different tangents per lecture, made concepts a lot more difficult than they needed to be with extraneous detail, and all the lecture slides were based on her work – she wouldn’t let us forget all the pioneering research she’s done in the field. She would interrupt student presentations and often take the presentation over.
I’m sorry, I neglected to add the part where he kept blaming US for not getting him, and using flashy techniques to teach, without ever considering that there were smart people in the class and could have gotten it. He went way too fast, and when someone asked a question - I certainly didn’t dare - he would fix them with a look, and then answer “As is obvious…” with emphasis on the ‘obvious’.
He was a jerk, no two ways about it. I’m amazed at how many people think it’s entirely on the student. Yes, often it is. In all my college classes I’ve only encountered one prof like this, and generally when people complain about the other profs, they are the ones who have the problem. However, nearly everyone has met the ONE teacher!
I tend to agree with the OP that in general, “everybody failing the class” = “problem with the professor”.
I’m not so convinced that the problem with the professor is necessarily a matter of egotism or showing off, though. A lot of people are very touchy about what they perceive as being “condescended to” when they run up against words or information that they don’t already know.
My general rule for such situations is “Just because I feel embarrassed about my ignorance on this subject does not mean that the person who made me realize my ignorance was intentionally trying to embarrass me or act superior to me”.
Yeah, if everybody really is failing the class, then that’s a problem. I had one (terrible) prof come in after the midterm and announce that every single one of us had failed the exam rather badly. He then berated us for about 10 minutes about it. That I thought was jack-ass material. But in my experience that’s very rare (only one prof like that in many years of school) and it’s much more common to hear students bitch about how bad a professor is when actually the problem is that the student wasn’t paying attention or working hard enough. Some classes are damned hard - that doesn’t necessarily mean the teacher is making them hard just for the joy of cackling maniacally and rubbing their hands together while the students fail.
In any case, I doubt most poor teachers are that way because they are ‘showing off’. I think it much more likely that they are untrained, inexperienced, or just don’t care much about teaching as compared to research. Some might just naturally be assholes. But I can’t imagine that many professors care whether the average undergrad considers them to be a ‘goddamned genius’.
If everybody who takes a class fails to learn the subject, clearly the first place to look is that the person hired to instruct the class failed to convey the information to the students, who all met the prerequisites of the course. Assuming that all 30 or 100 or whatever number of students are some combination of stupid and lazy is statistically unlikely. If the students then retake with another instructor and pass, then it is a fair conclusion that the teacher wasn’t doing his/her job.
I remember one of my college professors, an older man who was an expert in Soviet relations. He assigned two enormous major textbooks and several minor books. I read them all. So did my study group. The highest grade on the mid-term was a C, and I got a D. The only D I ever got in higher education. I squeaked out a C for the final grade. The guy was the second poorest lecturer in my college career. It was in the midst of the Solidarity crisis in Poland, and the professor was certain that the Soviets would be hands off. That was our final exam question. I wrote that based on Soviet foreign policy and goals that they would clamp down and replace the government. I got myself a C on the final. Imagine my smug satisfaction when Jaruzelski (sp?) got replaced by Moscow during the winter break. IIRC. The worst lecturer I had simply read his very extensive notes all during class. Introduction to international relations. He assigned 14 required texts and another 8 optional texts. Among the optional was Thucydides. I learned enormous amounts in this class, but not from the lectures. I did not properly appreciate Thucydides at the time, but later in my college career and to this day I now consider it the most important book I have ever read regarding war, politics and international relations.
Exactly my organic chem experience as well. Do they train them to be arrogant pricks?
We got the old “look to your left and to your right. One third of you will drop out and one third will fail.” If I was taking the class now, I would stand up and say “Professor, does that mean that you are so incompetent that you cannot teach basic organic chemistry to a group of intelligent science students? Maybe you should take some remedial teaching courses”