My only (almost) F in college came in Middle Eastern politics-- which was pretty impressive for a Poli Sci major (who got As in all of my other major classes) to fail. I even got 12% on my final-- seriously, 12%!
The professor was just awful— everything that’s being discussed here and more. She loved the sound of her own voice and loved, loved, loved to wax poetic about the fact that she got her advanced degrees at a prestigious school in Israel.
Being Middle Easter politics, our textbooks used Arabic names/words for. . . well, a lot. This was difficult for us to learn, but we were good students and got together in study groups, made flash cards, did the whole studying shebang. The professor, unfortunately, felt it was necessary to use Hebrew words for the things the book was using Arabic words for. While this would maybe make sense in discussions regarding Israel, she did this for lectures about places with no ties to anybody speaking any Hebrew. No one understood her. When we’d ask her to clarify, she’d snap at us and screech that we were ignorant and need to be more worldly.
She also would kick people out of class for even indirectly suggesting that Israel might possibly have ever done anything wrong in history. I mean, literally anything. Even when we’d read something in our assigned text books that made them look less than stellar and would repeat it in class, she’d say we were wrong.
Anyway, when I got my final back with 12% on it, I marched right into the Department Chair’s office and handed him my test, laughing (I had taken a bunch of classes with him). His response was, “Wait. YOU got an F on a final? A 12%? Diosa, did you write this in something other than English? Did you spell your name right? How the hell did you get 12%?” Needless to say, he spoke to her and my grade was corrected, but man, she was freaking awful.
Maybe she meant to be an organic chem teacher ;):D.
The only way to win is to get your students to engage the material consistently and come out better educated than they came in. But my motives are complicated. Part of me loves to dazzle a captive audience with my intellectual tours de force. But I really do care passionately about my job as an educator, and I like to think that comes through, too. I have tried to craft a teaching persona that harnesses my natural crudeness and vanity to a good purpose. But there is a fine, fine line between being a showy/arrogant prick and an intelligent/eloquent role model. I only hope I am on the right side of that line, but you never really know.
Higher education is not a very good career if you are into power-tripping. But sometimes a little chastisement really goes a long way. Five minutes of berating sounds like a waste of everyone else’s time, so I believe you at your word if this fool went too far. But if someone asked me to remind him what the sine of pi/2 or some such is, I would probably take the opportunity to remind the class how to calculate it quickly oneself.
IIRC, it was a simplification step that I hadn’t caught onto. He moved on from one step to the next and a bunch of stuff had dropped out (for seemingly no reason), and I asked why because it wasn’t immediately obvious to me. As an incoming freshman, it really wasn’t an unreasonable question. This was literally during my first week at college.
Either way, he had no problem wasting everyone’s time making me look like an idiot in the wrong class when I was perfectly comfortable with math (2400 SAT, Calc BC 5, etc) and was just asking a quick question that shouldn’t have warranted that kind of response, in my opinion.
It ain’t necessarily so. If the students are not properly prepared for the class in previous semesters, there may be nothing the professor can do no matter how good or bad a teacher he is.
Or it may be that the other professor has set his standards too low.
The problem may not be with individual professors, in other words, but with the institution as a whole. And–the problem may not be with the institution as a whole, but with colleges in general.
Also, of course, you’ve got some bad teachers out there. I’m just saying it ain’t necessarily how you say.
This is extremely surprising. College profs typically have zero tolerance for (and zero obligation concerning) interference from others (anywhere on any hierarchy) concerning their own teaching and grading practices.
I guess I was pretty lucky - I only had 2 teachers who were show-offs, and one was in a class I took for fun, so that hardly counts.
I was required to take an Electrical Engineering class as part of my Aero Engineering course of study. This particular class was taught by an arrogant ass of a grad student. His favorite line was “This is so simple, a child of 3 could do it!!” He all but said that if we didn’t understand the material, we were stupid. Now, I had been trained and had worked as an electronics technician in the Navy, and while it’s not the same as electrical engineering, I wasn’t in a totally unfamiliar academic area. But if it hadn’t been for my lab partner, I’ve have crashed and burned in that class for sure.
The other was a belly-dancing teacher. I wanted to take the class for fun and because it was supposed to be a good workout. I have no idea if it was or not. I attended 2 classes that consisted of maybe 15 minutes of us trying to learn something, and the rest of the time, the instructor was performing - literally. I wasn’t paying good money and driving all that way just to sit on my butt while this egomaniac used us as her captive audience. I took guitar lessons instead.
I took a college logic class (in the Philosophy department for some reason). It was the instructor’s first semester teaching after receiving a Ph.D. from Very Prestigious University. He thought he was real hot stuff.
One day he was madly scribbling a proof on the board, and it was obvious that no one in the class was following him. I asked for an example and he snarkily stated that he didn’t give examples because it made the students think in the concrete instead of the abstract.
After class, his TA approached me, apologized for his behavior, and gave me a nice example.
That was over 20 years ago, and I’m still ticked off that I was forced to waste 60 hours of my life watching that jackass preen.
Its been a long time but nothing like this sticks out from my college years. I seem to remember most of the professors being very disinterested in their students. My brother was in engineering and his major complaint was the large number of professors who could barely speak English. You might be brilliant but what good are you as a teacher if you can’t communicate with your students?
I do run into this problem in professional seminars and classes. If the instructor opens up with 15 minutes of listing his accomplishments then I know I’m in for a long day.
Not all high-handed teachers are show-offs, I feel certain. A good number are probably hung up to the point of obsession with the anti-intellectual laziness of young people. These are the ones doing their little idealist trip by making sure that no one in their classes - committed learner or not - enjoys the experience. They’ve become cynical, and they’ll be damned if you don’t leave cynical, too.
I think there are people like the OP described. But I’d question whether they should be called teacher. To me, showing off as a teacher would be educating my students. I’d be bragging about how difficult my subject is - and how everyone I teach learns it thoroughly.
I was told that organic chem was the weed-out class for pre-med. A lot of people start out pre-med who don’t have the brains, drive, and/or commitment to actually make it through med school and become doctors. Organic chem is a quick/easy way to get them out of that major quickly, first semester, freshman year.
