OK, my turn!
“Observational Astronomy” class. When I signed up for the class, I knew that the prof, young but tenured, had an “avoid at all costs” reputation. But, the class was only offered once every two years, so I didn’t have much choice in the matter.
First day of class, prof doesn’t show up.
Second day of class, prof doesn’t show up.
Prof eventually shows up, third day, and gives us our text - handout photocopies of the book he is currently cowriting. Along the bottom of the first page is the legend:
(I was pretty sure I knew what ‘pedagogical’ meant, but I later went home and looked it up anyway.) Throughout the semester we would get random updates to the text, with some errors corrected.
Anyway, very little of what the prof said in lecture made any sense to anybody in the class. Most of it had very little to do with observational astronomy, and focused much more on the design schematics of CCD chips (the light-sensing chips that are used in video cameras, digital cameras and most modern observatory telescopes.) If we wanted a digital electronics class, we woulda signed up for it!
I rarely ever skipped class in college, but eventually the only reason I ever showed up for this class was the extremely cute little French girl also in the class who I never really managed to strike up a conversation with. (Zut!)
He promised that in group projects, our groups would learn how to operate the on-campus observatory to take data, which we’d later crunch in the computer lab. Instead when we got there, prof operated the scope while we just sat there and told him where to point the thing. Ho-hum.
Then came the number crunching, using a special bit of software called IRAF. (Can’t remember exactly what it does, if in fact I ever really knew.) IRAF is a bit like UNIX, in that, if you don’t know the commands, and don’t have a reference manual of some sort, you’re just outta luck. Well, what few instructions we received were incorrect, and had to be revised several times.
My project partner and I got to the computer lab and tried to figure out IRAF. Two or so hours, we’d gotten nowhere, so we went to the prof’s office for some advice. He wasn’t there, but a postdoc was there, who kindly offered to help us. Three hours later, he managed to figure out what magic incantations to use so we could get even marginally useful stuff out of our data.
The final was a take-home exam, and made no damn sense. I suppose I could have scribbled down some lame attempts at answers and gotten marks for at least attempting it, but if I was going to have wrong answers, I wanted them to be at least honestly wrong, if that makes any sense… so I took an incomplete.
I think the entire department breathed a sigh of relief when he got sent to the mountains of Chile to build a new observatory, safely far away from any students.
(Two years later, after graduation, I took the class again with a different prof, who actually taught the correct material, let us use the telescope, etc. Still got a lousy grade, but most of it was much more interesting.)
Drop me an email if you need a hand.