Share your stories about bad teachers/professors

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

It’s Mr. Neville’s first semester teaching a basic astronomy class. He’s feeling like he’s not a very good teacher. I have been trying to tell him that there are many, many teachers and professors out there who are worse than he could possibly be. I’d like to hear some of your stories about bad teachers and professors, so I can share them with him.

A professor I didn’t have, but heard about: He taught a class for physics majors. If you asked a question in class that he thought was stupid, he would say, “Are you sure physics is right for you?” I thought of what someone should have said to him: “Yes. Are you sure teaching is right for you?”

2

Well, there was the highschool English teacher who used to perch on a desk, presumably to be “cool”. Which might have worked, had she not fallen off backwards at least once in front of every class.

Or the university American studies history prof (Canadian university) whose knowledge of anything NOT American was shamefully bad. He kept confusing the Suez canal with the Panama canal. He got the entire Spanish civil war backwards. It was painful to watch - especially the part where all the non-history majors dutifully wrote down what he was saying…after the history geeks got tired of correcting him.

3

Physics related, HS, not college level. The teacher started talking about scalar variables and measurements. Without defining the term.

Which confused a great number of people in the class. So someone asked, “What’s a scalar?”

She responded with, “Anything that’s not a vector is a scalar.”

As you may imagine, this was not viewed as a very useful definition.

4

There was the music teacher whose idea of teaching a class was to put on a record and leave. Some time after it ended, he’d pop in to turn it over to the B side and leave again.

His idea of handouts was to have us trek to another city to go to some obscure photocopy place where we could pay for our homework.

His idea of a roommate was one of his students paying 3/4 of the rent, sleeping in a closet, and working for him.

5

I went to community college for my first two years of school, and I took an ethics class from a guy who was in the seminary (unless that’s the wrong term for Protestants) and was required to do some teaching in order to graduate. The man was literally paralyzed with fear of public speaking. The first class he just stood there turning red and shaking for 45 minutes while trying to take attendance. I thought for sure that he was going to have a heart attack or something. A few of us felt bad so we met with him privately and basically taught the class for him based on what he told us he wanted to work on or discuss. Everyone got A’s in that class.

Same school, there was an older man teaching Humanities 200 who was well down the path to full blown Alzheimer’s/dementia. Every single thing we talked about turned into WWII somehow and stayed there in a real rambling and confused way for the rest of the hour. Lots of mumbling and random yelling about things that happened 50 years earlier. One day he just stopped showing up and was replaced by the kindest and most intelligent man I’ve met in a long time who was a local oncologist who thought teaching would be fun. He was truly excited to talk about the material and every seat in the class was jammed from that day on. Everyone got A’s there too.

6

The worst professor I ever had took the attitude, when asked for help in understanding concepts during scheduled office hours, that, “If you’re not getting the concepts, it’s because you’re classmates aren’t helping you enough. Not because I’m not explaining it well.” Which was especially useless in light of the fact that my classmates weren’t getting it, either. He spent ever lecture directly addressing one table of engineering students who were his pets, ignoring the rest of the class and their many questions.

Last time I checked, my classmates weren’t being paid to teach me physics.

I don’t know about Mr. Neville’s school, but when I was in college, astronomy was the science class many non-science majors chose because stars have got to be easier than chemicals or biology. I think it was a wake-up call for some of them.

7

My trial simulaton professor in law school. He was a nice person, but completely crazy in class. I dreaded every class, I referred to his course among friends as “the baffling ordeal.” We basically listened to him rant and rave for an hour while we tried to figure out what it was he wanted us to be doing. It ended up being a weird overview of the law in general, with occassional quizzes where we were asked to do things like name all the federal circuit courts of appeal, which is strange to say the least in a course on trial simuation. The one thing we never actually did was simulate a trial.

At the end of the course we recieved grades that can only have been assigned by a random number generator. I got a B, luckily, but the professor whose couse I wanted to take and could not because I was told it was full (and whose moot court class the previous semester had been very entertaining and informative) gave every student an A for participating. On graduation I was one hundredth of a grade point behind the valedictorian, so the happy ending of this story is: if I had been allowed to take the course from the professor I wanted instead of being subjected to the baffling ordeal, I would have been the valedictorian of my graduating class instead of salutatorian.

8

I remember a teacher in my computer science classes at the University who had been transferred to our college (it had just been created the year before) and was obviously very unhappy there. In retrospect, I think that he wanted to get the hell out of that “backwards” place (my town was a small one in the middle of nowhere, he had been transferred there from Barcelona or Valencia, some big glamourous city). I have the suspicion that he kept “sabotaging” his teaching so that his superiors would kick him away from that posting and send him somewhere else, obviously on the assumption that no place could be worse than Albacete (my town).

His classes were hideously bad. His teaching was disjointed and he had a really surly, antagonistic, almost passive-aggresive attitude towards his students.

Another bad teacher I remember was from a class I took at the College for Computer Science in Barcelona (where I transferred to some years later). The class was supposedly on “Data structures and algorithms”, but he kept talking about silly trivia and totally absurd non-related stuff.

During one class I couldn’t bear it any more. I stood up and said, aloud: “Sorry, <name of the professor>, but what you are teaching us is nothing but mental masturbation”.

Interestingly enough, I finished that course with an A+. I have the suspicion that I was “kicked upwards” there.

Just my 2 eurocent!

JoseB

9

I had a professor who didn’t bother to show up most of the time, didn’t bother to let us know she wouldn’t be in class and raked us over the coals for an assignment she didn’t bother to explain. She also refused to “release” the class so another professor could take it over. This was a course that majors and minors were required to take and pass to be able to stay in the program. Most of us got As.

Later on, I found out that she’d been having serious thyroid problems that were causing severe depression, among other problems. The department chair had been trying to get her to release the class so she could seek treatment, but she refused for some reason. Her contract was not renewed and she left after that semester.

Robin

10

Oh, I’ve had some awful teachers. I had a philosophy professor who would ramble from subject to subject without any overarching theme, or without any indication about how his various topics were related to each other or to any important issues in philosophy.

And for the combined good news/bad news, there is a decent chance that Mr. Neville isn’t a very good teacher. A lot of teachers start out not very good, and get better. I was a pretty bad teacher when I started; now I am regarded by my students and colleagues as an excellent teacher. They don’t teach you how to teach in grad school; you learn by doing. The most important thing is that Mr. Neville is passionate about his subject; the students pick up on that passion, and it can carry you a long, long way, once you get your method of delivery down. So if he’s not very good, he’ll get better, and pretty quickly, too–probably within a couple of semesters, in my experience (personal, and my experience of observing other new professors).

11

I had a chemistry professor once who gave us an assignment and when we handed it in told us it would be handed back in a week. Well, when the week was up and no assignments were to be seen, of course one student asked about them. The prof, in response, called his two TAs into the room and said “These are your TAs - I’d like you to complain to them because they are too stupid to grade things on time. In fact, they might just be too stupid to live.” In front of 200 students. One of the TAs started crying.

I also had an art teacher who was a perfectly nice guy but graded us all on every assignment as a rank out of 20. As in, the best students work got 20, next best 19, etc. And there were 22 of us. So 3 people got 0, every time, even if their work was okay in and of itself. As you can imagine, this did not exactly endear him to many people.

12

I had an Ethics professor that didn’t have us by the book. Instead he provided us with “lecture notes” that were taken 90% from one single book - very well footnoted, but far in excess of fair use. Ethics.

I had an accounting prof that when faced with blank faces of people looking at her not getting what she was trying to explain said “are you unprepared, or stupid?” When the whole room doesn’t get something, its probably because both the book and the prof aren’t explaining it well, because several people were coming to class very prepared all semester.

I had a very well intentioned and very nice Algebra instructor who was teaching his first college class. He was Indian, and was completely unprepared for a room of American “low tier school” college student who were only taking Algebra because most of them didn’t understand it well enough in high school (me and a few others - it had been too long between math courses, so we needed to retake Algebra). He started too hard, and then ended by giving us take home finals and midterms, which about 80% of the class did as group assignments (you weren’t supposed to).

13

I had a professer who would write equations on the board which involved x,y,z, t and assorted Greek letters, not to mention derivatives, and made it very hard to tell what letter was what without looking at the board.

(Ok, it’s difficult in upper level math courses to write an equation on the board which can be verbally described more easily than the look up, look down method. But it helps if you prounced the curvy “d” for partial derivative differently than the printed “d” for distance.)

14

My son was taking a computer networking class in high school and there was some issue with the classroom network that they couldn’t resolve for themselves so my son arranged for me to come in one afternoon to take a look at it. I went in and started doing some simple troubleshooting and asked the instructor for some of the basic information. Whether they were using DHCP, what the gateway address was. VERY basic information. Her eyes promptly glazed over and that was the first time I have truly seen a deer-in-the-headlights expression.

I found out later that her qualification for teaching the class was that she had used a desktop publishing software in the journalism class she taught…

15

I had an astronomy professor that thought he was Roger Ebert or something. We watched movies – all the time. It was summer & the class was in the evenings, so it was a nice way to sit in the air conditioning for a couple hours.

16

I had one of those. Actually, the same guy for two different classes, both of which were “history of philosophy” (I think one was Early Greek, and one was Early Modern European). Basically, he’d come in and think out loud in front of us, and that was the class.

I skipped one of those classes for an entire month. When I came back, he was talking about the same thing he’d been talking about the last day I was there. I hadn’t missed a thing!

17

I would be extremely surprised if this were not the case for a lot of his students. It’s made worse in his case because the class he is teaching got a reputation of being very easy under the professor who used to teach it.

I’d believe that. He doesn’t have a lot of experience teaching classes, and certainly not a lot of recent experience. This is a common problem in astronomy and physics- if you’re good, and you have an advisor who has money, you probably won’t work as a TA after your second year of grad school (this was the case for him). As a postdoc, you’re spending all your time on research- you’re not even taking classes and seeing classes taught. As a system of training and hiring people to teach classes, I think our current system leaves a lot to be desired…

I’ve told him “just don’t be evil”. I’ve had professors who seemed to be actively trying to get students to fail. I told him not to do that, and not to think of it as some kind of victory if he comes up with an exam question that none of the students get right. If he’s not constantly trying to prove to himself and his students how much more brilliant he is than them, he’s doing better than some professors I had. Running a class as a weed-out class might make some sense for a major class in a popular major like engineering or pre-med (though I still don’t like the idea), but it would make absolutely no sense in a non-major class like his.

My mom had a math professor who did this. She loved it (and just recently told Mr. Neville he should do this), but she’s a very competitive person. I would probably have panicked the first time seeing what looked like such a low score on my papers. I also am not competitive- as long as I’m getting a good enough grade in the class, I don’t care where I rank.

This sort of thing is common, even without the cultural differences. The problem is, a lot of astronomy-major undergrad students, and certainly grad students and postdocs in astronomy, tend to do most of their socializing with their colleagues (or at least that’s what Mr. Neville and I certainly did). That means you don’t meet a lot of people who do have trouble with the concepts and procedures that get taught in an astronomy class. It also distorts your views on a lot of things. For example, I often feel like a failure because I dropped out with a master’s degree and didn’t get my PhD in astronomy- most of our friends do have PhD’s in astronomy. I forget just how few people in the general population have PhD’s in anything (it doesn’t help that my previous job was at a government lab, where a lot of people had PhD’s…).

18

Two math teachers in my university.

The first was a professor of differential geometry who had been assigned a 100-level algebra/analytic geometry class-- basically between entry-level algebra and trig in terms of difficulty. He’d come to class and just sorta… wing it. And yell at students. Scream at them. In front of other students, in private, wherever. Before I’d found this out, I was in his class when he wrote some simple equation on the board-- something like nx/2 + ny/4 = n. “Okay, what do we do first?” I rose my hand-- “you could simplify by dividing through both sides by n,” which caused him to turn around in a rage, throw the chalk, and begin shouting that I needed to think before I opened my mouth, that I knew nothing of algebra-- and how’d I pass the prior algebra class since I was so obviously stupid-- and that my stupidity was sure to utterly befuddle the other nimrods in the class. Later that week, he approached me while I was outside studying, and was shaking with rage as he told me that I was worthless and should think about dropping out of school.

Thankfully, he was quite the fair grader on quizzes and tests, and I got a 4.0.

The second was a nice little lady from Poland who taught beginning abstract algebra/logic. Her method was to have us work in small groups, and make half of our grade in the class based on participation points, painstakingly making little hashmarks next to our names in a gradebook every time we went to the board to solve a problem we were all given. However, she had the tendency to begin snarking “Sit down! Sit down, you stupid! You know nothing!” if anyone made the tiniest error at the board… so eventually, in a class of 40 or so students, only three of us had the nerve to go up with any regularity. She was also oddly critical of non-essential language in our proof writing-- “don’t say ‘for all x in M,’ it confuse you, say ‘for every x’! See? See how sublime! Yes! Write it! Erase your ‘all,’ here let me write ‘every’ for you!”

She also really never taught us any abstract, logic, notation, or anything. Her advice on tackling a problem: “Oh, sometime I take days. Weeks. To think! Yes, to think of what problem say! And then I meditate, I sit on pillow and light incense! Math not always logical, math is mystical!” Rockin’, that’ll work on that one hour final exam.

19

I once had a professor that failed all but one student in a class for a quiz. I hated him for it. At least he gave us another chance to study for it and tested us again.

The class was conducting. We were given a vocal piece of about 32 bars. It was in 4 voices, SATB. We were told to learn it and be able to sing it the next day. Naturally, as I was a tenor, I learned the tenor part. That’s what I would be singing. The next day, he told me to sing the alto part. I failed miserably. Everyone else had the same problem. One soprano lucked out and was asked to sing the soprano part.

It seemed cruel at the time, but it was a very clever way of teaching us something about conducting that we all desperately needed to learn.

20

My school (like many others) offers trainee teachers a chance to practice in the classroom whilst qualifying.
One chap who tried out was a thoroughly pleasant lawyer, who had done a lot of useful research for other lawyers. But he wasn’t used to speaking in court (or anywhere else).

Day 1: The class spotted the newbie and tested him a little. He got flustered and lost control. They all left early.
Day 2: Another class tried to leave early, so he stood in front of the door to stop them. They opened a window and all climbed out (the classroom was on the ground* floor).
Day 3: He went back to the law.

In case this is too drastic for you, allow me to offer this example from my illustrious** teaching career:

In my first lesson at a new school, two of the teenage girls were first inattentive, then giggly and finally climbed under their desks. :rolleyes:
I sent them out of the room, carried on with the lesson but was privately thinking "That’s the end for me. :frowning: "
When the class left, my Head of Department was waiting outside for me. "Sorry about that " she said. “Those two are known trouble makers. Just carry on - you’ll be fine.”
The two girls then appeared (very subdued) and apologised. They behaved perfectly from then on.
I found out later that my Department Head had been ready in case anyone played up on my first day and had ambushed the girls as soon as I sent them out. She gave them the biggest telling-off in History, including threats of expulsion. :cool: :smiley:
*I believe you chaps across the pond call this the first floor. :slight_smile:

**after 31 years, I was recently told by my headmaster “write your own job description!” Currently I am teaching just 10 hours per week on roleplaying, chess and computer games. :smiley: :eek: