That reminds me of my HS freshman “Algebra 2” teacher, Mr. Briggs. Oh, he knew his stuff alright, but he would teach the class like it was a college course… when he taught. He usually would spend 10 minutes teaching at the beginning of the hour, then spend the rest of the hour playing with his computer. He had a philosophy that he would impart to us almost daily about grading in his class. He totally believed in the “bell curve” and told us that if everyone in his class got an A then he should make the material harder so that the average would remain a C. Great… how about just accepting that everyone fully understood the material? What a jerk!
I was really struggling in his class. So much so that my dad called him up to ask him to spend extra time with me on the material after school. When he told my dad that he, “didn’t have any time after school”, dad tore him a new one and threatened to go to the principal and the superintendent if he didn’t find time to work with me after school. The next week I was in there after school in his classroom, once per week.
The fact was I wasn’t prepared as a HS freshman to take this class, but it still doesn’t excuse Mr. Briggs’ behavior while I was there.
A drafting instructor once pulled me aside and told me, “I just thought I’d let you know- since you really don’t seem to be having any problems with any of this, I’m going to start grading you harder than everyone else.”
So my reward for being good at the subject is that I get lower grades on the subject? Thanks. :rolleyes:
To get back at him, I stopped holding back. I started finishing the weekly homework during class, while he lectured. At one point he posted a trick question on the board, and told us that we’d have a week to figure it out… and if we correctly answered it on the test at the end of the week, we’d get an extra ten points. I’d seen that problem before, so I quickly sketched the answer and took it up to him while he was still talking about it.
Is this a drafting instructor thing? Mine decided that there was no way females could do well in drafting, so the best grade a girl could get was a B. There were no As for girls.
Now, I did have a professor, a GOOD professor, who believed that he should show respect for the amount of effort that you put into an assignment an assignment by spending extra time grading the work of the hard workers. Thus, one could get an A which appeared to be dripping with red ink, correcting incredibly tiny grammatical style issues, while the person getting a C got little feedback beyond the obvious (lost points due to failure to write anything resembling a Method section).
But if that was your instructor’s intent, he expressed it poorly.
Physical Chemisty prof - teaching chemistry and engineering student.
The guy was probably within a couple of years of retiring. He was also German. (No those aren’t related, but they are important.)
As the class progressed, it became obvious that he had been teaching the class for a number of years, but he hadn’t bothered to update his lecture to go with the new textbooks. His lectures, while coherent, weren’t at all related to the order the book was written in. Neither matched the additional study guides that the prof gave out.
This same prof had put copies of past years notes and tests on file at the library, where students could use them to study from. The class notes were the same, year after year.
Then October rolled around, and the prof went to Germany for a vacation. And never bothered to come back. Thankfully, there was a grad student TA who was able to step in and take over the teaching. He actually did a decent job.
I did feel a bit sorry for him when it came time for the final exam. The entire grade in the class was based on the mid-term and final exam. A friend and I had been studying hard and as part of that we had been going over the old exams that were on file. The day of the test comes and the final is an exact copy of one of the previous year’s test. Except the final page, with 2 questions, was missing. I was tempted to write out those 2 and answer them.
In college I took an African History class from a very intelligent, kind man, but his method for creating quizzes and tests was horrible. He basically just wrote down a bunch of statements, then pulled out words seemingly randomly to create a fill in the blank test. Sometimes it worked in your favor – fill in a random “the” and get full credit. Other times, though, it made for ridiculous guessing games, as in “In the year _____, ______ became famous for ______.”
I also had an upper-level computer programming teacher who was brutally strict. There was no point in asking a question in class, because as soon as your hand went up, he’d interrupt his lecture just long enough to say, “and if you don’t understand, I suggest you go and get a book,” and continue on with the lecture. The class was pretty work-intensive, and there was a pretty significant programming assignment every week. You were required to turn in your working code on disk, along with a paper in a very specific format describing the details of every method in your program. The accompanying paper was generally about 15-20 pages of writing, and that’s in addition to the programming work. The assigment was due every Thursday, at the BEGINNING of class. I very distinctly remember one class, about 6 weeks in, when the teacher closed the door at the beginning of class, and the door was barely shut when a student, obviously out of breath from running to class, opened up the door, hustled in, set the assignment on top of the stack, and quickly took his seat before the lecture had begun. The teacher calmly walked up to the front of the class and began his lecture. As he spoke, he casually picked up the student’s disk and stack of paper from the pile on his desk, turned, and dropped them loudly into the trashcan without the slightest waver in his voice as the lecture droned on. The student just got up and silently left class, never to return again.
We had a great English teacher for the first half of our freshman year of high school. Seriously, one of the coolest people I’ve ever had the joy to meet. He was like the Robin Williams character in Dead Poet’s Society. He made us think critically about the stuff we read in class. Unfortunately, as those guys tend to do, he got into a tiff with the union and ended up taking early retirement halfway through the year. And in came Dr. Sharp. Dr. Sharp may have been the worst English teacher I’ve ever met. Three examples illustrate this:
She was always trying to overcome her inner-city Detroit background. She constantly wore business suits to work and was very formal. The only thing she couldn’t get past was her accent, but I don’t even think her accent explains how badly she butchered pronunciation of things anyone with a post-graduate degree in anything should have been able to pronounce. Somehow, Tybalt because Tae-Bo. Seriously, she said it just like the Billy Blanks aerobic kickboxing exercise.
We had to do an artistic project at the end of our small unit on Romeo and Juliet. I ended up writing Juliet’s diary. I distressed the paper to make it look like parchment, wrote it in a nice calligraphy, and colored the “cover” to make it look like leather. I’ll admit, I’m not an artist, so “artistic” projects in classes not dealing with art kinda pissed me off in general–but I worked hard on it, and I thought it was a good blend of art and…you know, actual English. I got a B on it. My friend BK did a little pop-up-book version of Juliet with a slide in the back for her “happy dagger” so she could stab herself over and over again. As I recall, he got 100% on that project, and Dr. Sharp commended it in the front of her class, showing it off to everyone. I am still friends with BK, and to this day we joke about it.
At the end of our Shakespeare unit (which consisted of the aforementioned Romeo and Juliet, and memorizing the “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” sonnet), she gave us a two-page handout for the test the next day. It was basically full of useless trivia, but by then we knew her well enough to know that we’d be tested on it, probably more than anything else we’d learned the 9 weeks prior. Sure enough, there were questions on the test (mostly fill-in-the-blank) cribbed straight from the handout, including “The Globe Theater had ______ doors” (answer: 3) and “Shakespeare was buried in a _____ ______ tomb” (answer: ornate marble). Someone answered the latter question “elaborate marble,” and she marked it wrong.
I later learned that the Globe Theater’s three doors were actually on the stage (right, left, and trapdoor) and not entrances and exits. She never explained that part in class. We just needed to know it had three doors, not why that was important or relevant in any way.
I had two jerks in a row for Chemistry I and II at the undergrad level.
The first angrily refused to answer any questions or expand on any points. His position was “I am not here to teach you. I am here to do research. Learn it from the book or your classmates or one of the graduate students, but teaching you is not my responsibility.”
The second announced on day one of class that in order to receive an A fro Chem II you would have to be a better chemist than him because he got a B when he was an undergrad. Sure enough, at the end of the semester one woman, who was taking only that class had a B. I and three other people had C’s. There were about 6 D’s…and the other 30 or so people failed.
I may have told this story before, but it is worth repeating.
My physics teacher in high school was a pompous ass and a fat and lazy oaf. For weeks prior to the Christmas break, he ranted on and on about his formal lab report we had to hand in. There were all sorts of requirements and it had to be neat and on and on. I remember working pretty hard on it.
I handed it in. I never saw it again. Neither did anyone else in the class.
FOUR years later, my younger sister is taking the same class with the same teacher. In the back supply room, she knocked over a pile of folders. When cleaning them up, she saw my name and the date. The funniest part was…
I had signed up for the class, “Educational Psychology”. The instructor had us do some ice breakers on the first day of class and then divided us into groups. She then told us that for each day during class, each group would teach one section in the book to the rest of class. “That way everyone will have the experiencing of teaching, and everyone will have to extensively learn their portions of what they will teach.” What this boiled down to was that the professor who was to be teaching the class to us never once taught anything. She would just sit in the back of the class and do… whatever she did while we taught ourselves.
I was an underperforming daydreamer (I still am) - and I often had trouble with the motivation to get my homework done on time and to the acceptable standard. To fill in some background: my tutor (who was also my teacher for Religious Education) had just returned to work after a sabbatical, following a nervous breakdown-type incident resulting in her assaulting a pupil.
She took it upon herself to micromanage my homework schedule and after registration each day, would trot quite jauntily over to my seat and demand to see my homework diary, announcing everything to the whole class at every stage, often insulting and mocking me.
She expected me to have completed any homework assignment ready for review by her the day after it was set - even if it was not due to be handed in for a week or a fortnight. if I hadn’t done this, she would fly into a frightening rage, or would, in a singsong-mocking voice, declare me lazy, or an idiot.
Can you tell I hated, HATED her? There’s no way she would get away with something like that now.
My aunt had a terrible professor once. She was in her final semester of school as a biology major and she couldn’t pass organic chemistry. When she took it over a second time, she was doing fine and then suddenly her mother was unable to continue helping her pay for school. Because of this, she had to work 60 hours a week to put herself through school. She got As on all her tests but she did not have enough time to finish one paper.
She went to the professor and said to him, ‘‘Sir, I am working 60 hours a week and this is the last class I need to graduate. I am not going to be able to finish this paper on time. I have gotten As on all my tests and have done all the reading. I will do whatever is required of me to pass this class, but I can’t do more.’’
He took one look at her and said, ‘‘Nobody works full-time while taking my class. You’re dropped.’’
She never graduated. She ended up having to declare bankruptcy because she couldn’t pay back her student loans.
The only class I ever dropped halfway through, physical astronomy. I’d already taken a ‘general education astronomy’ in first year and liked it, so I took one that was intro-level from the physics/astronomy faculty.
The professor was kind of stiff and wooden, but not bad, until we’d gone through a few tests, which I remember as often having sort of ‘trick questions’ that hadn’t been covered directly in the lectures or reading, things that you had to think through and where there were different ways of coming to an answer - not always the right answer, but at least reasonable sounding answers.
I really didn’t think he was capable of justifying his grading these questions well enough. There was one that sticks in my mind as the reason I dropped the course - don’t really remember all the details, but it was something about what part of the year the full moon would be higher in the sky at midnight. The ‘right’ answer for the professor was the winter solstice. I thought it would be somewhere around the summer solstice, depending on the phase of the moon and the tilt of the lunar orbit that would be way too hard to calculate.
And I remember saying to him, after class when we’d been taking up the test: “I think I follow your reasoning for the winter solstice answer - I think that there’s a flaw in your argument because this-and-so, and that leads me to my answer through the following chain of deduction. If my answer is not correct, can you tell me where I’ve made a mistake?”
He paused for just a moment, and then started to repeat the explanation that I’d already tried to rebut, not making it any clearer or explaining why my objection wasn’t valid as far as I could see. I knew right then that he wasn’t someone I could learn more from than I could learn from astronomy books, and not someone who I wanted putting a grade on my transcript.
Is that ‘bad’ enough?
PS: Yes, I realize that I was probably also being a bit of a troublesome, smartass student, and if he’d just laid down the law with me for wasting his time I’d probably have cut a bit more slack. It’s the way that he appeared to be willing to discuss the question further, and yet was incapable of actually explaining anything beyond repeating his canned answer, that I couldn’t deal with.
The one that sticks in my craw was the guy I took geometry from in college. Let me preface this by saying that I had always wanted to study the geometry sections, which all the way through elementary and high schools were teasingly placed almost at the very end of the textbooks. Of course, we never got that far but I always thought that stuff looked like fun. So I get to college and even though geometry wasn’t required for my major I decided I’d treat myself and go for it.
First day of class this old duffer wanders into the room and explains that he’s actually some sort of engineering professor who got handed the geometry class at the last minute. He was very jovial as he told us that he hadn’t even looked at a geometry text in over twenty years and wasn’t sure he remembered a darned thing about it. Then he spent the rest of the class time telling us anecdotes about his difficulties in welding a step onto his RV. :rolleyes:
It did not get better. He was seldom willing to even address the topic of the class at all, was miserably bad when he did and just in general was doing a shitty job. I got a little pissed off and visited the Dean of Instruction and let him know in no uncertain terms that I was NOT pleased with the level of “instruction” I was being given in a class I was paying good money to attend. I asked to transfer to another class–none available. None planned for the next semester either. I asked him to speak with the professor with a view toward getting him a bit more on target with the material and requested that my name be kept confidential.
The next class period the prof handed out quizzes. He stopped in front of me and said “oh, are you sure you want one of these?” He made a big deal out of it. It became obvious to me that the Dean had not been discreet about my visit. In spite of the prof’s continued hostility I persevered and learned the goddamned material anyway, got an A in the class. However I didn’t enjoy it and I really wished I’d just dropped the class and taken it some other time.
During my education masters, I had to sit in with a middle school science teacher. She was awful. Two things she did in particular that bothered me:
When she heard my last name, she assumed I was Jewish, and wished me happy holidays for every single Jewish holiday. Finally, I told her I wasn’t actually Jewish, and she said, “Oh good, that means I can convert you!”
Then, she was teaching about the human body, and asked the kids what organs of the did not regenerate. One of the answers she gave was the liver. After the class, I told her I thought that answer was incorrect. We went to the encyclopedias *in her class * and looked it up, and yeah, you know, she was wrong. She said, “Oh, but I’ve been teaching that to my students for 25 years!”
My Philosophy 101 professor was not a public speaker, and his lectures were punctuated repeatedly with the word “uh”. Somewhere around the 4th week of the semester, I decided to keep a tally. During a single 40-minute lecture, he said “uh” 202 times. Hey, I was 18 and easily amused.
Years later, in my 30s, I took another stab at the college thing. It was the late '90s now, and the local community college required everybody to take a class called “Interpersonal Relationships”. The course was referred to by students jokingly (but accurately) as “Political Correctness 101”. The teacher happened to be the coach of either the basketball team, or the wrestling team — can’t remember which — and was a nice guy. I attended class every day. I thoroughly read the assigned sections of the textbook. I actively participated in classroom discussions. I understood the material. But I performed very poorly on the weekly quizzes and other tests, and that puzzled and frustrated me to no end.
I finally went to the teacher after class one day and explained my problem: I was looking at the questions on the quizzes and finding myself completely unable to recall seeing those topics addressed in the textbook. So the teacher took the latest quiz in one hand and the textbook in the other, and showed me exactly where the questions were coming from. It turned out that he was taking the sectional headings from the text and rephrasing those headings as questions. That was my problem: those headings frequently used very specific terminology, which would reappear in the quiz questions, but was not repeated in the body text. And in much the same way that I don’t pay much attention to the chapter titles when I read a novel, I was mostly skipping over those section headings and diving right into the body text, where the actual information was located. Once I saw how he was devising his questions, I made a point of studying the headings just as much as the body text. From there on out I aced the quizzes.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a non-perching instructor. All classroom chairs are terribly uncomfortable, so anybody with an excuse not to sit in them will take it.
I do it out of habit, particularly if I have a small class and the students, for some unfathomable reason, are scattered all over the room. It’s easier to talk to them if I’m in the middle of the classroom, and I get tired of being on my feet. I remember I had a pitched battle about this issue when I was working as an ESL teacher at an exclusive academy in Korea; one day the owner called all the teachers together for a meeting and insisted that we had to stay on our feet for the entire class. Our classes were 3 hours long. The head instructor thankfully took our part.
The worst teacher I ever had was back in high school (in Korea) - I had an English teacher that loathed any student who’d lived abroad, as if we had done it deliberately to spite him. He took it very personally. I learned to keep my mouth shut in class, but this one guy was a bit of a show-off and actually corrected the teacher during a lesson once. (For the record, the student was right and the teacher was wrong.) The teacher responded by slapping him for being impertinent. :eek:
In my college career, I had profs who were good, profs who were bad, and ONE prof who…
This class (biochem) was required for me, and prolly most everyone there. We couldn’t avoid it, we couldn’t wait if we wanted to graduate on time. So we put up with this hostile cretin who HATED his students. He would assign reading, give these incoherent lectures, and everyone would fail the exam. This is in upper level, so presumably the people who were inclined to screw around and drop out or change majors had already done so. And STILL we all failed. I’d memorize the amino acids, the glucose cycle, the enzymes, and lots more, and the exam would be COMPLETELY UNRELATED TO ANYTHING. It got so bad, a 35 was an A, just so he wouldn’t have a 100% failure rate for the class, and it was still, most people failed (I got a D).
And did I mention the hostility, the hatred, the CONTEMPT he felt for us, emphasizing it every day, never letting us forget how stupid we were?
