Og, I open this thread with trepidation…
In high school we used a new $100,000+ “Engineering Systems” lab to play networked Unreal Tournament games, on the lab computers. After a while the teacher joined in, and that was class for the most part. I wouldn’t really blame the teacher for it; it was mostly just a bad class. Some of the equipment didn’t work, and the lab books were riddled with errors. The students were largely unmotivated seniors.
When I was in grad school in computer science I had a graphics class with a Living Legend. Twenty years before when HE was a grad student he had invented a very famous and useful graphics technique that had immediately won him a huge amount of professional respect and acclaim.
Unfortunately, for the last decade he’d focused most of his time on building his little high-tech start-up and not much at all on new research. Or even on keeping up with what was currently going on in the field. Except for the few hours a week he had class he was never around the department.
(One of the little tricks the grad students learned was to remote log-in to his workstation and run big batch jobs on it. He never used it and it just sat there in his locked office wasting cycles.)
His lectures were always a rambling, disorganized mess. The worst one was on the rendering equation, which is a generalized mathmatical description for how light interacts with surfaces. Halfway through the class after several failed attempts to write the equation on the board it became apparent that he couldn’t remember what it was! He eventually called up the guy who invented it on his cell phone and had him talk him through the rest of the lecture! We all just sat there with our mouths agape … .
When I went to high school in the late 50’s, all girls had to take Home Ec. I already knew how to cook, but I didn’t use the methods prescribed by the British Columbia Department of Education. Little things, like how to level off a measuring spoon, etc. So Mrs. Dyer, our teacher, would rap my knuckles with a ruler. Hard. I mean HARD, the blows would break the skin. But I was luckier than some girls, some girls she’d pull their hair or pinch them and make them cry. I think she knew I wouldn’t cry. But my worst crime was that I grew a lot from the beginning of Grade 9 to the end and so I outgrew the ridiculous dorky dress we made at the beginning of the year and couldn’t wear it in the “fashion show”. She went for me like a pit bull, more or less accusing me of deliberately growing. What a savage cow she was. Mean? When I say pit bull, I am not exaggerating. Every single class, she’d have some poor girl in tears, often the same ones, day after day. No one did bugger all about it. We hated her, but I admit I HATED her with a passion scarcely to be described. I had been out of school a few years when I learned she had dropped dead of a heart attack in class one day and honestly, if I’d been there? I would have danced around her dead and recumbent form. Me and all my classmates! I don’t think they have teachers like that any more.
When I graduated from high school, I couldn’t afford to go to university. But there was an option: Grade 13. The idea was, you could take first year math and English, etc, in Grade 13, and then go on into second year at university, if your marks were good enough. It was a good deal for poor kids, since you could live at home, and have more of a chance of getting after school jobs. You had to get the English and math, for sure. Our grade 13 Math teacher was brilliant, a great guy, we all did blazingly well. But the English teacher was a drunk who kept a bottle of gin, I’m not kidding, in his desk drawer and he’d be taking little nips all day long. We began the first term by beginning to read “The School for Scandal”, Act I, Scene I. And every goddamned day for the whole bloody term, he would begin each class with, “Ladies and gentlemen, take out School for Scandal, and we will begin with Act I, Scene I.” One girl got up and started shouting at him, finally, and we all went with her to the principal’s office and he told us we’d all get expelled if we didn’t return to our class. Our parents complained, and nothing happened, god knows why. Another girl’s sister was a school teacher and she was able to get us copies of past provincial exams so we could study on our own. I managed to pass English, but a few of the others didn’t, which meant they’d wasted their whole year thanks to this jerk. He was still teaching there 5 years later, still drinking, still screwing up kids’ lives. I like to think that nowadays the kids would have taken him out to the parking lot and beaten him to death.
I’d always been an A-B student for the most part. I had problems with math but I got through them and went on to high school. Tenth grade was the first time students were allowed to have elective classes and I chose remedial math but a few days in I was informed I needed to take an Algebra class. Okay,fine, how bad can it be?
Our teacher I will call Miss Fucktard, because her name did indeed start with an F and she fucked me over. Fucktard spent a good many classes jawing with the popular girls in the class that I called the “gang of four”. She discussed movies with them and when “Gone With The Wind” was having a showing at a local theater they all (Miss F included) made plans to attend. I never begrudged them this, even though I longed to be a part of their world.
Later on, when it was clear I had no clue what I was doing with this Algebraic nonsense, I went to Miss F and asked if she could help me understand what the fuck I was supposed to do. I was getting F’s in class and this was soul crushing to me. Even in regualr math I got a C average. Please, could you help me out?
No, stupid child, I cannot. I don’t have time, for there are smarter students that I must party with. Be on your own, retarded one, and find a tutor thyself.
Yes. This shy, ugly, unpopular, neurotic kid was supposed to find her own tutor. Wow, now that is a task, isn’t it? My goodness, I couldn’t even talk to the cheerleaders because I thought they were above me. Fucktard wanted me to find my own tutors because she didn’t have time for me, that is what she said.
Needless to say I failed Algebra, but hey, I’m not bitter.
I took Logic, in college, from a guy who was in the process of a major mid-life crisis. Before the end of the term, he was divorced, resigned from his position, and there were persistent rumors that he’d had an affair with a student.
He showed up to class about half the time. When he did, it was abundantly clear that he really did not want to be there. Some of the times he didn’t show up, another prof filled in; the other times I assume he must have blown it off. We only ever received one assignment back, that I recall. I think they just gave everyone As to shut them up. I know I didn’t deserve mine, since I learned very little in that class.
The sad part about this was that he was a decent teacher. I had taken an intro programming class from him two years before, and, while he wasn’t my favorite, he was perfectly capable and effective.
An early physics course I took in college was co-taught by a variety of professors. One of those professors was one of the most confusing lecturers I’ve ever taken a class from. After a few classes, I simply stopped going to class when she was lecturing. I could read the book and understand it, do all the homework problems right, then I’d go to class and I’d come out totally confused. It was the opposite of learning. I then had her as a lab prof a semester later, and she was fantastic. She was an excellent one-on-one teacher, and was the first professor I had who really taught me how to do science in a lab, instead of just following the experimental steps and writing stuff in my lab book. One lab I had to do three times before she was satisfied, but it took those three times for me to really get it.
Allow me to tell you a tale of two chemistry professors.
There was the Organic Chemistry Professor (OC) and the Physical Chemistry Professor (PC).
When I was a wee lass working on my undergrad (double major in Biology and Chemistry), I and all my cohorts were required to take a number of classes from each OC and PC. It was a small college, so there were really only 4 or 5 profs for the Chem department. One guy taught exclusively the year-long Intro courses (which were required of Bio, Chem, Physics, Math (!), Nursing, Pre-Med, and Sports Med majors (in short, anyone who was hoping to graduate with a BS instead of a BA). That’s all he taught - all he had time to teach. Those were huge classes. There was one guy who taught exclusively upper division, final year Biochem (and was the Department Chair in addition). There were a couple of adjuncts who taught several speciality classes - generally one class per adjunct.
Then there was the OC and the PC. One handled all the organic chem classes (aside from senior-level Biochem) and one handled all the inorganic chem classes.
This meant that every biology, chemistry or double major student could look forward to having to take at least three classes from each of these guys.
The PC guy was young, enthusiastic, new to the school, and a physical chemistry guy - the school had not previously offered much in the way of P-chem and so everyone was excited that he was planning to offer some new classes. He loved his subject and tried to make each class interesting. He was involved with his students, available for questions, and generally a good guy and a good teacher.
The OC guy was also young, but not particularly enthusiastic. He was primarily interested in pursuing his own research, and clearly and obviously viewed his students as a necessary encumberance and distraction to that goal. He was also deeply and fundamentally religious - of a denomination that viewed the kitchen as the only possible appropriate location for women. He made no secret of his prejudice and made it totally clear to all of his female students (and his female associates, as well).
The PC guy started at the school when I was a freshman. I first took one of his classes as a sophomore - and he and I hit it off in a mentor-student kind of way. Since I was a biochem major, even when I wasn’t taking classes from him (such as during my freshman year) I was still running across him a lot. It was a small school - and my student job was as a chemistry department solution preparation and stockroom person. I had lots of interaction with all the profs.
So, during my second year, when the PC guy was starting up the much-awaited physical chemistry course line, he asked me to be his TA for the second semester. He had no established TAs (he was new to the school, remember), it was a new course anyway (so any TA would have to learn the material from scratch - and I was his best student in the first semester version of the course), and he and I got along well. Plus, I was the TA assigned to his sections of Frosh Chem Lab (the prof that taught the intro classes did not do lab sections - sensible, since there were four lecture sections of Intro to Chem and twelve lab sections - they were farmed out to the other profs in the department to oversee with TAs doing the actual running of the lab from an established syllabus).
The OC guy decided that the PC guy asking a mere female sophomore to be his TA for his upper-division course was clear and unarguable evidence that we were having an illicit affair. He started dropping snarky comments along those lines every time he saw me - including during lectures.
One of the crowning moments was when he was announcing a quiz to take place at the beginning of the next class, he actually said “I recommend a thorough review of the assigned materials in preparation for this exam. Unlike Prof PC, I am not open to the possibility of exchanging sexual favors for high grades as some of your classmates have done in the past, including Ms. Smith /gesturing at me”* Later that day, as I was holed up in the solution prep room, steaming about his comments and preparing solutions for classes, he cornered me and read me a diatribe about my loose morals, character, and lack of virtue. Name calling was involved. At the end of a histrionic rant about my sexual immorality, he went for his zipper.
At that moment PC and the Department Chair came in - they could hear him yelling (and what he was yelling) and were trying to find out what the disturbance was. Good thing, too. I had a bottle of concentrated HCl in hand and was seriously, seriously contemplating an “accidental” splash on his groin.
As far as I know, he’s still teaching at that school. Had tenure, and the Department Chair was totally spineless. I still had to take four more semesters of classes from him, too. There was no avoiding it, other than to change my major. That was all kinds of fun, let me tell you.
*Some comments get burned into the brain for all time.
I once took an undergraduate class in poetry writing. Although I got an A from the professor, the course was nearly unbearable. The prof mostly just read his own poems to the class and asked us to guess what they meant. It was pathetic. He would read a line and then make beckoning gestures in the air with his arms, saying “And this reminds us of… what???” Then the members of the class were expected to read his mind and tell him what the poem reminded him of. Auggh.
Once when he solicited our views on what his poems meant to him, a classmate passed me a note that said “Doctor W wants to know what this poem reminds ‘us’ (meaning him) of. Do you agree that it is reminiscent of a fart in the bathtub?”
In 1970, as a high school sophomore in a smallish Central Illinois farm town, population about 10,000, I took a Biology class. And the teacher, who was known as The Lizard for his ability to sit there behind his lab desk without blinking for long minutes (seriously–we used to watch him and time the blinks), one day brought out the slide projector, and showed us a slide of a brontosaur. Then, his eyes glowing with his secret insider’s information, he told us that He Knew Why Evolution Was Wrong.
Pause for dramatic effect.
He drew our attention to the fact that its hind legs bent forwards, making normal-looking “knees”, but that as we all knew, a horse’s hind legs–its “knees”–bent backwards.
And he said triumphantly, with a secret little smile, “Now, you tell me at what point in evolution animals’ knees evolved to bend the opposite direction.”
My friend Janine and I looked at each other, because as a couple of horse-crazy teenagers we both knew perfectly well that a horse’s “backwards knee”, or its hock, is really its ankle, not its knee. A horse’s “knee” joint is well up inside what looks like its hip.
So I hadda wonder about a Biology teacher who didn’t know that a horse’s hock is actually its ankle.
Anne Neville, give Mr. Neville my best. Teaching freshman can be frustrating. 
Aangelica, on behalf of all males, my apologies.
You’re absolutely right. I perch, kneel on the floor, just about anything other than sit on a chair. Because they’re too small, being intended for 11-year-olds as well as adults. Of course this also means they’re too small for most of the older pupils, too :smack:
Also, the chances are that once the group is seated, any spare chair is one with a wonky leg, or fresh chewing gum stuck somewhere, or any other number of unpredictabilities it’s better to steer clear of.
I have had teachers who despised me, but I have been fortunate enough never to have had one that actually discriminated against me. The bad professors I’ve had were equally bad to everyone. Let me tell you about two of them who neatly bracket the category.
Professor H
Professor H “taught” Electromagnetic Fields Theory and Electronics II. After encountering him in EM Fields, I delayed taking EII until he retired. Professor H was originally from China, and had been living in the US for roughly 40 years. Nevertheless, he apparently spoke little English. His lectures were diatribes in a mixture of broken English and what we first took to be Mandarin, delivered to the chalkboard and punctuated with rasping throat-clearings. Consulting with several Chinese students in the class, we learned that the odd utterances scattered through his lectures were not Mandarin, nor Cantonese, nor any other dialect they had ever heard. They were as baffled as the native English-speakers…until the day the mask slipped. Several of us were making another (likely doomed) attempt to corner Professor H in his office and extract some hint of information from him. He was speaking with another professor in the hall, who pointed out that he had students coming to see him. As he turned and stomped away to avoid us, we heard him mutter to his colleague, “Like I give a shit.”
In flawless, unaccented English. The bastard was doing it on purpose.
Not that it mattered, as Professor H’s lectures (and notes…and book) had little to do with the exams. There were three 100-point exams and a 200-point final in the class. The average score on each exam was in the low teens, and no one scored a point on the final. He had already calculated the grades, you see, and didn’t want to redo it, so he “borrowed” an exam–on a completely different subject–from the graduate physics department and scribbled out the course number.
Professor K
Professor K was a nice guy. He was friendly, kind, enthusiastic, and helpful. His subject, Statistics and Probability, was a little dull, but we didn’t hold it against him. He wrote poetry in his native language–Hindi, I believe–and sometimes recited both his own work and that of other poets at an artsy little coffee shop on the edge of campus. I didn’t understand a word of it, but it sounded beautiful. He had a wonderful voice, and had practiced extensively. Oddly enough, that was a problem.
We’d show up to class, and he would smile benevolently upon us and start to lecture. He would speak in his melodious, soothing voice…about statistics. To engineering students, who were all chronically short on sleep. You could practically hear everyone’s eyes glazing over. He was like a human tribble. No one was immune. It took a fierce effort of will just to remain awake, and not even that could keep you focused on the subject at hand for more than a few minutes at a time. We only got through the class because he stuck close to the book, and we could actually read it without going into a trance.
I had a pre-algebra long term sub who could not teach at all. When a student would ask for additional explanation of a subject the sub had just tried to explain, the “additional” information would be the first explanation almost verbatim. Because of this, almost none of our assignments ended up graded (we were supposed to grade them in class, and when the end of class hit she would just give everyone an A if we hadn’t finished the grading process). When the actual teacher showed up after having a baby, the entire class’s grades took a nosedive.
Another math teacher (Most of the math teachers I have ever had classes with have been awful) was so busy trying to be nice to her students that she never actually taught, and her attempts at teaching were better geared toward pre-schoolers than high school students. She would give out a minimum of work, and then the rest of class time would be spent playing card games (my sister claims the only thing she ever learned in that class was how to play euchre, which she learned from friends, not the teacher). I was having enough problems figuring out the material and had little patience for her pussyfooting. Once, she was attempting to explain an equation, and below it had written at least three different lines of numbers. I asked in a somewhat exasperated way what the heck those were supposed to be, since the actual equation was quite clear, but what those additional lines were supposed to mean eluded me. Apparently questioning her teaching technique was a bit much for her (she was late in her pregnancy at the time), and after class she started to cry. How do I know this? Because she told the story to every single one of her classes after that, and every semester I’d get people saying “You made Mrs. So-And-So cry?” Yes, yes I did, because I am a horrible ogre person. Thankfully, she left on maternity leave only a few weeks into the semester and was replaced by a long-term sub who actually knew what he was talking about. He has made it onto my favorite teachers list primarily for replacing her.
I had a math professor in college that was attempting to teach a Discrete Structures course to a classroom full of Computer Science/Information Systems students. What he failed to grasp was that these students were all freshman or sophomores (the class was a requirement for a secondary admit, and students were required to get a C or above) that were NOT upper-level math majors. The textbook was written in math-ese, with no handy translations to English. He, of course, thought it was completely understandable. He assigned large sections of homework, and then wouldn’t collect it, but we had to do it because he threatened to collect it without warning if he thought we weren’t doing it. He also wouldn’t go over the homework in class unless a student specifically had a question. Of course, the problem with this is that you wouldn’t find out your understanding of the subject was completely flawed until the tests. Which everyone in the class failed miserably. The class averages were in the low 50’s. Oh, did I mention that he wrote all the code samples in a programming language geared for math applications, which none of the students had ever seen before, and which he never explained? By the end of the semester we all wanted to club him to death with his $200 useless piece of crap book that weighed about 10 pounds.
I currently am suffering under a computer science professor who thinks that he can rewrite the laws of the English language to suit his twisted view of the world. (He has held class long tirades about how “data is” not “data are”, and the differences between “effect” “affect” and “impact”) The guy is funny as all get out, but he rarely talks about the actual subject matter of the class. This is my third class with him, and I can look forward to at least one more. Complaining to the department head is right out, as he IS the department head. One class period was spent with him reading sentences he found particularly disagreeable from recent student essays. Have I mentioned that our semester project in our COMPUTER Systems Analysis and Design class is about biodiesel fuels for buses?