In fairness to her the course was on comedic literature in the Edo period (1603-1864). There is a dearth of decent exemplary material translated in English, and a lot of the fun aspects of comedic writing in this period relied on offhanded references to other works, wordplay, and a host of other things that really don’t translate well. But I think it was still the instructor’s responsibility to ensure she was prepared to do the course in English before she arranged to teach it.
I probably should’ve quit the class early on, but the syllabus gave no evidence of the insanity to come: it only listed the grading criteria, cut & pasted the standard “plagiarize something and your ass gets kicked out of university” verbage, and listed about half of the readings we would be doing. It wasn’t uncommon for professors to provide their own unpublished translations of interesting material, and since I spoke Japanese anyway I never really considered how bad inflexibility on the translation front could get.
I don’t think she was ever given a formal reprimand, although she wasn’t given any classes the next semester (she was contracted for 2), and I know they basically stopped giving her work and politely shuffled her off of most of the collaborative research projects she’d gotten involved in. I think the department head was honestly relying on the problem going away on its own once she was fenced off from harassing any more undergrads.
Everyone in the course DID get an A or a high B (after a neutral prof re-graded everything-I stand to understand that she tried to fail most of the class when she graded on her own), and I think that was the closest the department was going to get to apologizing.
I’m at a “community college” that requires one single Composition class. We had to go over parts of speech the first night. You know … noun, adjective, verb. Yeah. Good times!
In my American Lit class we were talking about colonialism and stuff when my teacher said, “And then Sir Francis Drake lead the English naval forces against the Spanish Armada off the coast of Virginia. Spain was attacking England because they were jealous of the English colonies.”
That’s when I said to myself, “Um, I don’t think that’s right. Ok, we’re not listening to her anymore.”
This reminds me of a prof we had for advanced vector calculus. He was Russian, and barely spoke enough English to talk about mathematical concepts but not enough to give any deeper explanation, not enough to understand any student’s questions.
Q&A always devolved into him furiously jabbing the chalk at the board shouting “See! Is easy!” and students giving up in frustration.
Worse, he was incredibly prideful and when our assignments were returned with terrible grades (due to the inability to get any questions answered) would berate the whole class about how stupid Americans were. After most of us failing a midterm, we petitioned the admins for relief, but were just force to tough it out the rest of the term while they reviewed our grades.
Now for the good bit…
Two years later as I was struggling in some crappy temp labor warehouse job for minimum wage, who do I see now pushing boxes of inventory around on a pallet loader?
Excuse me sir, but I seem to have misplaced my surface-normal vectors that are needed in the Green’s Theorem department and they are concerned that their office will no longer be piecewise smooth. Can you check up on the top shelf there for me behind the bleach? No, the other top shelf. No, the other one. Maybe on the loading dock? You’re sure? Maybe check again? See, is easy!
From university mathematics professor to warehouse box monkey, karma is beautiful
The post you are referring to reminds me of a prof I had during grad school. Looking back, I’m pretty sure he was insane.
I don’t mean that as joke or hype…he was most likely insane. I won’t go into it but the personality changes…except over the course of the semester he would change every few days.
He was, however, the best explainer I have ever had. He made complicated stuff seem easy.
It’s funny, my husband and I were watching a documentary the other day that featured a professor of philosophy sitting in the backseat of a taxi cab pontificating on the nature of life, the universe, and everything.
(For reference, it was the dude at the beginning ofthis film… which I highly endorse for philosophy geeks.)
Says my husband, ‘‘Have you ever noticed the thin line between brilliance and…’’
And then in unison, we both said, ‘‘Insanity?’’
Some profs blur that line a little more than others!
**Thank God for anonymous class surveys…the offical “bitch about classes” thread **
Oh my, you won’t believe the riff-raff they let into the club this season. It’s barely time to get the yachts on the water when these upstart yokels with no breeding and certainly no connections start bringing their beers, their iceberg lettuce salads, and their dreadfully large families to the docks as if.
I love your class. Learned a bunch about everything listed in the title. You’re quite good at what you do. Yes, there has been systematic discrimination against non white males in the past, and it continues in some ways today both intentionally and unintentionally. You’re right on many things, and could argue just about any point related to this against us undergrads and win.
But DAMNIT, you’re wrong about some things. Race is not behind everything. It was not straight up racism as you stated when Turner Gill was passed over for the Auburn job for Gene Chizik. Chizik had a tougher conference, had worked well at Auburn before, had run the defense on the Texas national championship team, and yes, did fit the old boys network. Gill did a mediocre job in the MAC. One was offensive minded, the other was defensive minded. Plenty of things are about race. This one wasn’t.
This is my last semester. Thank god. The vast majority of teachers I’ve had are good, even excellent. There’s one teacher who, despite being really nice and very very helpful, I just don’t think is good enough to be a teacher. She’s a really nice lady, but…
She teaches web design and flash, but I don’t think she knows them well enough. In web design she uses Dreamweaver exclusively. Perhaps I’m old school, or just too nerdy, but I think that you should be able to code by hand, with perhaps some help for difficult stuff (like mouseovers).
Flash is worse, or perhaps it just feels that way because I don’t know it. She relies on scripts that she finds. In other words, she can’t write the code herself. So if you’re trying to do something that doesn’t fit the scripts she has, you’re SOL. So I’m having a very hard time.
Silver Tyger Girl, I had the same problem in my Hardware class. With the delicious end result that I went into my OS class a year later with almost no knowledge of assembly. And since that class involved, you know, writing our own OS in C and PPC assembly, I was pretty well useless on about half the code for my partner. :thumbs up: Fuck you, incompetent-prof-whose-name-I’ve-forgotten.
I could handle regular exams without too much depression.
It was finals that really got to me.
Seriously…no humor about that…it really got to me. I was already seriously considering leaving teaching because of the shit pay and no advancement opportunities pay-wise…but I probably would have stayed if the finals would have showed something.
It made me realize that what I was doing for a career…MY LIFE…was meaningless. A large number of students didn’t learn a damn thing leaving the class. Sure, most can scrape by on the individual tests…but the Final Exam…the test that shows what they are taking out of the class…nothing. If they know nothing on the last freakin day of class…what are they going to know 1 year from now?
You might have been joking about the heavy drinking…but toward the end of my teaching career I would gather my final exams and walk to a nearby Irish pub. I would then drink Bass and Guiness while grading. Several hours later I would be done and would stumble, drunk, back home. {note, I seldom then, or now get drunk…so this was non-typical behavior}
Only took me a few hours you say puzzled? That’s because the vast majority of the students never asked to see their finals. They would just look at their posted grade and accept it. What I would do is look at the grade they had going into the final and then give their final a looking over. If it was shit, I didn’t even bother to grade it and I would lower their main grade by an amount of how absolute shit their final was to a lowest of D- *. I mean, why not? The pay was a joke. The students weren’t learning anything and, so , treating it as a joke. Why devote so much extra time to a joke? Just get it done.
If their test looked like they kind of learned something, I would go over it well.
The school allowed + and - grades which I think was great. If they received a D- and didn’t have to take a further math class then they didn’t have to retake. I was not going to force these people to retake something they so obviouxly didn’t give a shit about. A D- also conveys that this person knows nothing about what the class was about.
I had a professor in grad school who was a lousy lecturer. Either she wouldn’t know the subject and read notes that she cribbed from the text moments before the class, or she would know the subject, but deliver unfocused chats devoid of any real content. But she consistently received sky high evaluations from her students, with remarks like “she really cares for her students.”
Don’t get me wrong, she was sweetheart, but after each semester class I would end up with about a page of worthwhile notes.
I’ve taken to having my students sign a copy of the class policies…
and sometimes I slip a line in like “I promise to bring the instructor Twizzlers at least once per semester”. I figure if they sign it they might just read it, and I can also wave it in their face…
Because I get the “How commmme you graded me down?” from someone at least once a year, including the kid who said “Hey, no one told ME I had to show up!”
That’s because the vast majority of the students never asked to see their finals. They would just look at their posted grade and accept it. What I would do is look at the grade they had going into the final and then give their final a looking over. If it was shit, I didn’t even bother to grade it and I would lower their main grade by an amount of how absolute shit their final was to a lowest of D- *. I mean, why not? The pay was a joke. The students weren’t learning anything and, so , treating it as a joke. Why devote so much extra time to a joke? Just get it done.