What was the most unpleasant college class you ever had to take?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Oh, this will be fun. Seems like every year I end up with at least one god-awful class. :smiley:

1st year: Introduction to Literary Study. Despite being mind-numbingly simple material (think eighth grade English here), we were reading all sorts of post-modernist and post-structuralist commentary on it. That stuff went over everyone’s head and I don’t think anyone cared about it anyway. Also, the class was dominated by a loudmouth who thought that skimming the material gave him the right to dismiss it as “faulty” “failing” “flawed” etc etc etc. The professor would just nod and say “mmhmmm.” A lot of the class periods involved us sitting in silence and staring at our books, because there wasn’t anything to talk about, and after a while no one wanted to gain the loudmouth’s attention.

I have one really amusing story from this class. I was working in a group presentation, and our subject material was Philip K. Dick. The aforementioned loudmouth starts going off on how “cliche” the work is. The group leader tries to save the class by saying “Well, keep in mind that this was some of the first stuff written in the sci-fi genre as we know it today. It’s like Tolkien’s position in the fantasy genre.” L’s reaction? I have never seen anyone get so offended over the use of “Tolkien” and “cliche” in the same thought.

Oh yeah, and there were 12 people in this class. I don’t go to that school anymore.

2nd year: Introduction to Critical Thinking. A breadth requirement for a degree. I don’t remember this as being horribly bad; just a huge waste of time. sample problem: “Should you believe someone if they told you ‘All Democrats are communists?’” By the end of the semester I was either reading books in the lecture or not showing up at all. The crowning glory came when the assessment sheets got passed around and I couldn’t remember the professor’s name.

I got an A.

I also remember complaining about English Literature Pre-1800 a lot, but I ended up really liking the professor and discovering John Donne, so it evens out.

3rd and current year: Elementary Logic. The corollary of Introduction to Critical Thinking, and yet another breadth requirement for a degree. This one is difficult, but it’s my last breadth requirement. For the first third of the course, we’ve memorized rules of logic and proved conclusions from a couple of premises. Our homework looks like this:
If (P->R) v (X->(W&Z))
prove that (WvX)->P.
Repeat 10 or so times. I can see no use, practical or unpractical, for this.

Worst of all, whenever I complain about it to someone, they end up saying “Oh, that sounds FUN!” :smack:

Note: In theory, I have nothing against blow-off classes, but they make me wonder why I’m in college.

An :eek: smiley goes to the first person who attempts that proof. I have a sinking suspicion someone will.

22

As an art major, I took a Design class. It’s been nearly twenty years and I’m still not sure what the hell the professor was talking about. I DO remember he wore sandals with socks in all weather, and that he said things like, “The guy that designed this? His head musta been like totally MICROWAVED, man. We’re talkin’ completely cheesed.”

Our first project in the class was to divide a rectangular sheet of paper with three vertical lines, and the object was to make sure that all three spaces between the lines were of unequal width. Second project: take the same sheet of paper and divide the spaces with three more lines, again leaving spaces of unequal width. Our third project was to take each of those spaces and divide them each with six vertical lines… once again making sure that no two spaces were of equal width. Fourth project: Same piece of paper, only now we’re adding in DIAGONAL lines! At that point, I asked the teacher exactly what the point of the exercise was and he answered, “Those of you who don’t understand this VERY VERY VERY simple thing now… well, you’re like doomed to a D, at best.”

I never did understand it, I still don’t, and I am totally, like microwaved over the fact that I got an A in the class.

23

I don’t think the class is offered anymore, but when I was in graduate school for urban planning, a required course was Economic Development Research Methods and Analysis. About half the course was about advanced input-output economic thoery as applied to geographic regions.

The professor was great, but much as I like number crunching with demographic data, the class left me totally stumped. Somehow, I ended up getting a B.

Even though I worked in planning for several years before I went to grad school, it was still amazing how much I learned.

24

World History to 1650-Taught by a frustrated academic who was just like the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. Who was screwing one of the students, too. Obsessed with Scotland, since he had a Mc last name. No, he wasn’t actually Scottish, he was an American mongrel like the rest of us, but his last name began with Mc, dammit! The very image of the comic book guy mixed with the frustrated academic. The dude was a complete, total ass. Finer points of his class: He spent all semester bragging about how he did Tai Chi with one of the Buddhism teachers at the school and finally dragged us all up for a demonstration. Watching his overweight, out of shape self sweat and pant while these lean students (and teacher) went through basic exercises was priceless. Watching him throw a hissy fit about how you shouldn’t call an adjunct “Professor” because they weren’t a real professor, they just had a Ph.D., and then watching the head of the department say, “But…you’ve been working on your Ph.D. for 7 years. So she’s ahead of you.” The entire class gave him such horrendous evaluations–mine ran to five pages–that he was fired. Last seen: Teaching 7th grade English. Part time. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, mind, but considering his status consciousness and frustrated academicness, it was great.

My second required English class. Taught by a man who dressed and appeared to be–and I’m not making this up–homeless. Ratty, unkept hair, bad beard, crazy-eyed look, ratty clothes. He mumbled his way through classes. His method of teaching was “So what did you guys think about this?” And then standing there, bleary-eyed, while some people mumbled stuff. Would occasionally veer into weird communist theories. Last seen: Teaching a single night class.

Shakespeare. This course focused on the comedies. It was taught by an old man with a turkey neck-thing that wobbled when he spoke. HIS method of teaching was opening the book, peering down into it, and mumbling lines until class was over. Boring AND we learned nothing. Last seen: Unknown.

World History From 1650. This one was taught by a graduate of the school of history where men are evil, evil bastards and only women do anything worthwhile. Being male, naturally, I couldn’t get much from the course. Also from that school of teaching where everyone has to sit around in a big, touchy feely circle of desks. God, I hate that. I sit in the back for a reason. She had a strict attendance policy–of course–but even worse was her participation policy. She would sit there with her gradebook and actually mark every time you asked a question in class. So, naturally, class was filled with people asking stupid questions so they could get their participation points.

Ethics-Taught by one of those teachers who uses nothing but old tests. Nevertheless, of course, he had a strict attendance policy. What he talked about in class didn’t relate to the readings. What was in the readings and talked about in class didn’t have anything to do with what was on the test, which seemed to be entirely pulled out of his ass. The way to pass was to get copies of the old tests–at his SUGGESTION, I might add–and spend the nights before the test working up answers based on what other people had answered with.

Some 2 credit type course I signed up for to fulfill a requirement. This is a 2 credit, one day a week course. The guy wanted us to do four papers, one 15 minute group presentation, in addition to four tests and a big, boring textbook. I dropped it, because I had less work in my other, required, important courses.

The Comp 2 course I have to take this semester. Why do I have to take it? Well, you can only CLEP out of so many, my AP got me out of Comp 1, and no one in the department(s) I dealt with seemed to know how I could avoid Comp 2. God, it’s boring, but at least it’s easy.

25

I hated Math 265 (Linear Algebra). It really wasn’t too hard of a class; much easier than Dynamics, Electricity and Optics, and Math 261. But the TA, who had the most obnoxious Australian accent, could not go a single day without purposely making somebody feel stupid. When someone would ask a question, he would stare at the person, and an excrement-eating smirk would start to form in the corner of his mouth. In addition to the TA, there were pointless homework problems, such as proving that a matrix is equivalent to itself.

If I had actually gone to class for final exam review, I probably could’ve gotten a B instead of a C. But I just couldn’t stand the thought of being around that guy for another day.

26

Finantial Accounting and good/bad ole Chem 101

27

Statistics - I think I got 19% in one exam and I was proud I got that high !!!

The other one was Economics (for another under-grad course) which I really loathed when I started it but it grew to be my favourite subject - god, how boring am I? (no need to answer that question thanks :smiley: )

28

Applied Math II- Partial Differential Equations - I could actually hear the whoosh as most of the lectures went straight over my head

29

Count me in with Statistics (I & II).
I dropped them both once before I got an ‘F’. I have no clue how I did end up passing. Profs pitied me, no doubt.

30

Physical theatre with a horrible, pervy, lizard-like lecturer who was found of crotch-lifts and saying things like “Make your lips like your vulva. Make them warm and moist and inviting…” Ick.

31

Another vote for Sadistics…I mean, Statistics :smack:

32

sigh statistics

Then I married a man who likes them so much that he used to read statistics books for the humor in them.

So all of this time I’ve thought it was just me. It was MY character flaw that I didn’t “get” statistics.

I love you guys. SOB

33

Statistical Mechanics – The course itself was har enough, but the professor made it worse. Every day he came up with another example of how stupid we, his present students, were. His assignments were always incomplete, and a thriving underground economy developed trading information on where he got the problems from, because it was only when you found the complete problem in some old text that you had enough information to solve it. A thoroughly unpleasant course that we soon came to call “Sadistical Mechanics”. Anyone who was able to dropped the course.

34

Ah, yes. I’ve had a few of those. I just love having my opinion automatically discounted because I’m a white male with moderate political views. Evidently, I’m not ethnic enough to have a valid viewpoint. :rolleyes:

Hm. Worst class, hands down, was a writing class. The professor was going through an ugly divorce that semester, so he didn’t actually teach much–he’d assign us papers every week, lecture for about a half hour (out of the scheduled 3), then have us read chapters from a grammar guide to each other in class. This was graduate level, mind you.

His grading was arbitrary and random and completely unrelated to how much work you actually did on your paper. He’d occasionally have to get up and run out of the room to avoid people trying to serve him papers. Eventually I got into the habit of just hammering out the papers an hour before they were due. It was, however, a turning point in my writing style–because I did everything at the last minute and didn’t bother doing interviews (I’d just make people and quotes up) I became very, very good at researching lies on a deadline. :slight_smile:

35

Cobol programming because it was taught by an assistant to an assistant professor who spoke the language so poorly, so quickly and with such a heavy foreign accent that she should have come with subtitles.

36

The first half of my Victorian History class at Leeds, England was unbearable. The sad thing was that I was on exchange there, and was really looking forward to it. Unfortunately, it was taught by the most boring lecturer on earth, a man who reminded me of nothing so much as an elderly Methodist minister droning through another sermon. Once I counted more students asleep in the lecture hall than awake. And even if you did try to listen to him, nothing he said actually made any sense. During one lecture, he made the same point three times, using almost exactly the same words. To top it off, he gave us a “brief” reading list of 200 books (this was for half of the term, mind you)–then made no suggestions as to which of the books might be more valuable than others!

The saving grace was that the second half of the term was taught by the incomparable, libertarian, fiercely independent Simon Green. The difference in that class was like night and day…suddenly, you had to get there early to actually get a seat. Brilliant teacher.

37

Groups, Rings, Fields, also known as ‘Garble Warble Farble Principal Ideal Domain.’

38

Statistics. The only thing I got from it was that my grade was going to be in the bottom percentile.

39

As far as the ‘woosh’ factor goes my most unpleasant class was Diffy Q’s! (Differential Equations) Yay for me that my stalker picked that semester to start and so I only attended a month of that hell.

Sheer unpleasantness of the professor was a Sociology requirement where the professor liked to make statements about how he had a really big penis because he was black and that all women really aspire to sit on the couch and eat bon bons all day. I would have spoken to the department head about him but he was the department head. sigh

40

How about if I immediately notice that it can’t be proved? P = 0, R = 1, X = 1, W = 1, Z = 1 satisfies the hypotheses but not the conclusion.

I had a lot of really bad classes in college (diff eq would’ve been OK, if it hadn’t been taught haphazardly and directed towards high school seniors), but the one that took the cake was a religion class entitled “Faith & Doubt”. It was described as a survey of various positions of religious and non-religious people. Sounded kinda interesting.

Problem was, the class existed more to convince sheltered freshmen that some people don’t believe the same things as you. It was frightfully dull–every “aha” the professor tossed out as a challenge to religion was something I’d heard ten times before. I don’t know how I made it through that class.