Restoration Literature in my first term of an MA in English Lit program.
In this class I learned that I hate Pope & Dryden. Swift is funny, but we didn’t read a lot of him. Mostly og-awful pages & pages of Pope sniping at disgusting men with names like Tapgut and Dryden sounding like a shrivelled up prune of a man who’d just eaten a handful of sour gummy bears laced with alum.
Plus, the prof was an ass. I went to him during office hours during the second week of the term and told him that I wasn’t as familiar with this period as I’d like to be and asked him to please recommend background readings on the historical & political period. He said that I didn’t need these materials as the amount of reading required for the class would be so substantial I woundn’t have time to read anything else. Being new, I believed him. I ended up with a B- (which was like a D in that program) , and a statement in my permanent file that said I, “lacked an understanding of the historial and political milieu of this period, an understanding necessary to the proper reading and interpretation of these materials.” He also called me some name (an adjective word) in that file that was so rude that to this day I can’t remember what word it was he used, but it meant I didn’t know what I was talking about. Thanks, Dr. Stumpf!
History of Chinese Literature 1 of 3, unfortunately absolutely required for my major. Taught by the most monotone professor I’ve ever had, who would occasionally throw in odd jokes that didn’t strike anybody as jokes at all because of his delivery. Also, if there’s anything I like less than reading poetry, it’s reading poetry in translation and then writing about it when I have no feeling about it whatsoever since my eyes glazed over after the first few lines. I just about had a nervous breakdown doing the takehome midterm for this class.
Heh, one of the professors another poster has complained about is in my department (though not someone I know personally). Y’all might want to think twice about posting names and other identifying information.
Mine would be tennis and badminton – not so much because of the instructors, about whom I remember almost nothing, but because gym classes in general are miserable (and requiring them at the college level is an incredibly stupid idea).
A seminar on the Politics of the European Union. I thought it was going to be interesting and actually about the European Union. Nope. The professor loved to talk about Lithuania and Russia so that’s all he did. Our class met once a week for 3 hours. We were never there for more than 1. (That wasn’t acutally bad.) Most of the time he would just ask us to talk about the progress we were making on the 20 page paper that was our grade for the entire class. If he did lecture, it was about Russia and it’s possible entry into the EU.
He didn’t like my paper because it had nothing to do with Russia and everything to do with EU politics. (hell, i even got the EU to mail me information.)
The only thing I learned about the EU was from my paper.
I also had had him for 2 other classes- requirements too. He never ever got my name right, even with the entire class chorusing “It’s FirstName LastName” every time.
My first semester of college, I took sociology 101 to satisfy some general requirement or other. The teacher … ugh. Most Indians with whom I’m acquainted were hardworking folk in engineering programs; this guy was committed to breaking the mold by working on his sociology PhD, and he had to be the Laziest Guy EVAR. He constantly complained about how hard it was to teach a big class; he failed to show up upwards of seven, eight times during the semester without any notice; he offered absolutely no compelling sociological insights, mostly just reciting the primary textbook; and he had us purchase books that we just didn’t have time left in the semester to read. I suppose my description doesn’t make it sound bad, but it really was an unpleasant class.
(This reminds me of the time in that class where he said he didn’t grade a test question because it wasn’t covered in the book. Without thinking, I informed him that yes, indeed that portion was in the book. I was met with such intense hatred, muttering, and groaning from a hundred freshmen over the next minute that I’ve resolved to keep my mouth shut about such matters from now on. But I mean, c’mon, guys, it’s not like he was going to take back the tests and regrade the question.)
Next Worst Class: Statistical Methods. It might’ve been a good class if the teacher had spoken serviceable English. It might’ve been a decent class if the teacher spoke bad English but was a good teacher. A horrible teacher that can’t speak English … well, I got an A in the class, but I was one of a very lucky few.
Third Worst Class: An introductory astronomy course. Oh, don’t get me wrong, the teacher was charismatic enough to make you smile. But he didn’t teach anything interesting or worthwhile, and after a few class periods of nothing but self-deprecating “arentibaldandfatandanalcoholictoo” jokes it was a struggle to get to class each morning. (I wrote him an anonymous letter about how I thought he was too rambunctious to teach an effective class, and he read it aloud to the class. Eep.)
Fourth Worst Class: Vocal Production for the Stage. It was very little but a bunch of deep breathing/stretching. A majority of the class periods were taken up by students giving a Shakespeare sonnet and a short monologue twice each. Those were the only graded material and they were graded with great leniency (or I would’ve failed and not received an A like everyone else who showed up often enough).
Analytical Chemistry. 1 and 2. The first was taught by a mean little squirrely guy who liked to insult people for asking questions and who gave out 0s on labs if the data wasn’t exactly right to his taste (no points for doing the work, even though we had inferior equipment and 90% of the mistakes were due to HIS typos in the lab manual).
Anal 2. We had a sessional. It was clear that HE knew what he was talking about, but he just simply couldn’t teach the material to us. He was a nice guy, but had no clue how to present anything. His slides consisted of pictures taken out of the textbook, and then tests required us to calculate things that we’d only seen pictures for, no equations. Tough class, but well bell-curved and I actually did ok in the end.
Oddly enough, I am enjoying Anal 3, although I was forced to take it. It’s a different prof this semester than usual, and I LOVE the way the new prof teaches (I had him for another course, in which I got 90%).
Worst: French III. I foolishly elected to take the 8am class, which met for an hour every day of the week. If you happen to be taking statistics at the same time, you’re gonna miss a lot of French. Not that it would have mattered much. I’m not good with foreign languages. It was a requirement. I got a C+.
Second worst: something to do with the anatomy and functionality of the nervous system. It was especially concerned with the way reward and punishment circuits work, since it was part of the psychology department. I picked up the material in the text book easily enough. But the professor tended to say obtuse things like:
“All drugs are addictive because there’s no such thing as a mixed agonist-antagonist.” To this day, I’m not sure if that’s true about the agonist-antagonist thing… and even if it is, I don’t see how that really proves that all drugs are addictive. But I parroted it on the test.
Third worst was graduate level statistics for the behavioral sciences. Yuck.
And in fourth, a graduate class on literature of “Neverlands.” Sounded interesting. We devoted three weeks to Eudora Welty… which seems to be incompatible with a Y-chromosome. Not to say Welty’s bad, necessarily… but half the class didn’t get it.
Hmm…I have to call a tie between Latin American History and Business Law. I can’t recall any dates prior to 1960, and don’t care much for debating about how a company can turn a profit. Yuck.
Well I’ll see your French III and raise you French IV. Seriously though I know there’s another thread where everyone is patting themselves on the back about how great and wonderful manditory foreign languages education is. That I should have been grateful that my university made me waste my time by forcing this garbage down my throat. Of course if the vast majority of the people running these classes weren’t jokes I might agree.(I don’t say “teach” since these people couldn’t teach a dog to urinate on a hydrant.) The French IV class was done by this arrogant French bitch who obviously had almost no teaching experience and definitely rubbed me the wrong way. (She did brag “I speak English good enough to teach it.” and yes that how she said it. Even I realized it was grammatically flawed.) She was basically impossible to follow and made me wish I had no scruples so I would have been OK cheating in class.(I have nothing but ill will towards that churlish harpy.) Of course you’re lucky. The end result of all those bastards f*cking with me was they drove me crazy(yes, literally) and I now hate the French with an incredible passion. (Which of course any intellectual with any sort of honesty has to admit is now completely with in my rights and has been validated by their meddling.) Like I’ve said before, I can’t think of a better way to make a person hate a culture by simply have people of that culture torture the person for years. (Why yes, I am bitter about that.)
Dave_D, the same kind of thing happened to me in high school. For French III, we had a French-Canadian guy from Quebec. His accent was almost stereotypical. If you were going to cast “French toady” in, say, a war movie, you’d pick him for the part. He’d spend the first part of class telling us how horrible American students were…every day…and how horrible it was to be here and how everyone in Quebec was so much better and on and on…
Mmmmm this is a hard decision. I did Chem. Eng and even somehow managed to get a Masters in it with a complete and utter lack of understanding of thermodynamics. In my first year my “Basic Thermodynamics” class had a great lecturer would could explain well and gave good examples and also easy exam questions everyone passed most did well. Second year “Advanced Thermodynamics” we had a new lecturer who had just received his PhD in some thermodynamicy thingy type thing and was very very keen however he couldn’t teach for anything - research was more his thing - I have never seen an entire class sit for three hours with exactly the same WTF!! expression on their face for an entire semester. Tutorials were worse as no-one not even the guy who had a 99% average in most subjects could do the assignments. We were all frightened to ask for help or ask for him go over questions as he would give a huge sigh, roll his eyes say it was easy, repeat what he said in class and tell us to figure it out. Unsurprisingly the entire year failed and failed badly. But as the department could not have the whole class failing a subject we were given a make up assignment and told which text books the material was from. We commendered a lecture room one afternoon and did the assignment en masse - everyone passed!
Of course the other option was Computational Fluid Dynamics which was differential equations as far as the eye can see…
I was blessed with Professor Tsu for Economics 101. Mr. Tsu was from Taiwan and had a heavy accent. This was not the problem. He was a charming man and relished teaching. Again not a problem. He, however, worked for State agencies doing something related to rice production. This clearly was the highpoint of his life.
Every economic concept was related to rice production. Every example he used, both orally and on tests was about rice. To this day I think of economic concepts as they relate to a farmer producing rice. I have to work backward an extrapolate from the Taiwanese rice farmer to the larger world. Scarred me for life.
Theoretical symbolic logic. I actually enjoyed the first half of that class, which dealt with solving logical problems through deductive or inductive reasoning techniques, using a basic “toolset” of logical propositions. Where I got lost was the segue into the metatheorems behind the logical propositions. I can’t even clarify that last sentence, as I’m not even sure what it means.
Although I haven’t taken it yet (have it next semester), there is a biochem class here for straight chem majors. The professor’s inordinate fondness (and research on) for a particular molecule and her amazing ability to apparently relate everything to this molecule has already earned the class the nickname (molecule)chem.
