Oh, Melandry. I’ve put up with some pretty dippy lecturers in classes I’ve TAed, too.
You have my sympathy. Just be glad this semester will be all over soon, and that, even a year from now, this will have had absolutely no effect whatsoever on your career or the rest of your life. (Taking that philosophy was the only way I got through teaching for one of the worst classes ever this Fall Quarter.)
Jeez. Remember your mantra.
I put money on you guys meeting to fill out bubble sheets to turn in to the registrar, at which point asshat, seeing the outcome, has a little compassion anxiety epiphany and has you guys inflate final grades so that they are almost as bad as they used to be.
At least at this school the university itself schedules all the final exams-- ALL MWF 11 classes have a final exam at this time (Saturday at 8 AM being the most classic), et al, so that there can be no conflicts, so unless someone has a certified learning disability or lost an arm we don’t have to do a dang thing for make-exams except out of sheer pity, at our discretion.
Oh, my school has a final exam schedule like that, too capybara. It’s just that every year he puts in a special request to hold his final exam earlier so he can leave earlier (and the students are marginally happier to have an early final, too). Thus, the necessity of the make-up exam.
If it’s at all like previous years, though, we won’t be party to the final grade inflation. He usually just takes the grade lists from us and does that all himself.
So does this hallucinogenic mushroom theory have any support for it or not? I’m sure I’ve heard it before, but that, of course, could just mean that it’s a popular crackpot theory.
Personally, I believe that all religions have their origin in primitive RPGs, which would explain the discovery of Neolithic many-sided dice…
Well, I’m not an expert because I tend to tune that aspect of the class out to the extent that it’s possible, but my understanding is that there is pretty good evidence of religious/sacred Amanita muscaria use in several Indo-European cultures, however, when you get to the point where it’s being seriously declared that Philoctetes is actually a mushroom because he only has one good foot, I think you’ve gone past what’s supportable by scholarship.
I can’t mention my prof’s work, of course, but Gordon Wasson was the originator of the field, as I understand it. And until I found that page, I had no idea he was a vice president at J.P. Morgan. Wow. Totally not what I was expecting.
Hey, Melandry, what are you doing posting? Go study!!! 
Seriously, this brought up TAing nightmares for me, too, but at least the profs were slightly less insane. It was the idiot students who had no freaking clue what plagiarism was that drove me over the edge.
Good luck on the papers and finals!