My 9th grade math teacher was an OLD man, who apparently served in the military during some conflict that I don’t recall. He would stand in front of the class everyday, and recount his wartime memories, good and bad. EVERY. DAY. He had math problems on the board, but failed to explain them to us, but yet we were supposed to do the required work, while he was standing there, yapping away. Finally, one fine day, one of my classmates asked him if he had ever killed someone while in the military. He shut up and started TEACHING math. What a wonderful day that was. It’s a shame no one asked him that question sooner! We never heard anymore war stories after that. Thank Og!
My favorite instructor of all time taught Stat Mech held his office hours on Saturday morning. He was a high-muckity-muck, so he had an administrative assistant whose office you had to walk through to get to his. And of course the assistant wasn’t in on Saturday morning, so you’d come into the building and be confronted with a closed door with a dark office within, which, if you didn’t know about the administrative assistant thing, would lead you to believe that he wasn’t there, but if you knocked, you were ordered to “Enter!” His response to questions was, “This is all in the book. You need to go back and reread the book.” Which, of course, I had, not being the sort that pesters profs unless I am well and truly befuddled, especially when their office hours were Saturday fucking morning. If I could have figured it out from the book, I wouldn’t have been there. But he would yield up no actual help. I asked what sections I should focus on when reviewing the book, and he said, “Pretty much from Chapter 1 on.”
I learned two things in that course: jack and shit, and I already knew jack from undergraduate Stat Phys.
Okay, actually, that’s not quite true. I learned how it feels to be totally and completely lost in a class, which was something I’d never experienced before. This makes me a lot more . . . kind . . . toward students who wash up in office hours in the middle of the semester, nigh unto weeping in desperation because they are sure they’re going to fail.
My worst teacher was actually a damn good teacher who also happened to be an smug, judgmental, in-your-face control freak. I pretty much refused to learn higher algebra after being assigned to him; the school actually reassigned me to another teacher, which was something of a precedent.
Interesting that almost everybody’s “worst” teachers are not the bullies, the slavedrivers, the egomaniacs. They’re the lazyasses, the un-communicators, the intellectual slobs. This is probably better for the student’s maturation and development, because out in the big world, lots more people will accept bullying than laziness.
Ooh! Ooh! I remembered another one! We had a Spanish teacher in high school who was indeed a native speaker of that language. Some of us were really enthusiastic, as we were in our 3rd or 4th year of learning it and were sure we would get our accents authentically improved. Unfortunately, Mrs. Marquez was also very proud of being bilingual. She tended to speak mostly in English, promising us that “Next week in this class we speak only inna Espanish.” :rolleyes:
3 come immediately to mind:
7th grade history-
I don’t know if Mrs. W was having problems in her personal life but every morning for first period the routine was identical. She’d arrive late looking like she just rolled out of bed, throw her purse and jacket on the desk, turn the lights off and the overhead projector on, and copy her notes onto the overhead for a straight hour. It was your job to copy these notes into your notebook. She did this everyday without ever speaking a word.
Required college ethnic course “Afro-American Studies”-
The prof. took the opportunity of this class to stand on his soapbox and preach about the “man” and why white people were horrible and black people were repressed. My friend and I who took the class should have been angry but were more amused by this guys outrageousness. One of our favorites, nursing homes were invented by the white man to warehouse the elderly. Black folk would never put their elderly in an ‘institution’.
Politics in America 101- Another soapbox prof. who had a thick Europeon accent and liked to ridicule Americans any chance he could get. American business- idiots, American politicians- fools, American lawmakers, lawyers, doctors, etc.- clueless, Americans in general- sheep.
(on the other hand I have had numerous ‘outstanding’ professors but that’s for another thread)
This is a toss up -
As an undergraduate I had a class on the history of Great Britain that I was very much looking forward to taking. You can imagine my incredible disappointment when I got to class and the professor spoke so softly that I couldn’t understand a single fucking thing he said. It was maddening! We repeatedly had to ask him to speak up, and there couldn’t have been more than 10 people in the room to begin with. It wasn’t uncommon for us to spend have the class turning to each other and asking, “What did he just say?”
The other was a graduate professor who was teaching a course in effective public speaking and presentation skills. Damn near every other word out of his mouth was “uhmmmm,” pause, stammer, stutter, “uhmmmmm.”
I had a third-year professor of French linguistics in University who did not speak French. It was absolutely appalling. The very first class he tried to conduct in French, but gave up after about fifteen minutes of stumbling, stuttering, and being corrected by the francophone students. It was the most bizarre class I have ever taken. After that first class, he only spoke English.
At least you’ve all got teachers right there in front of you. Want to really have fun? Do the training via NetMeeting.
Mix together:
Trainer droning on about highly arcane subject (mainframe administration)
Trainer progressing through mainframe screens more rapidly than NetMeeting can transmit through the remote access VPN and your DSL line.
The result is a droning voice accompanied by psychedlic flashing of portions of screens. I’ve got a screen print of one example where three different screens are overlapped.
The trainer was evidently just brilliant at mainframe, judging by the speed they navigate and enter commands, but not so brilliant at transferring that information out of their head and into ours. When asked about how to look up something in a certain region, we’re told how it’s much more efficient to do it elsewhere, but no explanation of how to get to elsewhere, assuming we already knew.
I still don’t know.
Since I’ve gone and enrolled in college, I’ve been lucky - all my professors were wonderful! All three of them! :rolleyes:
However, in training I had to take for work, I took an XML class - and for three days, I could not understand one word the teacher said due to an extremely accent and a speech impediment. What they hey - I figure all this internet stuff is just a passing fad anyway, right? 
I can’t pass this thread by without throwing in one of my professors from my first year university course. I feel like I missed the part of the course he was teaching. Now, I’m not going to say this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about–I’m pretty sure he does, because everything he said made sense. But here’s the thing–I could never remember any of it. I’d be listening to his lecture and everything would be fine, but one minute later I wouldn’t be able to remember what he said one minute ago. It just didn’t stick in my head (I couldn’t even remember it long enough to write notes!). He also gave out notes before his lectures with all the more important points of what he was saying on it–reading those were as useless as listening to his lectures. I really might as well have skipped the lectures entirely.
I once had a Tai Chi instructor who was very intense. He ran around the room, pointing and yelling out suggestions and criticisms.
My 11th grade chemistry teacher once accidentally set his tie on fire with a Bunsen burner . That was more entertaining than bad teaching though. He was a perfect example of a stereotypical absentminded professor.
CHANGE YOUR TIE!
YOU SHOULDN’T WEAR THAT COLOR!
YOU COULD GO FOR PIZZA AFTER CLASS!
–Cliffy
It doesn’t sound like much, but my worst teacher ever just couldn’t teach. He reveled in passing out copies of study aids that he had made himself and run off on the copy machine, but he couldn’t convey knowledge to save his life, and he seemed to have no understanding at all of what “teaching” even means.
No matter what question a student asked, his answer was always a variation of, “that information was in the lesson.” WTF?? Apparently he thought his role was to make sure that we appeared in class and paid attention to our computer screens.
A few solid hours of students asking him questions that he didn’t answer wasn’t enough to clue him in to the fact that we didn’t understand the computerized lesson.
At one point he went around the room and asked us questions from the lesson, and if we didn’t know the answer we had to do pushups.* He had three quarters of the class on the floor doing pushups and it never occurred to him to TEACH!
Ah, the beauty is that he shortly thereafter went on to become an officer.
*This was in the Army. You can do that there.
My senior year calculus teacher. She was from Hong Kong, but had lived in America for a few years. She was about 21, teaching 17 and 18 year olds. And she was gorgeous. Seriously, she should have been a model.
Now, none of this would have been a problem, but she was more interested in chatting with students and buying stuff on eBay instead of teaching. Also, she couldn’t control the class at all. Students would go to the bathroom and not return until the end of class. People would eat, talk on their cell phones, and play cards. She would occasionally teach, but she’d have to do the lesson two or three times because only a few people would be paying attention each time.
Funny how so many people’s worst teachers just happened to teach computer science. Brace yourselves, but so did mine.
Dave was supposed to be teaching us data structures using Java on a Windows NT platform. I’m not sure if it was just reading from the book for three hours during lecture with a lousy attempt at a thoughtful facial expression or thinking that when you pushed CTL+ALT+DEL to logon, you had to push all three buttons at the same instant or it wouldn’t work, but by the third lecture we realized that this guy didn’t have a clue about computers. Once, when someone asked him about saving their work on the C drive, he replied “I’m unfamiliar with that concept”. That was the last question anyone asked in lecture.
As an added bonus, he wore a red bowtie and the same knitted sweater the whole week until it started to make us cry to be in the same windowless room with him. To top it all off, he once asked two sisters from Nigeria in our class about “rhythmic erotic dancing of Africa.” As God is my witness I am not making this up.
Diamond Dave lasted just long enough to ensure his place of honor in my pantheon of fucking waste-of-sheep-sperm teachers and then he was gone.
Oh, and the guy who hired him taught another programming class of mine, and his mom must have hit him with the Asperger’s stick once too often. We got through the course by giving him the affectionate nickname of “That maladjusted fuckwit who’d get rejected by a drunk Real Doll.” A real headcase in his own right who wound up getting a large chunk of my tuition money 'cause I was too stupid to quit while I was behind.
But I’m not bitter . . . :mad:
My university lecturer in aquatic biology/limnology had only just accepted the position. All his previous positions had been as an assistant lecturer and we were the fist class he had on his own. To say his teaching of practical science was abysmal leaves no to describe his application of the practical. Everyone just called him The Clown.
A combined limnology and aquatic biology course is going tot be pretty broad, but the previous Professor had structured such that it started with two weeks of geology, moved onto hydrology for a week, then to hydraulics etc. It was broad but it was broken up into manageable chunks. The Clown decided to restructure it. The result was an unfocussed mess. Instead that jumped from geology to thermodynamics to ecology to taxonomy to evolutionary theory, all within a single one hour lesson. The next week he covered all the same diverse subjects in slightly more detail. To say that attending lectures was pointless was an understatement.
But the real fun started on the practical field exercises. We went out collecting biological samples from a river. The Clown forgot to pack enough ethanol to preserve the material so half the class spent a bus ride home with several kilograms of decomposing seafood. At one point gas buildup led to one of the plastic bags bursting and flooding the aisle of the bus with the juices form several dozen rotten crawfish, fish, tadpoles, insects and so forth. This was rapidly followed by someone’s vomit, then of course a wave of sympathetic vomiting. The aisle was awash. Driver, students and staff were not happy.
We went out to do a survey of a small lake. The Clown forgot to make sure there was a bung for the drainage hole of the boat. Boat was backed into the lake, and immediately began to sink. We noticed this after a while, so myself and one other tall student waded out up to our necks to try to stop it going under completely. So here we are, struggling to hold up several hundred pounds of boat in freezing water while simultaneously trying not to drown as the weight of the vessel pushed us into the mud. The Clown then finds a bung and jumps into the boat from the shore so he won’t get his feet wet, and walks across the boat to put the bung in. Both of us holding up the boat get pushed down into the mud of course. I get dunked and surface spluttering. The other student nearly drowned because his feet had become stuck in the mud when The Clownjumped into the boat. He survived by leaving one of his boots behind.
Still, it was OK. We had a boat, we didn’t have to drive 50 miles to get a bung and a winch to refloat the vessel. Good thing he found that bung. We never even thought about where he found it. Until several hours later we were started doing an oxygen analysis on our water samples. This was a class exercise. Everyone collected water form different depths at different parts of the lake and the results were combined, with everyone writing their results in a small whiteboard. It was quite clear that all the oxygen levels were way to high.
Both mysteries were solved when we discovered that The Clown had borrowed the bung for the boat from one of the chemical flasks. That wouldn’t be so bad, except that the flask he borrowed it from was the reagent used for oxygen determination. The reagent had been exposed to so much oxygen that what was suposed to be a clear liquid had become a cloudy syrupy mess. And of course the oxygen determinations were so high that the water should have caused the air to spontaneously combust.
And these stories just go on and on. There are a million of them about the Clown from just 12 months exposure. It really is hard to imagine any instructor being worse. He managed to be an incompetent teacher while at the same time doing things that would make Inspector Clousseau look like a ballet dancer.
Observational Astronomy. Dr. C didn’t show up the first two days of class. When he finally did arrive, he came with copies of the ‘text’. The text that he was currently in the process of writing. In the form of several handouts. On the cover of the first handout was the notice:
I went home and looked up “pedagogical” just to be sure I hadn’t been mistaken as to its meaning. I was not mistaken.
Anyway, the guy couldn’t teach his way out of a paper bag. Most of the class was concerned not with actually learning how to use an observatory, but the process in which CCD chips (the electronic devices that gather images in telescopes as well as digital cameras) are fabricated. Nobody was really sure why that was relevant. I was never one to skip classes if I could avoid it, but this one tempted me. I think the only reason I ever showed up was because of the really cute French girl two rows up.
Dr. C did promise that eventually we would get to do observations from the University’s observatory. Well, that was almost true. Actually my lab partner and I went to the telescope and called out coordinates, and Dr. C would move the telescope to the right position. Then he downloaded the data into the computer for us. We never got to touch the equipment.
Then it fell to my lab partner and I to reduce the photometer data into some sort of results, using a program called IRAF. IRAF is, I’m sure, very powerful software, but it’s controlled by arcane, impossible-to-guess command-line instructions. What little documentation we were provided turned out to be incorrect. Dr. C eventually provided us with a new set of instructions, which were also incorrect. My lab partner and I eventually managed to track down a post-doc, who was kind enough to spend three hours trying to figure out how to get anything looking vaguely like data.
The final exam was a take-home exam. Simple enough, right? But it bore no relation to anything discussed in class, on the syllabus or in the ‘preliminary’ text. It made very little sense at all, and I decided just not to bother with it. (Later on I found out that I could have made a passing grade just for scribbling something resembling an attempt and turning it in.)
The next year they shipped Dr. C off to Chile to build a big observatory. A good portion of astronomy and physics undergraduates breathed a sigh of relief. I eventually took the class again with a different professor. I still made a fairly lousy grade, but I did pass. We learned useful information in the class, and I still have the astrophotos that I took and developed myself. Not to mention the memories of fun evenings with friends, working in the observatory.
I had a 4th grade teacher who’d grade anything I did lower than the same work by others. I knew she didn’t like me but that just made me try harder. After seeing me struggle, my best friend and I switched papers. My work but her name, her work but my name, and they were also identical with regard to the answers and how they were attained, esquisitely neat and tidy, the both of them. She received a ten with a ‘good job,’ I received an eight, no comment. Knowing you’re utterly screwed is a bit hard to take at 10 yrs old. About april I finally found out why she hated me. I overheard her telling one of the other nuns she thought allowing white kids into the school was going to be bad for the others and cause the school to lose it’s reputation for excellance in education.
Other than that, the only other bad experience was a symbolic logic class. At least that’s what I think it was. The course description made it sound like a regular logic class, but when I got there, we did equations. I’m certainly no math wiz, but managed to pass my first calculus class ever with a professor who never did anything but write out equations on the boards so fast, he had two assistants to keep them erased for him. But that logic class killed me.
The ‘professor’ would give us the assignment to work on at home and then he’d review the next week by reading the instructions for the previous week’s work. It wasn’t too hard the first three weeks because you could muddle through based on what you already knew about math and using the text’s explanations. Eventually I could fathom less and less, tutoring and study groups didn’t work. I had my roomate’s boyfriend, who was brilliant-- he’d been offered full scholorships in a bunch of majors at several colleges-- and a good tutor as well, help me. With him I was shaky but fine, the second he was gone and I was stuck in lecture, I went right back to lost.
It wasn’t just me. Out of about thirty students, we were down to ten by the mid-quarter. Of those remaining, we asked questions, we asked for reviews, then three kids just told him his teaching methods sucked, we weren’t learning, dammit. The showdown was finally going to happen-- those three girls were pissed and had nothing to lose. The SOB then pointed out the two guys who were still actually passing at that point and said he couldn’t be that bad because two students were passing, maybe the rest of us just needed to try harder.
One of the two students he’d singled out I knew for a fact didn’t understand, he was in the tutoring center with me, but his tutor gave him the answers after trying for an hour or two. The one guy who was passing then revealed it was easier for him because he’d taken it before but wanted a higher grade than the B- he’d gotten the last time. The prof just sat sort of goggle-eyed for about thirty seconds, then he put the front legs of his chair back down and gathered his papers. He dismissed us early, after assigning the week’s work for us to choke on and then stomped out. Next week, back to the same stuff.
He’s the only really bad professor I ever had, so I count myself darned fortunate.
I had a somewhat silmiar situation too. Except the subject was precalculus.
Ask me again why do I hate maths?