Worst Professor Ever

[ottid]

I'm curious to know from those State side, how prestigious is it to have a Harvard Teaching Award? My classmates and I were working on seminar together and joking about how bad his teaching was. We decided to look up his profile on the Uni website, and he as an award from Havard for teaching.

His lectures are full of um's and ah's, in my other paper of the same level in the same department, we cover way more information and still have to research more to understand most of it. I understand that he may not want to spoon feed us etc, but there is always more information out there. The more info you give us directly the harder you get to grade us right? I'm still to actually take a decent amount of notes from this guys lectures, most of what is covered is in his slides which we can get off the internet anyway.

[HorrorFrogPrincess]

My worst teacher was Macro-economics. He was a self-professed bigot, very boring, and pretty much lectured all boring class. I passed just fine, but read in the class. He even asked me once in the middle of a lecture if I was bored or something. I told him I'd rather be reading, and read. When we got our finals back, he said something about not liking my attitude.

I passed, so I don't care. I don't like bigots. I'd have dropped the class, but needed it for my degree, and didn't want to have to stay in school longer.

[EricKei]

I managed to get away with only one true "nightmare" prof in college (the monotone-voiced fellow who taught History doesn't count). This was a Basic German 2 professor -- I had had a couple of years of the language in High School, so I figured I'd use this course to catch up and satisfy my foreign language requirement...I didn't last a month before I had to drop. It's not so much that he was HARD, but that he was a complete asshole. Here was his preferred "teaching" style:

On non-quiz days: talk about the day's lesson, like any other teacher

When we were due for a quiz the following day:

- Assign a certain chunk of the chapter, saying to read it before the next class. This was usually done five minutes before class ended. It did NOT include any mention -- or basic intro -- to the concept to be studied

- On the next day, have people come up to the front and write out sentences involving this new concept which we had, by now, only passing familiarity with and no actual instruction on.

Nothing TOO bad so far, right? Just your normal "OK, this is how to do it properly" sort of thing...*buzz* Nope! Continuing...

- He would then proceed to *make fun of* people writing these sentences...On concepts they had not been taught. Not as in "no, try again, dingbat, here's the info you need"...his preferred method was more like "OH! I see! The chocolate is walking the duck! Uh-HUH...SIT DOWN!"

I wish I was joking.

For the record, I wound up taking 3 years' worth of Japanese instead, and I got straight A's all the way through. Much easier...well, the writing was nasty, but speaking it was nothing compared to German...

[Cats]

Well, I don't have any professor stories, but I do have one of my High School Senior English teacher.

The woman didn't know that "ground zero" was an actual general term and not just one to describe the 9/11 disater site (which had occured that school year). She'd been teaching for 30+ years too. Every 7th class day we had a long period (we had a rotating schedule, so every middle period of the day was a long period during lunch), and in prep for it, we had to make 2 little journal entries about stuff we'd read...with one rule, one HAD to be on a book. Though it tended to come with an unwritten rule too, that she had to have heard of said book.

Which screwed me, since I don't read books. I read and I read a lot, but High School english teachers KILLED my love of reading (mainly by all the analyzing everything and that we HAD to like all these great books. Sometimes a good story is just that, and that a dislike of well, anything really, doesn't necessarily mean it's BAD). It didn't matter that I read newspapers, magazines, research works, fan written works, text books, oh no. Because apparently not reading well-known published stories makes you a dumbass.

She resented me for other reasons too. Despite her teaching it for years (due to being school requirement), I knew and understood Shakespeare's Macbeth better than she did, not to mention knew most of the actual history (which she didn't believe, since Shakespeare wouldn't lie or make stuff up cause he was a literary god).

And the kicker, she was a scam artist. That's right, a teacher who had students working in the retail buisness, came into our store with no shame and would return stuff without reciepts that we all knew she had bought on sale, but returned for full price. Since we had a semi-lenient refund policy (we have no "lowest price in 90 days" or such policy for items returned without a slip) and she didn't commit her crimes in a close enough time period, we could never actually "prove" it to a level where we could take action, but all the kids knew she was doing it. Yeah, way to be a role model. If you're going to be stupid and scam, you'd best not do it in a place where you are well regognized.

Shame besides the 1 semester senior gym, her's was the only other class left I needed to graduate. Yeah, a whole year of life wasted spending 45 min a day in a class with a woman who sucked at her job. Oh how I wish schools around here had programs for early graduation. Though one 16 year old girl in a nearby town is being PRAISED for maturity and intelligence level for doing so. Hello, a ton of people I know would be capable of graduation at that age had there been a way to skip grades and move up in courses. Man I hate the school systems around here.

[Andara Bledin]

Cats' story reminds me of my freshman year high school literature teacher.

This was a woman that could not spell "soccer" correctly (or a host of other words), had difficulty conjugating a sentence, had absolutely zero control of her students (I spent most of the year passing notes, and I was one of the goody-2-shoes kids!), and had no spine.

Over half of her class failed every year because she was so awful.

Oh, and my brother had her two years later, and he made a habit of correcting her grammar and spelling. I know it's mean, but he made her cry all the time, and I kinda felt proud of him for it.

Thankfully, my other English teachers knew what the hell they were doing, and my senior year teacher kicked ass; she played Iron Maiden's Rime of the Ancient Mariner in class while we studied the original.

^-.-^

[HorrorFrogPrincess]

I knew and understood Shakespeare's Macbeth better than she did, not to mention knew most of the actual history (which she didn't believe, since Shakespeare wouldn't lie or make stuff up cause he was a literary god).

Oh, should have told her that good ol' Bill made up half the English language. Many of the phrases and terms we use he just pulled out of ye olde back entrance.

[BarbieGirl]

I've had more than my fair share of bad teachers.

7th grade vocabulary (can't remember the name of the class) She came to school drunk too many times to count. Had her scheduled for an 8th grade class but she got in a dui hit and run and went to jail.

8th grade- the sub for the aforementioned teacher was a witch. She would just scream at the students and throw the homework papers at everyone. One assignment pretty much everyone just copied each other and she randomly failed students, but not everyone. (she was eventually fired)

10th grade geometry. She was crazy. Didn't know the subject, would do a problem on the black board and come out with the wrong answer, look at it laugh and then go play on the internet laughing every couple of minutes while we 'worked the problem out'.

College- bunches and bunches. One that ticked me off the most. Had her for two english classes, one of which was online. She gave the same midterm for both classes and it was mostly a how you personally felt about the meanings of the short story (forget what it was, but I think it was something about wall paper roses) Well since I had the two classes within a year of each other I felt pretty much the same and wrote pretty much the same paper. The inclass one I passed with a low A/ high B (can't remember exactly). The online one I think I got a C or D, I didn't hand it an exact copy of the original, I rewrote it but it was esentially the same.

[ottid]

College- bunches and bunches. One that ticked me off the most. Had her for two english classes, one of which was online. She gave the same midterm for both classes and it was mostly a how you personally felt about the meanings of the short story (forget what it was, but I think it was something about wall paper roses) Well since I had the two classes within a year of each other I felt pretty much the same and wrote pretty much the same paper. The inclass one I passed with a low A/ high B (can't remember exactly). The online one I think I got a C or D, I didn't hand it an exact copy of the original, I rewrote it but it was esentially the same.

How would they be able to have the same assessment for a different paper? You can tell if they use the exact same exams here, they embargo them. I think you can go check your marks, ie what you got for the three different essays you wrote or whatever it may be, but at the end of the day you can't take the essays or the question booklets home.

[Dave1982]

I've already talked at length about my worst professor, but here are a couple smaller incidents resulting from carelessness. One was the professor's fault, the other is a case of a poorly done textbook.

Hello......conservation of mass!!


WARNING: SCIENCE CONTENT!!

I had to take two semesters of basic science to satisfy Core Curriculum requirements. I'd wanted to take Chemistry, since I'd enjoyed it and excelled at ti in high school, but had been talked out of it since it'd be far too much work for CC stuff. Both semesters also had a separate lab component that was also required.

(As an aside, due to some weird course selection glitch, I was unable to take the SC-101 (heh heh) lab in the same semester that I took the classroom portion, and had to take this lab two semesters later).

So for the SC-101L, we had several lab practicals (tests). ALL of the lab material - including all the tests and the lab manual - had been written by the department head, who I happened to get for the classroom part of SC-101. This guy was very full of himself and a self-professed asshole, but I never had an issue with him since I knew the material backwards and forwards. He was also a hypocrite, in that he said he'd take off big points for spelling and grammatical errors on papers, yet the very sentence on the syllabus containing that threat had TWO spelling errors in it.

Anyway, on the lab practical concerning the decay of radioactive substances, there was a problem that went something like this:

"You have a sealed lead box - massing 200 grams - which contains 200 grams of Element A and 400 grams of element B. The half-lives of these elements are [gives half-lives]. After x amount of time has passed, what is the mass of the box and its contents?"

Now, obviously the intention here was to calculate how many grams of Elements A and B were left after having decayed for x amount of time. But as I was doing the calculations, it started to dawn on me that the answer to the question would have to include the mass of the box, as well as the mass of the decay by-products. Now, there was no information given as to whether or not alpha particles could escape the container, but the fact that it's described as a "sealed lead box" could only lead to the assumption that all the by-products would remain inside.

Therefore, the answer had to be 800 grams, regardless of how much of Elements A and B were left.

So I went to the lab instructor and asked very diplomatically if this was a trick question. I explained all the above, and she slowly began to realize that I was right. However, she felt that the point was still to do the decay calculation, and I agreed. I ended up carefully phrasing my answer as "After x time, the total mass of the box and it's contents is 800 grams, of which 200 grams is the box, x grams of Element A, y grams of Element B, and C grams of unknown decay byproducts."

This led to an extended discussion about that question when the next lab period, where I was commended for having seen beyond the scope of test and finding that problem.


OK, just how are we supposed to do that?

Another class I had to take was an introductory programming course in VB.net (it was a pre-req for a course I needed for my minor). Now, I'm not much of a programmer, but it seemed the instructor wasn't either, because EVERYTHING he taught was directly out of the textbook, as were all the assignments. His tests were very similar to the problems listed in the book.

Now, one particular assignment in the book was to create a simple program and interface for determining late fees for video rentals (oh joy). It specifically required the using of date/time drop down boxes to input the times, and then required you to use the data from those inputs to calculate if the rental had been returned late, etc.


Two problems:

1) In VB.net (or at least, the current version of VB.net at the time; this was in 2002), drop-down box input could ONLY be returned as a STRING variable. Attempting to use INTEGER, SINGLE, or DOUBLE (numerical variable types) would cause the program to fail.

2) NO WHERE in the textbook did it explain how to convert a STRING into something that could actually be used to do calculations. NO WHERE. Trust me, I spent a lot of time reading ahead trying to figure this out. And even IF the answer was in there, it wasn't in the chapters leading up to this particular assignment (which was in the book).

So, in short, the assignment was impossible to complete using the textbook as your only reference. Way to go, author. You really dropped the ball there. And way to go professor, for not going through what you assigned to see if it could be done.

I ended up having to go online and DIG for the command that convert the date/time STRING to a numeric variable that I could actually use. Even then, I had to figure out on my own how to format it, otherwise it would return the time in a form I could not use. As I recall, I had to specify HHmmss (Hours, Minutes, seconds) rather than hhmmss because a lower-case h would return 12 hour time with no AM/PM differentiation, and a captial H returned 24 hour time.

It was a nightmare. I wrote a small book in the comments detailing hte problem and my solution, which the instructor ended up copying verbatim into his solution key ().

I ended up being the ONLY person who was able to turn in a fully functional program, since no one else figured it out. So the instructor had to fudge the grades on that assignment so as to not penalize anyone for the mistake in the assignment. That rendered my extra-work worthless from a grade standpoint.

[JoitheArtist]

I knew and understood Shakespeare's Macbeth better than she did, not to mention knew most of the actual history (which she didn't believe, since Shakespeare wouldn't lie or make stuff up cause he was a literary god).

Um...was she not clear on the concept of "artistic license"? Of COURSE he made crap up, it made for a better story than the facts! Geez, he was a writer, not a historian.

[JoitheArtist]

Hello......conservation of mass!!


WARNING: SCIENCE CONTENT!!

Now, obviously the intention here was to calculate how many grams of Elements A and B were left after having decayed for x amount of time. But as I was doing the calculations, it started to dawn on me that the answer to the question would have to include the mass of the box, as well as the mass of the decay by-products. Now, there was no information given as to whether or not alpha particles could escape the container, but the fact that it's described as a "sealed lead box" could only lead to the assumption that all the by-products would remain inside.

Therefore, the answer had to be 800 grams, regardless of how much of Elements A and B were left.

Nice catch!! You should get one of these: http://store.xkcd.com/xkcd/#StandBackScience

[Red Hand of Ulster]

She gave the same midterm for both classes and it was mostly a how you personally felt about the meanings of the short story (forget what it was, but I think it was something about wall paper roses)

I'm willing to bet it was "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. For some reason, English teachers, especially the ones for analytical English, love this story.

Um...was she not clear on the concept of "artistic license"? Of COURSE he made crap up, it made for a better story than the facts! Geez, he was a writer, not a historian.

Well, this was the same prof that's never heard of the term "ground zero" outside of 9/11....

[BarbieGirl]

How would they be able to have the same assessment for a different paper? You can tell if they use the exact same exams here, they embargo them. I think you can go check your marks, ie what you got for the three different essays you wrote or whatever it may be, but at the end of the day you can't take the essays or the question booklets home.

This was at a community college and it's not a very strict one regarding testing. Generally it's a matter of teacher preference whether or not you can keep the questions etc. My mid term was one she let us take home and work on. The second was online and submitted online. With everything returned to you after it was graded.

RHU-
And yes I do believe it was "The Yellow Wallpaper" now that you mention it.

[derangedperson]

Thankfully, my other English teachers knew what the hell they were doing, and my senior year teacher kicked ass; she played Iron Maiden's Rime of the Ancient Mariner in class while we studied the original.

I'm going to enroll at your old school just so I can do this. That's AWESOME.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Thankfully, my other English teachers knew what the hell they were doing, and my senior year teacher kicked ass; she played Iron Maiden's Rime of the Ancient Mariner in class while we studied the original.

^-.-^

I had a professor who played Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" before every lecture.

Unfortunately, he was a spaced-out imbecile with some really nutty ideas about crime, punishment and politics.

He considered anybody who didn't share his political leanings Nazis, and he even used the term to describe them in one of his speeches.

What happened after that will not be discussed here.