Professors sucking

[Eisa]

I think we need another thread like this.

I'm only reminded because of really mild suck on the part of my Sociolinguistics professor. She has a habit of only telling us about research projects the week before they're due. And I know they're online/on the syllabus, but we don't really know what she wants from them, so can't start them yet, you know? And that was ok for the first project because it was pretty short, just involved an interview. But this one? That she only gave us a little more than a week on? 5-page paper with 5 outside scholarly sources. On language death...having to pick a dying language, do a lot of research about it, and then write a fairly big paper on it. [I picked Irish. ] So...it's really minor suck, but it would be nice to have a little more notice on a 5-page paper, 'cause it's not like this is my only class.

Bigger suck in the past. My 2nd year French prof. Now, I was pretty good in French. Mainly because I took 2 years in high school and had done stupendously in those. [I won an award, actually. Both years. Actually, my teacher had me do this honors testing when I'd only had one semester of French...and I got the best score. That was awesome lol. But anyway.] So I was good in French, but I'm not magical, you know? And my prof was talking to me and telling me how she thought I would do really well if I would just skip 202 and go right into 301. Miss an entire semester's worth of grammar, etc. Why? Because she didn't want the 301 class to be canceled for lack of interest or whatever.

So I...very foolishly...agreed. How hard could it be? She was teaching it and she said that I would do very well in that class.

...WRONG. I was horrible. I mean, I might have been able to pass the class with an A, but that's only because her grading system was messed up. She heaped praise on her "good" students while she ignored everyone else. By the way, I was one of the ones she then ignored because my French skills weren't up to par. Why? Gee, I don't know...maybe because I hadn't taken the pre-req?! To top all of that off, I was dealing with a ton of PTSD issues and some other pretty difficult classes for my major. I didn't need this.

To recap some more horrible stuff about her teaching style: she sucked at teaching concepts. She liked assigning actual stories to us and having us answer all these questions and do a ton of assignments based off them. Only problem? Hardly any of us could READ the stories because we didn't have nearly enough vocabulary. And it's not like we were just learning, it was just that the stories were that advanced. Another time--and I wasn't there for this--she actually BLEW UP at the whole class, telling them how stupid we all are and that it's our fault for not getting all these grammar concepts. I don't know, if hardly ANY of your students are getting it, don't you think maybe you should take a look at yourself first?

I ended up petitioning to withdraw. She was actually really nice about it [because even though I wasn't her "favorite," I was a nice, shy girl...not a troublemaker at all], but the school? Sucked. It got denied because I "didn't withdraw from all my classes." You see, if you're withdrawing due to PTSD, you have to be failing everything! Not, you know, working your ass off to stay up to date with your other classes. So I now have an F on my transcript and I'm STILL pissed about that.

And another French-related suck. My French 101 prof was...very strange. He went through boxes of chalk. His teaching style wasn't the suck, it was other stuff. I ended up feeling very uncomfortable around him. He liked touching my shoulders and coming up behind me. One day, he had me stay after and he taught me how to write some Armenian words because my "handwriting was so pretty." Found out from another girl a couple years later that he also had a propensity to only pay attention to the girls with big boobs, and he made fun of another kid's accent. Dick.

Aaaaaaaaand one last one. From junior high. My P.E. teacher...would stare at all the girls' butts when they ran. And what little boobs they possessed. I don't know if anything happened to him [I don't think so], but I know I was petrified to tell. It's hard to judge that, you know? Like...is he REALLY staring? Yeah...yeah, he was.

Ok, and another one. Was just kind of gross. My 7th grade Physical Science teacher...never wore a bra. And they sagged. And you could see how er excited she was. GROSS!


Any other stories of professorial mayhem?

[LingualMonkey]

I've got one.

This is from my last semester in grad school. One of the final classes I needed for my linguistics degree was phonology. Now, my university had only four linguistics professors (it's a very small part of the English department), and this was my first (and last) encounter with this professor.

As students, we could drop a class up to eight weeks in without it going on our transcript (although we didn't get money back). After eight weeks...everyone had a score of 0. No graded work for the first eight weeks, so there was no way to know how you were doing. If you were completely confused, your grade was the same as the person who got everything perfectly.

The class met on Tuesday and Thursday (this is important). On the Tuesday of the ninth week (now too late to drop), he convened the class and told us we had a take-home test that week. He passed it out, and said that because of the test, there would be no Thursday class. This happened six weeks in a row. So, weeks 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 we had class on Tuesday, got a take-home test and had no class on Thursday. Six weeks, six take-home tests.

Other annoyances. I once got a B on an assignment because my answer to a problem, while as logically correct as his suggested answer, wasn't as "pretty" as his answer.

Also, he would regularly start class by walking into the room, setting his things down, looking at us, and saying, "I brought the wrong stuff." He'd then disappear for 10 minutes as we walked back to his office and got the right stuff.

Man, I hated that!

[Jay 2K Winger]

I don't really recall many bad teachers like are being described here, to be honest.

The "worst" teacher I can recall having? That would be my Spanish teacher from my junior and senior years of high school. She called herself "La Bruja." (The Witch.) She'd been called that by some of her students one year, and she adopted it as her name in class. (This was also explained because it helped students differentiate between her and another teacher who had the same surname as her, but wasn't related to her.) While class was in session, she refused to speak or acknowledge English unless you were asking "Como se dice <blank> en espanol?" (How do you say <blank> in Spanish?) There were times when she would call a time-out, and explain something important in English so she could be sure we all got it, but otherwise, Spanish only.

This may not seem so bad to you, and I can admit it's a good way to make sure that the class learns enough to pass the course! But when you factor in that both years, she was the first class of the day for us-- us being a classroom of twenty-odd teenagers who don't get nearly as much sleep as we need by virtue of our school starting about two hours earlier than was sane-- and that meant that Bruja had a classroom full of zombies to deal with. Our brains were not fully awake when we had to deal with her, and having to shift our brains into translating everything into Spanish? Yeah, not fun.

Especially since Bruja also took pleasure in setting off one of her many noise-making toys next to anyone's head when they fell asleep.

[ExRetailDrone]

My high school physics teacher was pretty crazy, but for some reason the students all LOVED him. He was the type who was very charismatic, otherwise he would never have gotten away with all of his stunts. I only had him for a semester (had to do directed study the other half because of other class conflicts), so I wasn't able to see him in all his glory like other classmates were. I sat in the back of the classroom. We had lab tables that we sat at, and I liked propping my feet up on mine. Hey, it was my senior year, whatevs. He usually didn't say anything, but one day he must have been feeling particularly irritated because he decided to yell at me and throw an eraser at my head. I laughed at him and threw it back

A couple of years earlier, before I ever had him as a teacher, I was really introduced to his personality for the first time. Before this I had only heard stories. He was in charge of high school bowl, and me being a fairly smart cookie, he was trying to get me to join the following year. I'm ok at trivia and such things, but I really didn't think I'd be good at high school bowl, and frankly I was involved in so many other things that I just didn't want to do it. Well, he didn't want to take no for an answer. One day, he pinned me up against a locker and wouldn't let me go until I promised to join the following year Not in any sort of way that I felt threatened, I found it hilarious actually. Any other male teacher, oh hell no. Regardless, I never joined the team.

The only other teacher I can think of was the senile math teacher I had in 5th grade. I had his class after lunch, and one of the main things I remember is him having jello near the crotch of his pants I'm not sure if this was a common occurrence or it was just so memorable that it's stuck with me, but.. yeah. He was also the one who made me write "I will learn to follow directions" 100 times because, for a quiz, I had torn the sheet of paper the wrong way than what he had instructed. I was pissed about that. Seriously, the paper was in half, who cares?

[Mishi]

The worst teachers that I ever had were my year 6 class teacher (he had PTSD and wasn't coping well), my year 10 Mathematics teacher, and my year 10 English teacher.

The Math teacher was a pervert that constantly checked out all the girls and enjoyed humiliating the pretty ones. Most of the class failed due to his teaching style (puzzle worksheets, lots of yelling and very little explanation). I walked out of the class and refused to return until the head of the department reprimanded him for singling me out in front of the class for failing a test. I got 30%, 3 people received 0% and there were others that had received lower marks than I did on that test. The highest mark was somewhere around 50%. Oddly, most of us had Introductory Physics with another teacher and all scored between 70-100%.

The English teacher brought all her family problems to school, constantly embarrassed her son (in the year below my class) by talking about his personal business and would also go on nonsensical rants about Australian law, Indian caste systems and the Bible. She couldn't tell myself and my best friend apart even though we have different shades of blonde hair, different eye colours, different body shapes and she was 10cm taller than me. She also insisted on randomly talking about supernatural stuff, reduced my devoutly Christian best friend to tears and couldn't see anything wrong with that.

[Whiskey]

[I picked Irish. ]

Irish isn't a language, is it? Gaelic?

[LadyAndreca]

Irish isn't a language, is it? Gaelic?

Yes, it is. Irish (Gaeilge, or 'Irish Gaelic' in English) is related to Scottish Gaelic and Manx--I believe it's the root language for both--and is the first official language of Ireland. Only a small percentage of the Irish speak it natively, but most of them learn it it school. The language itself is over 2000 years old, and it's the oldest written language in Western Europe still in use today.

I...may have just finished two semesters of Irish for my college language requirement. Love the language, can't use it enough to keep it fresh...much to the disappointment of my professor, who shops at my store.

[Imogene]

Quick aside: That was totally NOT what I was expecting the thread to be about... false advertising! I'll sue!

[Victoria J]

Apologies for the complete derailment and shameless attempt to get someone to answer my random questions.

I...may have just finished two semesters of Irish for my college language requirement. Love the language, can't use it enough to keep it fresh...much to the disappointment of my professor, who shops at my store.

LadyAndreca - you don't know how to say "black and white" do you ?

I wish to be able to describe my cat (She's called Pan - and I sometimes call her Pangur Ban. I understand that Ban means white, but my girl is a "tuxedo" cat. (I guess the language you learned may be as different from old Irish as current English to Old English though).

Opportunistically,

Victoria J

[chainedbarista]

My P.E. teacher...would stare at all the girls' butts when they ran. And what little boobs they possessed.

i had one like this...in fifth grade; if you think seventh graders had little to look at, imagine fifth graders. his favorite punishment was to make girls do pushups while he looked down their shirts.

another teacher (fourth grade) liked to massage his groin during class...yah.

one of my actual favorites was a marine instructor for my ammunition course in the military. his chosen methods for waking up sleepers involved chalky erasers and duct taped rolls of tp.

[Magpie]

Undergrad, my 3B term. Our prof for kinematics and dynamics of machines. It was a lot of little things. For example - he'd never be on campus to meet with people until 17:00 (we'd mostly gone home for dinner by then), but he would stay as late as you wanted, "until midnight even". It's how he said it - he was really hard to get ahold of, but tried to make it sound (in tone of voice to, not just phrasing) that he was really accommodating because he was willing to stay so late.

He wouldn't explain things completely enough (mostly, but not 100%), and then he'd give an example to explain it. But he wouldn't bother finishing all the math to finish the example, because we "could see how it goes". Most of the class was perpetually left in the state of "really really confused because you get most of it but not all of it". All I can say about that course is I really recommend dating someone who's done most of the same courses as you a few years earlier

I was lucky, and never have I looked back at any teachers and said "gee, I wish I'd known better when I was younger, I'd have reported him for sexual harassment."

[Jay 2K Winger]

The only other teacher I can think of was the senile math teacher I had in 5th grade. I had his class after lunch, and one of the main things I remember is him having jello near the crotch of his pants I'm not sure if this was a common occurrence or it was just so memorable that it's stuck with me, but.. yeah. He was also the one who made me write "I will learn to follow directions" 100 times because, for a quiz, I had torn the sheet of paper the wrong way than what he had instructed. I was pissed about that. Seriously, the paper was in half, who cares?

OHHH, you just reminded me of a teacher I had at the technical school I recently got my Associates at.

I had to take this basic Problem Solving course, since I didn't have any other credits that would cover it. I didn't mind, since it was mostly basic math and whatnot, and I liked having an easy course. We covered different ways of approaching a problem, and solving it in various methods. When turning in homework or a test/quiz, you had to show your work. Makes sense, right?

This teacher would take points off if you solved a problem using a method other than what we were supposed to be using. I could understand it if he was doing this because the "wrong" method took longer. But I lost points on a quiz because I'd used a simpler method to solve the problem, still got the right answer, but lost points. I wasn't the only one who'd gotten nailed in such a manner on quizzes. And he would not allow you to challenge your score on those questions.

I was angry as hell about it, and in response, on the next quiz, I solved a problem using an "incorrect" method, but which still gave the correct answer (I'd used a scrap piece of paper to solve it the "correct" way to be sure), then pointedly drew big arrows at the proof of work and wrote PROOF! above it. He didn't take points off for that one.

[Bronzebow]

He was also the one who made me write "I will learn to follow directions" 100 times because, for a quiz, I had torn the sheet of paper the wrong way than what he had instructed. I was pissed about that. Seriously, the paper was in half, who cares?

I hated that! Who cares if you don't do all the steps the same way as your arbitrarily ordered instructions, as long as the end result is the same? Reminds me of that episode of Malcolm in the Middle about the box breaking area.

I had a college professor that was pretty bad. He's a great guy, but his teaching style was abysmal. His accent was thick, his written English...off. Normally it wouldn't be a problem except that it kinda made test taking in his class fun. His justification for poorly written questions: If the question was so bad that a lot of people banged against the language barrier, the curve will make up the difference. Nothing like the RNG style of test taking.

I had a college level composition professor who hated men. I can't even remember the number of times she'd make some snippy comment or gone into some rant about how women are better than men for whatever the topic of the day was. After one guy made a comment about driving, she snapped and went into rant mode: "There are more women than men, women are smarter than men, and I guarantee I can drive better than any one of the guys in here." Casual conversations around the classroom suggested gender favoritism for grading. She offered to read our papers before we turned them in and give us pointers on what to improve. I did once--she said that my paper was very good and that fleshing out this one section would improve it. I did just that, turned it in the next day, and got a 75. Yay.

This wasn't as bad as it was just annoying, but my fifth and sixth grade teachers were real pains. They were over the top strict about us lining up to go to the cafeteria, recess, whatever. If even one student was judged to be ever so slightly out of line, they'd make us walk laps around the hallways to "practice walking in a straight line." I'm not making this up. What real world skills! To make this even more ridiculous, our hallways had those broken line traffic markings so that each half of the hallway was one-way. This wasn't an issue of the whole class crowding the hallway to block others. These two teachers were absolutely nuts about treating their ten year old students like they were rowdy kindergartners. It's just a slightly comical footnote from elementary memories.

In high school, I had this right of a man for my senior year history. Two big incidents really pushed me to the edge, though there weren't exactly a whole lot of fond memories. One day, he asked for a volunteer to write up a short essay about Isis and Osiris. We'd have one day to write it; it'd be read the next morning. No bonus points, no extra credit, no grade. The topic interested me, so I raised me hand. Wrote an essay about a typed page long after I'd finished the rest of my standard homework. It was mostly just the story about their ascension into deities and how they, ah, fertilized the Nile river. The next day, I read it in front of the class, and this guy just gave me a disappointed look. "I thought you'd do more than that. We need more detail." Accepted the paper begrudgingly and continued to summarize everything I'd just said...in about a quarter of the words I'd used.

Glad my volunteered, last minute crunch time extra work wasn't good enough for you, Narcissus.

That didn't end there though. The same guy, a month or so later. Now, for full perspective of this, know that I was not popular in high school. I didn't have a lot of friends, and the few that I had were often fair weather, at best. There was an alternate student (the teacher was out that day, so he was assigned to sit in this guy's class for that class/hour) that ended up sitting close to me. He spied the Link shield that was on my key chain and struck up a conversation. He was a cool guy. I was ecstatic to have the chance to make a new friend. The moment the late buzzer sounded, we stopped talking and I went back to paying attention to the teacher. It's important to note that class does not officially start until the third buzzer sound, and we stopped talking at the first.

The very moment that the third buzzer stopped, this "teacher" started yelling at the alternate and me at the top of his lungs. It's disrespectful to talk during class and we're going to get detention if we keep that bull[] up! The stark contrast from grinning and having a confidence boost was just shattered in about ten seconds of bellowing. The other kid never talked to me again, in the hall or otherwise. It sucked.

[Kheldarson]

Teaching wise? My worst professor was my Economics prof. Man could NOT teach to save his life. Good thing he had tenure. Everything was from the book. His notes, lectures, tests, examples, everything. Don't understand the book? Too bad, he can't describe it any better. Only two classes I have ever skipped religiously. Still mad an A, though Yay curves!

Just overall sucking? That would be the prof from hell. But Kabe and I have described him enough.

[Eisa]

Whiskey et al: Yep, it can be called just Irish. I actually asked someone who lives in Ireland because I thought it was "Gaelic," and she was like, "We just call it Irish..." I think Gaelic's perhaps an Anglicization of the Irish word for the language?

This now reminded me of my Honors Algebra 2 teacher in tenth grade. Now, I'd ended up in honors math in seventh grade. I didn't pass the impossibly difficult test in sixth grade, but they did another test once you hit seventh grade just to make sure...and I passed that one. So I was put in honors math, took Algebra 1 in 8th grade, and then had Geometry in 9th grade.

Now my confidence already took a nosedive because I was horrible in Geometry. I've actually never been all that great in math [to the point that I actually got tested for a learning disorder], so I was a little surprised to be put in honors, anyway. But Geometry? I almost got a D in it. I could not understand ANY of it. I still don't. I'm horrible with anything spatial. I think half the time, my teacher just took pity on me.

So cue Algebra 2. I was thinking, "Well, at least this can't be as bad as Geometry! " 'Cause I had passed Algebra I ok [although I got a 14 on a test once...It was all about the slope-intercept formula...guess who forgot the formula right before the test? ].

Wrong. My teacher was awful. He had a bit of an accent that made it difficult to understand him sometimes [I think he was from Iran maybe?], but his way of teaching sucked. He taught it ONE way. Kind of. And if you didn't get it? Tough shit. He would also do stupid stuff like "fish plus chair equals shoe." Could you make sure your students understand wtf the concept is because you start going off on some weird abstract tangent? 'Cause it's NOT HELPING.

Most of the class didn't have a clue. And again, this is the Honors Math class. The only people who did well at all were the ones who could teach themselves, basically. If you were having difficulty? Tough luck.

One girl, Kendall, even ended up bursting into tears in the middle of class because she didn't understand a single thing he was talking about. He just started kind of lighting into her, like, "Why are you crying? There's nothing to cry about, you don't need to cry." I saved my crying for home.

I ended the year with a B, and I think the only reason I got that much is because I somehow started to understand the end and got lucky on the final. It certainly wasn't due to ANYTHING my teacher did. My sister had him a couple years later, and he did all the exact same things.


Oh! My AP Bio teacher was kind of sucky. His teaching style was all right, but his tests had almost nothing to do with what we'd gone over...OR what was in the book. They were all extremely involved detailed questions that often involved picking out JUST the right thing, and were often not even in the book or his notes. We were just supposed to guess it, apparently. He said his tests were to "prepare us for college." As you can imagine, we all then became terrified of college! I also found out later that he gave good grades to all the athletes/people who were his favorites, even if they hadn't earned them. That pissed me off...I worked my ass off in that class. I got a 3 on the AP test, so at least I passed and got credit for this school, but...man. I still find it funny that there was a guy who got an F in the class...but a 5 on the AP test.