The (Very Un-Funny) Nutty Professor

[LibraryLady]

At the start of every term a certain Professor became the bane of our lives. He taught a course that all in-coming students had to take. The title of it was something like "World Cultures to 1500 AD". You can imagine what would have to be covered in 12 weeks. It was an insane course but the Prof was much, much more insane.

He gave an assignment of 50 questions and demanded that his students come to our Library to research the assignment. The students had to attach their Museum admission receipts to their papers. The problem was that many of the questions were not answerable. At the least, they were ambiguous. Here are some of the questions. They are taken directly from the assignment. My commernts are enclosed in square brackets.

1) Where does the Occident begin and end? Using your atlas, give exact co-ordinates. [Say whaaah?]

2) Which came first -- the mummy or the coffin? [See my comment above]

3) Describe Sacral Kingship. What does it entail? [Our Library has about 5 feet of books devoted to sacral kingship aroound the world. How can a first-year College student distill this into 3 paragraphs?]

4) Name nine civilizations that co-existed with Ancient Egypt in the Nile Valley. [You got us there, Prof. None of our Curators know about them.]

5) On the first floor of the X Museum there is an exhibit of paintings. From what time period do these paintings come? [This question appeared on the assignment for 5 years. The show was a nice little jewel box of early Italian painting. It ran for 6 months.]

6) Yoruba religion -- What is its tenets and practices? Do not put forward the vile rumors. I want only the facts! [ Oooh, vile rumors about the Yoruba. That certainly would be much more interesting than the latest celebrity gossip , wouldn't it?]

We can't fault the students. Many of them knew that they were being wrongly served by this Prof. We tried to give them the best information we could but some days, we'd get hit with 15 people a day trying to do this assignment. With only 2 people working the library it was impossible to help these students complete an impossible assignment. Something had to be done.

The Prof. refused to talk to the Museum but the College was more amenable. A student allowed us to make a photocopy of the assignment. After the beginning of his 6th year, the Prof was turfed out and we never had to deal with him and that awful assignment again.

[AdminAssistant]

yeeesh. Yeah, once Professors get tenure it's almost impossible to fire them so they're allowed to be as batshit crazy as they like.

I had one that wanted us to give specific quotes from plays that we had read. Word for word, exactly. And the bonus? We weren't told ahead of time that we'd have to memorize sections. I dropped the class after the first test.

[marty]

I bet with the Yoruba question he meant stuff like cannibalism and other myths. But, I mean, really, who the hell believes that stuff anymore anyways?

Wow. I'd totally refuse that assignment. I'd take the F. And I'd take it to the other history professors to laugh at. Being a history major, I'm glad I haven't had anyone that crazy yet.

[Aethian]

I once had a professor who wrote the book to be used for the class. One thing she always and I mean ALWAYS asked on every test was..

What was your thought concering {instert chapert here}?

And of course not one person would get any points for that or the other questions that delt with how we saw something because hey SHE wrote the book so we should obviously understand how SHE thought over the subject.



The moral of the story...never take a class under a professor who writes said book for the class.

[aurelemsrealm]

Wow, some rather ambiguous questions there...... Yeesh!

I've had instructors at both ends of the spectrum.

I had an anatomy & physiology class at one of the local community colleges a year ago. I had separate lab and lecture instructor, but you had to pass both to get the grade. The lab instructor was awesome, and I always did well on his exams, even if I didn't study. The lecture instructor, however, was a total bitch. No one did well on her exams because she'd cram too much material into them for the time allotted. For instance, she expected us to complete 110 essay questions over two or three chapters at a time within the space of an hour -- approximately 30 seconds to answer in detail a thinking question about human anatomy & physiology. During one test, she didn't even come to class prepared. She spent 15 minutes of test time making extra copies of the exam, but still counted off points for unanswered questions. It was totally ridiculous! I ended up dropping the class halfway through the semester. Most of the students I know who took her lecture hated her. Even students who seemed to have a better grip on the material, I was no slouch because I did very well in lab, couldn't pass her lecture. Many of the others from my lecture section ended up dropping, too. Several of us ended up going to the dean of the sciences division to report her behavior.

Then, there was the history instructor who disregarded the textbook in favor of his own notes. Now, his approach really was a much better, more interesting one. He was an avid reader of historical literature. He could tell you the stories that never made it into the textbooks. All you had to do was be in on time everyday, pay attention, and take notes when he told you to write something down. He definitely gave you writer's cramp with all the material he covered each session, but he would make sure you got the material if you asked questions and showed interest. All of his exams and assignments were based on his notes. You take good notes, you study those notes, you have it all. The only exception was the final essay. He'd assign you to pick a historical book relevant to the course material. The book you pick to write your essay about was the only other material outside of his notes. He expected a lot from students, but he was generous with students who paid attention and showed interest. I know there were a couple of times on exams when he'd note that I got a detail wrong, but he didn't count off for it because I cited other details which showed that I still understood the situation being discussed.

[RedRoseSpiral]

At the community college I'm currently attending there's one instructor who I despise. She is constituently late to class by 5-15 minutes which is completely ridicules considering the class she teaches before mine is next door, then she spends a good 15-20 minutes going on about her personal life, then half-assedly goes over the chapter, and gives out two quizzes over it. The quizzes are worth a whopping 5 points each and there are usually about 15-25 questions on each one. On more than one occasion she has handed out the previous class periods graded test while trying to get everyone to clap when she hands back a 100%. I currently sit in the "100 Row" even though I have purposely made sure to get at least one question wrong on each test so that my grade isn't called out to the class. Yesterday I had the sudden, violent urge to take the plastic chains off of my pants and pull a Slave Princess Leia move on her and yes, she does look like Jabba the Hut.

[Arucard]

OK, The Occident and mummy/coffin questions I can see there'd be definite, and hopefully findable answers to, but the rest...

[zzapp the witch]

Trick question. Don't assume the coffin is a box. It could be a jar or wrapping of some kind. Most civilizations don't just throw bodies in the ground, they wrap them or contain them somehow before interrment. The prof is waiting for you to make an assumption.

Here you go, from Wikipedia:

The notion has prehistoric roots and is found world-wide, on Java as in sub-Saharan Africa, with shaman-kings credited with rain-making and assuring fertility and good fortune. On the other hand, the king might also be designated to suffer and atone for his people, meaning that the sacral king could be the pre-ordained victim of a human sacrifice, either regularly killed at the end of his term of office, or sacrificed in times of crisis (e.g. Domalde).

As far as the Nile Valley one: If he's talking about the full length of the Nile and its Valleys.....shit, it goes all the way into the Congo. (Dr. Livingston I presume?) The Hittites and Nubians come to mind....could throw some Hebrews in there....lessee.....

[draftermatt]

Kinda OT, but a few people mentioned crazy prof's at Community College. Did any of you complain that they shouldn't be that hard because it's "community college, not a real university"? I hope not, but I heard that in my English 101 class because they felt she graded the first paper too hard. When asked for my opinion I told them I was happy with my B because my Brit Lit teacher in HS would have failed this paper.

One girl actually switched to a different prof because she hated ours so much. She later came to regret the decision as the other prof required 5 more papers than ours and was much more difficult to get along with.

[IT Grunt]

I've never dealt with any that were truly out there, but I do recall one time one did something that just left me with a feeling of

It was a Calculus class, and when we did labs, we all had a lab partner. In the beginning, my lab partner ended up doing all of the work, often outside of lab, and just wanted me to sign my name to it. How in the hell am I supposed to learn that way? Osmosis? ESP? Seeing as I am not the world's best math person to begin with, and that some of my classes in my major at the time (Engineering, later switched to Comp Sci) needed it, missing opportunities to learn by doing really irked me. So one day during class (I had trouble catching the prof other times), we were working on some in class problems, and I flagged the prof down as he walked past. I explained my concerns to him, and he went off on some tangent about 'safety in numbers'. In retrospect, I guess he thought I felt safer asking him with others present, but why this bugged him, I will never know. It just seemed a good time to ask as far as I was concerned. Anyways, he told me to stop by his office the next day at 6:00 AM.

6:00 AM rolls around, and my lab partner is there as well. He asks us to sit down, and he pulls out two drop forms, all filled out and just needing our signatures. He tells us that we can either work together, or we can drop the class, because he didn't have time to deal with this crap. My jaw is still a bit creaky to this day, I had trouble putting it back on after picking it up off the floor. I'm concerned about not having opportunities to learn, and he's saying deal with it or quit? It was a shocker, let me tell you.

Later, he had a change of heart, and he swapped around some lab partners and I ended up partnered with a friend, and then labs were more fun and I started learning more. So in the end, it worked out, but my heart got a work out that day when he pulled out that drop form. On top of all that, I was a Freshman, and this was in the first month of class, so it was all that more of a shock considering I was new to college at the time. Only incident with a professor I can recall from my college days, but man that one's gonna be with me forever.

[Gerrinson]

I had a joyful statistics professor. First day of class he told us that as far as he was concerned his class was "the only class you are in and should be the top priority in your life." Ummm...yeah.

His first homework assignment: 6 hours in the statistics lab attached to his office, which is only open from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Monday through Friday.

Which would be easy but for all those other pesky classes and only being on campus 2 days a week because I worked the other 3 days.

Even though the homework assignments got progressively longer, I stuck it out until the middle of the semester. Then he gave us an assignment that required 40 hours of lab time, and was due the following week. So, basically, that meant the whole class had to be in his lab from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM every day that it was open for an entire week. I told him I couldn't possibly do that because of my job. His response was that I had to choose what was more important to me: My job or Statistics 101. Care to guess what I chose?

I wasn't alone, either. 18 of the 23 students from myclass dropped it that week. I was motivated by that professor, however. I joined the student senate, formed a commitee to investigate the entire math department. Their testing was rigged to put you in remedial classes that didn't transfer and would take an extra semester or two to complete. I had tested into Honors Calc at a different school, but when I came to this one I tested into Beginning Algebra. Seems a bit off, doesn't it? I wound up CLEPing into the higher level classes, but it still cost me extra time and money to do so.

As a result of our investigation and collecting complaints from students, the testing was restructured and the professor mentioned above resigned because most of his classes were assigned to other (more reasonable) teachers.

[Finance Gopher]

I never had problems like that in college, but high school was another story. See, it has come to my attention that not everywhere is like New Jersey, where teachers are automatically given tenure after 3 years of teaching in the same school. The number of burnouts screwing over the young is simply terrifying. My best story, though, actually comes from a math teacher in his 2nd probationary year.

He would have us do labs. In a statistics class. Stupid ones, like "here's an inclined plane, let this block slide down it and record the times. Do % error analysis on it." Then he'd hand us a printout with 6 questions evenly spaced across both sides of 1 sheet of paper and grade us on our ability to fill the entire space with words. Correctness or quality did not enter in to the question. This was problematic for my partner and I. We had to fill half a page about how to reduce our percentage error. We had simply engineered some numbers that gave us 0% error on our experiment and sat and played drug-wars on our TI's.

Well, I wrote an essay-let about how I would recreate the number system such that 0% error was actually horrible, but forget to correct my original data to reflect the new situation. My partner wrote an essay about how to reduce 0% error, he'd have to negate the existence of the lab, by going back in time and prevent the teachers parents from breeding.

This was apparently a threat against the teacher and got my partner suspended for 3 days. This was shortly followed up by this teacher trying to get me suspended for writing some classic rock lyrics on the back of a warm up problem. Anyone else here know "21st Century Schizoid Man" by King Crimson?

[RedRoseSpiral]

Kinda OT, but a few people mentioned crazy prof's at Community College. Did any of you complain that they shouldn't be that hard because it's "community college, not a real university"? I hope not, but I heard that in my English 101 class because they felt she graded the first paper too hard. When asked for my opinion I told them I was happy with my B because my Brit Lit teacher in HS would have failed this paper.

One girl actually switched to a different prof because she hated ours so much. She later came to regret the decision as the other prof required 5 more papers than ours and was much more difficult to get along with.

Nope, I've only ever complained about the competence of an instructor. Which in a way can be tied to the toughness of a class. Take Gerrinson's instructor. I would definitely say that teacher was tough, overly so, and also would say a competent teacher would not act that way or make such assignments for Statistics 101. Just depends on the situation and teacher.

[IT Grunt]

My partner wrote an essay about how to reduce 0% error, he'd have to negate the existence of the lab, by going back in time and prevent the teachers parents from breeding.

That's a good one. A+ for creativity in insults.

[InsanityInc]

The college I went to had 2 teachers who were teaching medical terminology. One of them wrote his own textbook, taught only from it, and was one of the biggest psycos I have ever heard of. Now writing his own book isn't the bad part, but his personality.... He complimented one girl on how well her jeans fit her.... He claimed that after a person had a pacemaker installed, a replacement leg, arm, whatever, that they were no longer human, they were a cyborg.... Machines (and cyborgs) were going to take over the world.... I've forgotten most of the tales, but even other teachers were like, "Um, take so an so's class, not Mr. Outthere."