Somebody PLEASE post a college class horror story

A class that they hated so bad they almost flunked.

Or better yet, an "I flunked a class but still got my graduate degree in *****" story.

I need to understand that I am not alone in drowning here.

I had a crappy attitude about the whole thing. I repeated it, and made a D! Then I took Spanish IV in summer school and made an A. :shrug:

BTW, my college forced us to take third and fourth level foreign language, or I wouldn't have taken Spanish at all (I had four years of it in high school, too).

You will get there, I have complete confidence in you.

2 of Greek and some other one I can't remember right now.

Oh yeah, Hebrew.

But, that is inspiring that you got through it!

Thank you for the note! it definetly helps!

Whew, that is some language requirement! Two words: summer school. I took Spanish IV in a three week course, and got an A. I have no idea how I did that, but it worked.

Theology.

I took too many classes this semester...AGAINST the advice of an advisor...now I have to admit the horrible truth:

I FUCKED UP ROYALLY.

Most of my grades are "a's"

But, this ONE damned class from HELL...........

Reading the OT in Hebrew gives one a great appreciation for the choice of words in good English translations. OT Hebrew is a vivid language.

Greek is OK if you don't try to acquire it at the same time as Hebrew because learning TWO new alphabets while trying to learn everything else about the languages is, how shall I say, challenging. Trust me, I speak from experience. The semester when I had Latin, Greek, and Hebrew on my dance card was the most miserable one ever.

Ultimately it was all good. I still retain much of the Latin and Hebrew, but the Greek knowledge atrophied a long time ago.

BTW, I wasn't a theology major. I was just addicted to learning new languages.
:freak:

Zoology 105.

The lecture teacher was a terrible windbag who never tested on his lectures at all. I'm very much a lecture-oriented person, and the man's lectures were garbage. And every single solitary day he would let the class out 5 minutes late, giving me 5 minutes to get to my next class, which was about 3 blocks up a VERY steep hill across campus. And the teacher in the next class had a quiz at the beginning of every class which counted for a third of the grade.

The lab was miserable. The sharks we dissected sat in the cupboard all semester and went off despite loads of formalin, the fetal pigs were totally foul, and there was a dead baby in a jar on the shelf. Every time I had a question the instructor would say "I'm a histologist, and I don't know anything about that." And he looked like a vampire.

I hated that class more than any other class I took in college.

I got my D, got out, and my last job was working as a biologist, so there you have it.

I'm a histologist, and I don't know anything about that." And he looked like a vampire.
:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

i had a real asshole for an american lit prof. so cross-eyed you couldn't tell what side of the room he was looking at. didn't know shit about american lit either--insisted that i obviously had never read "huck finn" because i was the only one in the class who didn't regurgitate his bs that huck & jim were gay. he said this in front of the class too. (btw, at that point in my life, i had read "huck finn" about 4 times.) turns out he had it in for me because he knew my uncle who had been a prof at the same school a decade before & they hated each other. (uncle thought he was an dumb ass too btw.)

his big mistake was pissing me off so much about huck finn that i purposely studied up on cliches. he said he HATED them, so figuring my grade was going to suck anyway in that class regardless of how brilliant my writing was, i made it my goal to use as many cliches as i could in the final just to make his life as miserable as he had made mine. :) best "c" i ever made. :evilgrin:

dg

and almost flunked thermo, so dropped it and took it with a non-insane professor and did great.

Organic Chem I retook with a professor who wasn't a mean sonofabitch, but actually felt it was his job to teach all of us, and not just figure out which 30 percent should fail.

...except I DID flunk thermodynamics. Amazingly so. It got to be so bad that I quit attending the class with 6 weeks to go, because if I scored perfectly for the rest of the semester, I still would have flunked.


It's true. Ensconced, somewhere in a manila file folder, there is a permanent stain on kmla's PERMANENT RECORD. (Or college transcript, if you prefer.)

Totally sucked; brain-destroyingly boring; professor was terrible. Naturally, I either cut class or, when I was physically present, I tuned out. I didn't flunk the course, but that was only due to some last minute cramming and some good luck.

I took this class because it was one of the few classes open my first semester at the university. Crashed and burned.

I had an English professor beg me to drop out of college for my own good.
I got drunk off my ass for my symbolic logic final - don't remember it clearly but I aced it. The prof was NOT amused.

Worst horror story was psych - we had to actually do some supervised counseling. We were assigned women from a women's shelter. Emotionally a tough issue, but fairly basic stuff. The woman who was assigned to me was a paranoid schizophrenic, though. I was in way over my head. But it worked out OK, my prof came to me later and asked me to work with her in her private practice because of it.

Khash.

The team took it at 7pm, and my girlfriend and I were two of the only "civilians". I kid you not - all tests were true or false, and a 51% was a passing grade. Fortunately, there was a chapter on matrices, which I understood perfectly, so I got over a 50% (yes, even with tutoring, I was THAT confused about calculus).

I still shudder when I hear the word differential.

Joe bless Joe Paterno & his "student athletes"!!

Go blue & white! Beat those gators!

tried the regular class twice then tried and easier version for nursing students. It was just my limit - too bad because I actually did pretty well up to it. Wonder if I could have passed the foodtball player version. Maybe.

Any class taught by a certain geology prof here on my campus.

He's an asshole. It's like he has no heart. The other day I asked him if I could move my presentation back a couple of days from Tuesday until Thursday so I could take my piano final, and he basically told me to fuck off. x( :wtf: I need that piano class for my degree! I'm going back and asking him again tomorrow. If he gives me the same answer, then I'm telling him to fuck off. I don't need his class to graduate anyways.

It was the year my dad died and I had a so-so teacher.Ended up taking the class with a different prof the next semester. He was great. One of those classes were it's actually interesting to listen to his lectures.It ended up being my favorite class and I learned so much.

I took the first term and got an A. It wasn't hard. I waited about six months before taking the second class in the sequence. I was totally lost. Ended up getting a F and losing my financial aid. Three months later I found myself homeless. I still haven't recovered from this.

Thtwudbeme is looking for some encouragement. That life goes on after you bomb a class. Work with me.

That's my worst nightmare....I am so sorry this happened to you.

You lost your financial aide over ONE class?

And you will be force to give plasma, sperm and dumpster dive for your furniture like everyone else.

I lost FA if I didn't pass 9. I was only taking 12. No probation, just kicked out.

It was the year my dad died and I had a so-so teacher.Ended up taking the class with a different prof the next semester. He was great. One of those classes were it's actually interesting to listen to his lectures.It ended up being my favorite class and I learned so much.

It was 1971 and sexual freedom was in the air. I was an art student and taking a figure drawing class. There were two women in the class and the rest were gay men. We used nude models, male and female. That day we had a male model. I was about half an hour late for class and when I got there, after hiking up three flights of stairs with my huge portfolio, I was a bit surprised to find the male model wearing an evening gown and tiara...and the students were all naked. The other woman was no there. The model, by the way, was straight and so was the prof. They all looked at me and I looked at them and said.."nope, not gonna do it." So I schlepped my stuff back downstairs and left.

The thing is (this is very personal) I might have gotten into the spirit of the thing but it was that time of the month and no way was I getting naked with my period and a bunch of guys.

Nope, not gonna do it. Hahahahahahahahahaha!

in apparently what was a record of three days. ;)

I went back to Dean's List later, then sort of fizzled for awhile, then bounced back. And LOOK at me now! :D

I wondered what happened to you after the movie ended! ;)

:spray:

This instructor couldn't add a column of numbers three times in a row with a calculator and get the same answer twice. This was a little frustrating to me since I'm a bit of a freak in that I can do stuff like that in my head.

Even worse - that semester she had three sections of calc too.

It was the Fall of 2001, and after 9-11 everyone sort of fell off track, including the teacher. She didn't know shit about physics or math to begin with, and I really felt like she gave up on teaching that class. She wasn't even really going through the motions convincingly.

The worst part was that she'd do a formula on the board, then turn to this one dude in the class to see whether she'd done it correctly. He was basically checking her work for her.

The final in the class was BRUTAL.... like 5 pages of brutal equations far beyond anything we'd done to date in the class. The whole class had a drunken party that night to celebrate/commisserate.

But I got my C, and my degree, and that's what counts. :D

and got an A in the fourth. I left school for two years afterwards and returned to pull excellent grades. Then I left again for four years. Now I'm going back again.:rofl: I've become fond of the "Road Not Taken" poem by Robert Frost.:P

Go get 'em. Lara!:bounce:

until my last Quarter. It was Into. to Natural Resources and was reknown as one of the easiest courses in my major. The professor decided to make the class hard the time I took it. I was taking 19 units and did none of the reading or projects and expected to pass the class by just attending lectures. About the end of the quarter, I realize I'm about to fail this class and not graduate. Noone fails this class because it's usually so easy. I had to study non-stop and turn in all my assignments late. I had to ace the final if I was going to pass. I ended up with a C (my only C ever) and graduated. It's the only class that I still have occassional nightmares about and this is 25 years later.

one of the classes I needed to take for my English degree was a writing class, it was deadly dull. I decided I didn't want to go, so I quit going. Mind you, I had never done anything remotely like that before or since. ( one of those goody-goodies, that was me.) Anyway I failed it, obviously. However, I just retook it the next term and got an A. The prof was really cool, the kind that meets the class every so often in a bar. He was neat - I later suspected that he was one of the profs that Wonder Boys was based on....

This didn't keep me from grad school or anything else for that matter. It all worked out and I still became a productive, responsible citizen. ;)_

don't worry, it will all work out.

was the time I got a zero on my term paper in British Lit. This story has a happy ending, I took this class again and did real well, but I liken the feeling to seeing that grade to to feeling you get when someone tells you a relative has died. Damn, that was rough.

The fault was entirely mine, I totallt blew the assignment.

in my paper.

and forgot that I had added a new one. So when I got my report card, I looked at it and saw A, A, A-, A+, F. I looked to the left and saw "Symbolic Logic II" instead of "Econometrics". My gut clenched. I immediately rifled through a sloppy pile of papers until I found the carbon copy of the add/drop form and called the registrar. They said they could fix it. It was a big relief.

Are you having trouble with the Latin? My final is tomorrow. I feel fairly confident, but don't want to blow the A. Salve amica!

in physics. That good 'nuf for you? Hang in there, salvage what you can, and move on (or retake if necessary, which is what I did, LOL)

Computers were so new that my college only offered a PROGRAMMING class and the teacher was so bad she would write the formulas on the board then get confused & use her fingers to erase something in the middle & rewrite it, saying, "Oh no, that's not right either."
I saw grown men break down & cry in the computer labs after working for hours then it all disappeared...
I myself finally resorted to going through the trash to piece together some of the assignments. I passed...barely.

My first computer science course (the one that I failed) was also pass/fail and it was 1982. All I had to do was log in, edit a file and print it out, but I had no clue and I wasn't interested. And how many times did I edit a long file of text only to not hit "save" before it was too late. Gawd, what a horribly awful time. I can laugh about it now.

but now it has just dragged me into its clutches, I hardly feel I had a chance.

I'm a 3.5 student without this math class, and because the teacher is so horable (www.ratemyprofessors.com is a good indicator of thier skill) he has negelected to teach us. So I'll retake my placement test and pass and skip into my proper math class.

two-and-a-half years away from an associate professorship at a major research university. I swear to God.

My fault was not asking for help more often. And I paid for it dearly.

The end result was I was so p'd with school -- took me almost two decades to try graduate school. And one school did accept me with my academic warts.

I can say I did do well as a grad student and finished my masters this year.

I got a D in vibes. It's a mechanical engineering course that makes calculus look like tinkertoys 101. I swear, there are so many variables that the english alphabet wasn't enough. It goes fully through all of the greek alphabet. Zeta, phi, and a bunch of squiggly figures I forget now. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Those little letter only symbolize sophistocated variables which in themselves are nearly impossible to understand, let alone combine and apply.
It's all about the modes of how things vibrate. Here's how crazy this class was- the professor was the person who played a role in redesigning the space shuttle o-rings after the big failure of the Columbia.
I don't know if there is a more difficult course one can take. Getting a D was just the beggining. It took me 15 years to fully recover from the fright of those classes. Oh, there were other classes. But I won't scare you with them.

Whatever you're going through, I wish you good luck. Hint- beer and pot are your friends. Haha.

He was a French guy, who looked kind of like Rumsfeld.

Normally, I'd remember. But that was 1985.

He was also working on composite shuttle fuel tanks. Stress analysis.

It'll come to me in the middle of the night, next week.

It was utterly rote and the professor was numbingly dry and detached. One had to take weekly tests and get 100% on the test or take it again. If you were a drunken hophead as I was that semester you can imagine how many such tests piled up. I finally drank fewer beers one week enough to pass them and get a "C" but I always loathed that prof and his so-called teaching methods ever since.

Obligatory upbeat note at the end: I never did go into teaching and I had to go work in a hospital so I wouldn't end up in Viet Nam. Later on I ran for office and was badly beaten.

but I have 24 hours of F on my transcript, and still graduated with a 3.5. Academic forgiveness rules.

Unless I pull all A's this next semester, and possibly even not then, I will not be an Honors Scholar much longer. If that makes you feel anybetter?

My advisor foolishly made me take it after only one year of modern Chinese. I don't know what he was thinking, because everyone else in the class was either a Chinese major or a native speaker of Chinese.

I spent hours preparing for every class, and I was still lost. I'd listen to other students' translations of the day's readings, look at the assigned text, and think, "Where are you getting that from?"

When it came time for the midterm, I completely blanked out. So completely that I couldn't recognize characters that I already knew from Japanese. It might as well have been Mayan hieroglyphics on that page, for all I could read it.

With such an obvious disaster, my professor conferred with my advisor and convinced him that I didn't belong in the class.

and I haven't even thought about it yet.

And she wanted to be my graduate advisor, because she knew I was staying at my bach school for my MA....

Drinky. Like a half-gallon of Cutty Sark (in the big, plastic bottles with the handle) every week or 10 days. Her liver must have been on separate maintenance by that point.

Luddite: Hated computers. Despised them. Refused to deal with email, web reference, or digital images. When we needed to get images of some 13th century court records from France, the Universite had to mail her 8x10 photos - scans of the photos weren't good enough (for the class' purposes, scans would have been fine.) Her assistants had to copy the text out of her email messages, paste them into text documents, remove the headers, and print them before she would read them.

Flakey: Related to the drink, I think, but she showed up about 2 in 3 times for independent consultation and about half the time in her labs, it was the dozen students and the TAs all working through the process together.

Mean when drunk.

Had issues with topicality. Tended to ramble.

When she ended up on my thesis committee for my MA thesis, I pretty much dropped out of the program until I convinced my advisor that she needed to be replaced. But eventually, she was, and I did get my degree - even though I had moved out of state, and did all of my work at a distance - including my defense, by telephone. Had she remained on my committee, the degree would not have happened.

Don't feel like saying much about why, but thank you.

I wrote my grad essay on Gilligan's Island just to piss him off. The class loved my presentation on it and were adding to it and going on and on until he interrupted and said, "This is all bullshit. The show is forgettable garbage," and so on. It turned out he had been out of the country when it was originally on, and never saw the syndicated reruns. I still got a B in the class, and now I teach college writing.

The ironic thing is, I tried to watch the show recently and realized it really is crap. Or maybe I've just seen it too many times.

not being funny?

I assume you weren't supposed to be writing Greek comedy where, as long as no one dies it's all good??

to break it.

But you are right in principle.

Although I do like the idea of writing Elizabethan English when you take Shakespeare.

them...

but she killed herself - I got A's for the semester. I did nothing - she killed herself. Why did I get A's?



OK - I know why..... but it always seems so dishonest to me and her memory - I was not a suicide risk.

Here's to Missy - she was a wild ride on the Lithium expess that didn't make it.

I went back to University to try to get a degree in Computing Science.

I was basically understanding what was going on in class until I missed two classes 'cause I had the flu. When I went back the prof was writing total gibberish on the board.

I went to him afterwards to try to catch up and he ignored me except for giving me a piece of paper that explained what was going on using two variables (which I already understood) but we had moved on to three variables and it didn't help at all.

I ended up dropping the mandatory course, then out of University (like I really needed a third degree) and went to technical school instead.

I was out working for a few years and ended up interviewing candidates for a computer-related position. Several people from University applied and got interviews. They were totally useless. Yes, they could write a sorting algorythm from hell, but we already had the "sort" command as part of the OS. In terms of practical systems administration or systems analysis, they were hopeless. They didn't have a clue how the real business world worked.

I was at NTSU in Denton for my first 3 years of undergrad.

Was doing great. Until THE BIG BREAKUP. My ex and I had the same major, the same minor, all the same friends, lived in the same dorm, and he was EVERYWHERE. We'd had a huge row when we broke up and I stupidly OD'd, so it was pretty horrible being in each others' faces all the time.

I had to get out of there. So I tried coming home to Austin for awhile. I hated UT from the outset. Too big, too impersonal, and I started during summer school, so I was HIKING huge distances in 100+ temps. I freaking hated it.

But I had never had to have science in Denton until then. It wasn't required for art majors.

At UT, I had to have Chemistry. GOD what a fucking nightmare. Trapped in a lecture hall in Jester Hall with 400 other people, 3/4 of whom were sorority bowheads DRENCHED in Lauren perfume (it was 87 after all). You needed a gas mask to breathe, it was so bad. And I'm semi claustrophobic, so being that jammed up next to that many people freaked me out. Let alone all the formulas and crap that looked like Greek to me. I'm an English person. I can diagram sentences and write kickass papers til the cows come home. But put a formula in front of me and I turn into a blithering idiot! I am not a mathematical person.

I ended up with a D.

I retook it the next semester and got a tutor, but got into a huge row with my typography professor in the art department, and then just got fed up and QUIT. I mean totally stopped going. Got up in the morning and pretended like I was going to class, and just screwed around all day so my mom wouldn't get pissed off.

Eventually I had to come clean. I ended up getting F's in everything because the student loan people told her I'd have to start paying everything back right away if I officially withdrew from my classes. So my final report card was horrific. All F's.

Flash forward to 1994: I had to go sweet talk the dean at UNT (it had changed names by this point) to let me back in based on all this. He was totally cool, understood the sitch, and let me in no questions asked.

Instead of chemistry, I took archaeology and environmental science-- two science classes I could actually handle. I even made the Dean's List a couple times. This was with at least 12-18 hours of classes per semester AND working full time!

Don't sell yourself short. If you fuck up, give yourself some time to recover if you need it, then get right back in there. You'll feel such a sense of accomplishment. I know I did.

People come back from what feel like even major academic mess-ups all the time. Don't let what looks like a big, career-ending problem now derail your progress toward your long-term goals.

Ask Maddy or Prof GAC or NJCher...we do.."give you credit" for "stickin' ":bounce:

:hi:

I have to admit.

My mom told me years ago I had one chance to do the college thing and she'd pay. If I blew it, that was it.

I could have done SO much more than I did. I made half-assed B's without even trying.

When I went back, worked full time, AND worked my ass off in my classes, I got so much more of a sense of accomplishment. I would recommend it to anyone.

fsc

made me not even want to listen to him.

I graduated with a 3.4 and got into grad school.

However I did pass them both with a C and a C-.

sitting for the final. I was completely lost. Had no idea how to even approach a single question.

So, I just spent two hours doodling pictures of sharks on the exam, which I handed in sans any identification.

I failed the course. Still graduated on time, tho.

I had heard of blanking on tests but it had never happened to my until.....CALCULUS.....I had studied - I even had sort of a clue...but when that test was in front of me I blamked out so bad I almost couldn't even write my name.

The damned genetics section always screwed me up. The kicker? I was a 4.0 except for this....

I got sick of hearing this phrase out of my classmates at 8 in the morning:

"Um, I'm not a feminist but I think that, like, the way women aren't treated as equals is like, totally unfair."

So I stopped going and I failed that class.

I ended up at an all women's college later on and did very well there. Go figure.

Hang in there. You'll be ok.

I really wanted to learn about the topic but the professor was nuts. I mean NUTS. He'd lecture on almost totally unrelated stuff until about the last 10 minutes of class when he'd somehow segue into class material. He was obsessed with Jessica Savitch and kept working her in to his rants. He didn't take questions gracefully. The textbooks were virtually unreadable (why is that so often the case?) and possibly too advanced for a 101-level class so there wasn't much to learn from.
I wish I'd thought to complain to the dean or someone but I think undergrad complaints and advising in general were taken much less seriously in those days.

Horrible enough?

If you want our own stories, I could tell you about the time when I had a history instructor who believed that the destruction of the world was being wrought by the Jews, Catholics, and gays. When he discovered that I was both Catholic and a practicing bisexual, he pointed me out to the entire class as an example of "what is wrong with society". He made my life an absolute hell for the rest of the semester, actually marking my assignments down for grammatical errors (-1 point for run on sentences, that kind of crap), and constantly making disparaging remarks about me. I passed his class with a C, and years later my written account of what happened in that classroom helped to get the guys tenure overturned and get him thrown out of his job.

Most college students today don't realize how good they have it, and how as recently as 15 years ago that kind of bigotry wasn't actually that hard to find in higher ed. Luckily, it's almost completely been eradicated nowadays and people would be horrified to hear about that kind of discrimination.

i did what i could, and had done alright in spanish 1. it was a hard class, with a 3-5 page research paper due every week and a oral presentation on an assigned topic 3-4 times during hte semester. no english allowed in class and all notes were to be in spanish (she graded notebooks weekly). the teacher would not speak english under any circumstances. i understand this is a good way to learn but not if you have a full time job and a full course load, and a basic understanding of spanish.

so about a third of the way through she asks me to see her in the hallway. we step out and she starts speaking very quickly in spanish, i understood about every 5th word but i could tell she was mad. finally i asked her to speak in english, because i wasn't comprehending. she said very slowly, in english, "i assume there is something you could do monday/wednesday/friday between 8 and 9:45" i was still confused and pointed out that was the time i was in her class. she looked me in the eye and said, "i know. isn't there something else you could do?"

the bright side is that when i took spanish 2 the second time it was with a part time prof who taught highschool during the day. she gave out candy for attendance. i got a B that semester, and plenty of free candy and somehow made it through life with a basic spanish vocabulary.


a high school story that should cheer you up...
my senior english class required a 15 page research paper for graduation. i got stuck with teh topic of "Puffins", the small, penguin-like bird.

i got whatever books our library had, and got 15 pages written on these cute, flightless birds.

i got a D, not good enough to graduate, i had to rewrite it before graduation.
i rewrote it...and got another D
i rewrote it...and got an F
i rewrote it, checked and double checked all the punctuation, got another teacher to proof it for me, got someone to type it so it was clean looking, double checked the forms for all my citations and quotes and handed it in a day before graduation and finally got a passing grade, a C-. I never found out what was at the heart of my continuing failure.

years later i was watching some nature show on tv. they were featuring puffins, the flightless penguin-like birds i had become an expert on. there was a small group of puffins, standing on a rock, ready to jump into the sea...except instead of diving in, they flew away. not flightless at all....

i had figured out why i maxed out at a C-. turns out that puffins aren't flightless. who knew?

anyway, i went on to get a nice degree from a serious university, and i am nowhere near the jackass that failed spanish and rendered puffins flightless.

we need to add PUFFINS to the DU menagerie!

cats yaks and puffins

I graduated 4th in my class and thought I was pretty smart back in highschool. But I had neglected any math for college prep, accounting yes, but the highest math I to take was Algebra II and Geometry. This class absolutely kicked my ass like no other. I had to kill myself to make a C which for me was blasphemy.

Advanced Cobol was our schools washout program, we had a great reputation in the state for it. I had to drop it my first time taking it. I did my summer intership and came back for it my senior year with a total load of 18 hours.

Here is how it worked. There were 6 or 8 programs you had to write and 3 tests, you had to memorize disk pack space, hex values etc. If you made ANY mistake on a program, data location on a file, file format, even the header of a report having to many *** you were docked 1/2 a LETTER GRADE FOR THE ENTIRE COURSE! You then had 24 hours to try it again and find the mistake(they didn't tell you what it was) or they would take off the other half costing you an entire letter grade for the course.

Out of 3 sessions of about 20-25 kids each there were 3.. count em 3 A's that semester. Someone in another session and myself and my future brother in law. The nice thing was that A on my transcript pretty much let me write my meal ticket when I looked for a job that spring.

Ow forgot one... College English, 2nd required gen ed class. I had it with the dean of the English department. I'm terrible at grammer but I had my mother proof read this paper and we looked it all weekend working on it to find mistakes. During my grading session with him he said and I quote("This is 4th grade writing, I'm being generous with this and he marks a D- on my paper". That just destoryed me. I found another teacher that worked better with me and finally got through that class with a B.

He would work himself into a frenzy and scream abuse at us, e.g. "you're a *-ing ignorant bunch of uncivilized morons!". People complained about him but admin wouldn't do anything about it, because he was the Dean of Arts at our university. After one of his rants, he felt sorry about it and showed up at the next lecture with a bottle of wine for us to share. The scariest thing was how unpredictable he would be -- nice as pie one minute, and putting people literally in fear for their lives the next. The way he allocated his marks was just as incomprehensible. (This was actually a lot more serious than just being bored by dull lectures from other profs.)

After I finished my graduate degree and became an instructor myself (and ironically, I do lecture on some of the same topics as he did), I swore that I would never be that capricious. So I guess he did have an influence on me after all!


As a graduate student, I did see sides of professors that the undergrads didn't. I worked with a guy who was always winning the "best prof" awards on campus ... ultra-popular and always in the local media ... but it turned out he was really creepy, and stole work from his grad students. One of the reasons he could look so good out there was that a whole bunch of people were toiling away doing his research, writing his lectures, etc. -- and one particularly nasty trick he played was to needle and criticize his research assistants to the point where the guys tried to take a swing at him and the women would burst into tears. We later found out that he was doing this on purpose, getting people to quit after they had done most of their allocated work but before the end of the semester, so they wouldn't get their last paychecks.

On the positive side, though, I did meet a number of profs who were absent-minded or inarticulate in public, but very kind and inspiring when shepherding people through their Master's or PhD programs.


p.s. it's thanks to the GOOD profs that I'm doing what I'm doing now. This week I am supervising rewrites on major papers for two people who would flunk the class (and be ill-prepared for next term otherwise, because they don't know basic research and organizational techniques). I'm going to be marking their work over the holidays. I don't mind giving up my free time if I know that they are going to learn something useful as a result.

There is absolutely no way to make a class on Unix, and DOS even remotely interesting.

It was my first term of college. I had graduated with almost perfect grades in high school. I always had done well in math. I had a substantial scholarship that required a 3.0.
One of my first classes was calculus 1 which I took to fullfill the math requirement. It was also recommended, although not required, for my major, biology.
I soon discovered that most of the class had taken calculus in high school (which was not offered at my high school), we were moving at a very fast pace (we would cover the material that my high school teacher said was covered in calc 1 and 2), and my professor was nuts. After two weeks of struggling, I went to the professor for help who said that I obviously wasn't prepared for the class and should drop it. Unfortunately, I couldn't find another class which would take me that late even though it was within the chaging classes time. I would have dropped below full time status without the class which would cause me to lose some of my financial aid, lose insurance coverage, and get kicked off of the cross country team.
I stuck with it. I spent 3-4 hours on it every night. Despite this, the tests were always harder than the homework. We had to write out calculus proofs that we had never seen before based on our knowledge of calculus. I wondered why we as undergraduates, most of us freshman, were expected to be as smart as Sir Isacc Newton. I cried for a couple hours after my first test, but ended up getting a D.
The work and tests being hard was bad enough. His attitude made it even worse. He believed that mathematics was a religion, a kind of spiritual entity. He was a high priest of mathematics. The enlightened understood mathematics while the unenlightened did not. He took pride in failing several of the unenlightened in every class he taught.
I did a little better on the second test. The final was really scary, though. He found a way to not put anything easy on the test. Our exams were supposed to last up to three hours. Only one person was done after 3 hours so he gave us another hour to work on the test. After 4 hours of calculus, my brain was fried. About half of us used the entire 4 hours. Luckily, it was my last exam.

Now I love
Art history, my mom has her degree from UNM with art history but the class was a nightmare.
1. our prof. was a very small man with a tiny voice you could bear ly hear. He also had no inflection in his voice.
2 He kept the room warm
3 The room was dark (for showing slides)
4 Worst of all, it was right after lunch.
Mix that up - friends it's nap time! You could hear the "Thunk" of heads hitting desk every day. Thank the lord for mom, thats how I passed.

HATED it. I did well all through nursing school. The school I was in you had to pass everything in the quarter or repeat the entire quarter-- every class. They sent you these little notices telling you (basically) that you're fuckin up and better get your grades up. You had to have a 2.5 point mininum for ANY extra credit to count towards your total grade. (Funny, Psych nursing was the big one for most. Breezed through.) But L and D, I just couldn't stand it. I did well in clinicals though, thank god.
I made it, I'll never know how, but I made it.