Nightmare professors
 

Tell me about some of your nightmare professors.

What did they do (or didn't do)?

How did you deal with them?

As a sophomore, I took an Intro class for my major, along with some other sorority sisters. One day, the professor had a sign-in. As I was sitting with my sisters, I signed them in and passed the sheet along.

It was a lecture hall and we got in trouble because the prof. believed I had signed in people who weren't there.

I tried to get on his good side, but every effort I made he was rude and mean. He is a fraternity alum, and I was a friend of a member of his fraternity (he is not from our campus; so it is a different chapter) and I wore a fraternity letter shirt one day... nothing.

I ended up getting very sick in the middle of the semester and had to leave school for the remainder of the semester, so I took a medical withdrawal.

For the next 3 years, I avoided this Prof like the plague. If I saw him coming toward me, I walked to the other side of the street.

Fall of my senior year, I had a required course that I couldn't graduate without and guess who was teaching it...?

I gritted my teeth and signed up. Somehow, things were different this time and I ended up becoming very close to this prof. He really pushed me to become a better writer, and has helped me throughout my career, connecting me with other alumni and professionals. I've been out of school for quite a few years now, and I still talk to Frank regularly! Although we got off on the wrong foot, some time and distance helped... and to this day I have a wonderful mentor and friend!

And he loves the sororities that have super-involved member of Quotes and other Ad/PR clubs (like ZTA and ADPi!). He is really nice and very helpful when I was looking for a job here.

Onto my bad prof...

I've had a number of horrible of professors. There's only one that sticks out in my mind as being truly awful but I'd rather not re-tell the story. It gets me angry everytime I do and I seriously start sweating. He no longer teaches at UCF (he was fired) or else I'd put his name on blast right now.

Ah yes, I think I might have connected you two when you were moving to ATL! :)

Oh, I had another one who had been fired but was in his last semester... It was a physical science course, but he tortured us with advanced astronomy. No one got out of there with anything higher than a B-!!!

There was another prof who left our university and they founds tons of porn in the things he left behind!

Did these profs get fired because of the students, or something unrelated?

The astronomy guy was fired -- not tenured and poor performance from his students as well as poor reviews...

Porno Guy... I'm not really sure what his deal was. I think he left for another opportunity or maybe retired....

I don't have any very interesting bad professor stories. Most of my bad professors were just boring or couldn't teach. One of the worst was a Chem II professor. He would spend every lecture just going through problems AND HE NEVER EXPLAINED THE THEORY AND BASIS FOR THESE PROBLEMS!!! He would just write a problem and start doing the math and expect us to know where he was getting his numbers from. The class average was an F (around 50%) and he would curve that up to a C. I think a class average of 50% is a pretty good indication that the professor isn't doing a good job teaching. This guy had been teaching for YEARS and instead of trying to teach better, he just adjusted everyone's grade up 25%. I can honestly say I learned absolutely nothing from his class.

90% of my classes are engineering or math based. 90% of those classes are taught by people that mangle the english language in such a way that they might as well be speaking something else.

Clarity of speech should be a requirement for teaching.

Ditto. I had a Chinese organic chemistry prof that spoke with such a strong accent that I couldn't understand what he was saying in general, much less anything about the course. :(

One of my daughters has an econ professor from Mongolia. The students can not understand the woman. Several students just quit coming. Most are failing; my daughter, who's an honors student, has a D. :(

I told her that the students would have to take group action to be taken seriously so they emailed the dean individually plus some went to see him. The upshot is that they will be given a major take-home test and then a take-home final. Thank the Lord, because her scholarship requires that she keep a 3.0 every semester.

Mrs. DA had a professor with such a heavy accent she couldn't understand a word he said.

She dropped the class.

In the speech class in which Mrs. DA and I met, the TA who taught it made a big point in the first class of how much he hated Radio-TV majors. We made up about half the class -- and about half the R-TV types were my pledge brothers.

To be truthful, though, I may have been more of a nightmare to him than the other way around.

I was not amused.

The class was "Oral Intretation of Literature." For my final, I read a selection from National Lampoon.

I currently have a professor that refuses to explain things to us. She is soooooo vague. I asked her when is our last class, she said "Friday". It had me thinking that our last class was today! I studied for my exam, super early. Then yesterday, two of my classmates told me it was Friday as in Friday, December 2. :mad: We only meet twice a month. She has no dates on the syllabus. When I was doing a project around a month ago, everytime I asked her to explain something, she refers back to the assignment sheet. That assignment sheet was SO non-specific. Speaking of studying for the final exam, she told us not to study. :eek: :confused: Sooooo, all I know about the exam is that is an essay and I will need to fill several pages of paper. We have no idea what these essay questions will cover and what it will not. And, we covered at LOT of material. I also have no idea what my grade is in the class. Nothing has been returned or posted. I even left a voice mail, asking her how I was doing in the class. She has not returned my call.

I had a computer programming teacher who told me I would never hold a job in IT. Still wondering how he made that assessment as it was the first class in the major and we were only 3 weeks into the term. Oh I forgot to mention that he had a 75% attrition rate, there were 5 people inlcuding me at the end of the semester and only 3 successfully passed the class. Sadly I was not one of them (see his above comment). Anyway I ended up transferring schools shortly after, his class was no longer needed for the major, and I graduated with a major GPA of 3.75. I also managed to successfully hold several jobs in IT, and left it of my own choice.

Yeah, that's what my mother told me. She said that in order to get the teacher in trouble, us students need to band against her. I'm scared that it could backfire, and instead of her getting fired, she will still be there too teach our other classes (she teaches like 1/3 of the classes in our program). I don't think she would be a happy camper.

I guess I will try adpiucf's approach first.

I had a professor (first year)who was fine during our class from 11am-noon. Then he had a break and taught our class again at 4 pm. In OT school, we had like 5 professors over two years, so we had each one of them A LOT. He liked to hang out at Cross Street Station, a local bar/grill in between his classes and was always drunk for the 4 pm class. It was a class on medical conditions that we would treat frequently and he would just read the Merck Manual to us. His tests were fill in the blank from sentences in the Merck Manual. You had to have the exact word that was in the book for the answer to be right. So, if the book said "hard" and you said "rigid", it was wrong. Insane! He was a retired Army Colonel who had been an OT in the Army for 20 years. I'm sure he was a good OT in the Army, but he was not a good prof.

We gave him bad reviews on his evaluation and said that he was always drunk for the 4 pm class and he never taught again...