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Cheeseroyale34
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13 Jul 2010, 11:17 pm

Who is the worst teacher or professor that you have ever had, and why were they so bad?

I think the worst teacher that I have ever had is my former history of motion picture teacher. He tended to constantly sidetrack the curriculum by going on endless tangents about the AIG Bailouts and how the bankers should all be hung. As much as I liked to hear an old 72 year old rant about "kids these days," and how "sex isn't love," I would also have liked to learn about how the art of film making works for Christs sake. He also is incredibly meticulous in the fashion that he grades assignments, though most of the "work", we did was a week or two ahead of what he was teaching. Needless to say, I got an A in that class, but I still hold animosity towards that man.



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13 Jul 2010, 11:46 pm

Worst in what way?

I've had instructors that spent the whole class period talking about their problems in life, instructors that knew the subject well enough but could not explain it for the life of them, instructors who treated their students like crap, instructors who failed their entire class, instructors who had completely ineffective ways of teaching, etc etc etc.

So I must conclude, there is no one worst. There are only those who are the worst in their own way.



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13 Jul 2010, 11:55 pm

Are you just talking about college or are does this discussion include elementary/middle school too?


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13 Jul 2010, 11:56 pm

My first grade teacher hated me. I was six years old when I was in her class. She would always call me by a short form of my name that no one else ever used and she said it with such disdain and disgust that I'm uncomfortable being called by it to this day. She thought I was stupid because I couldn't tell right from left or tie my shoelaces. She also had these little assignments where there would be a picture to color -- like the state bird or flower -- and a few lines to copy a short paragraph onto from the blackboard. She always got mad at me because I couldn't stay in the lines when I colored and had to look up after every couple of words instead of being able to copy entire sentences at one time.

My mother found out from one of the other mothers that I was crying and having stomach aches every day, so she went down to the school to have a conference with her and commented that perhaps I should be moved to another class, since we seemed to be having a personality conflict. This was the professional kiss of death for a teacher in that school district at the time. The woman insisted that no one would be allowed to do that. Mom informed her that she would just ask my uncle about it -- he was treasurer of the school board. She said she looked stuffed for a minute and then became very, very sweet. Until I heard this part of the story, I never could figure out why she was suddenly being nice to me all the time, since I knew she hated me.



Cheeseroyale34
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13 Jul 2010, 11:59 pm

Chronos wrote:
Worst in what way?

I've had instructors that spent the whole class period talking about their problems in life, instructors that knew the subject well enough but could not explain it for the life of them, instructors who treated their students like crap, instructors who failed their entire class, instructors who had completely ineffective ways of teaching, etc etc etc.

So I must conclude, there is no one worst. There are only those who are the worst in their own way.


I guess an instructor that had a majority of the qualities that you listed would probably be among the worst professors. My personal peeve when it comes to professors though is inability to explain the subject coherently.



Cheeseroyale34
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14 Jul 2010, 12:00 am

Quote:
Are you just talking about college or are does this discussion include elementary/middle school too?

Any and All teachers.



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14 Jul 2010, 2:21 am

Cheeseroyale34 wrote:
Quote:
Are you just talking about college or are does this discussion include elementary/middle school too?

Any and All teachers.

It was my 4th and 5th grade teachers that were the worst. I really don't want to go into details now. Maybe I'll come back later.


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14 Jul 2010, 5:41 am

I took an art history course at a community college. The instructor was a sculptor who announced at the beginning of the course that he didn't want to be there and was only there because he had to make money to live. Then he set up the slide projector and just told us the barest information about each work of art, like the title, artist and time period. That was the whole course, just one long slide show.



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14 Jul 2010, 8:41 am

Aimless wrote:
I took an art history course at a community college. The instructor was a sculptor who announced at the beginning of the course that he didn't want to be there and was only there because he had to make money to live. Then he set up the slide projector and just told us the barest information about each work of art, like the title, artist and time period. That was the whole course, just one long slide show.


I attempted an art history class once. Another long slide show, but we also had to memorize the professor's names for the artworks -- not necessarily the official names, just the ones she preferred -- and she treated radio carbon dates as if they were irrefutable universal truths. I ended up dropping the course.



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14 Jul 2010, 6:18 pm

I have had alot to many to explain though



Last edited by Kat15 on 15 Jul 2010, 3:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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14 Jul 2010, 6:48 pm

Mr. Twiet.
He taught Digital Electronics.
He was Russian and Iranian and didn't speak English fluently. He rarely used helping verbs, so between that and the heavy accent I barely understood him. The class was 18 boys and 2 girls. The other girl was this Canadian chick who quit after the second day because Mr. Twiet seemed like a misogynist. He made a point out of saying "Ohohoho, look! Girl got question right! Can happen, boys!" whenever I answered a question. As far as equipment distribution, I was pretty much ignored. There were 18 cases with integrated circuits and stuff.. and I didn't get one, and there were 19 computers with the simulation software, and the boys and Mr. Twiet got the rest of them..sadly I gave up halfway through the class after a partner test that I failed because I didn't have a partner. FANtastic. I even bought the equipment and my own circuit board and did all of my soldering at home because Mr. Twiet nudged my hand in class and burned my finger with his iron.

Aimless wrote:
I took an art history course at a community college. The instructor was a sculptor who announced at the beginning of the course that he didn't want to be there and was only there because he had to make money to live. Then he set up the slide projector and just told us the barest information about each work of art, like the title, artist and time period. That was the whole course, just one long slide show.

I took that college level class in high school. Last year.. there was an excellent textbook. My teacher was the same as yours, but I just read all of the information at night :roll: I did well. Pretty fun class. I have an enduring appreciation for Neolithic art.. :)


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14 Jul 2010, 7:08 pm

book_noodles wrote:
Mr. Twiet.
He taught Digital Electronics.
He was Russian and Iranian and didn't speak English fluently. He rarely used helping verbs, so between that and the heavy accent I barely understood him. The class was 18 boys and 2 girls. The other girl was this Canadian chick who quit after the second day because Mr. Twiet seemed like a misogynist. He made a point out of saying "Ohohoho, look! Girl got question right! Can happen, boys!" whenever I answered a question. As far as equipment distribution, I was pretty much ignored. There were 18 cases with integrated circuits and stuff.. and I didn't get one, and there were 19 computers with the simulation software, and the boys and Mr. Twiet got the rest of them..sadly I gave up halfway through the class after a partner test that I failed because I didn't have a partner. FANtastic. I even bought the equipment and my own circuit board and did all of my soldering at home because Mr. Twiet nudged my hand in class and burned my finger with his iron.
Aimless wrote:
I took an art history course at a community college. The instructor was a sculptor who announced at the beginning of the course that he didn't want to be there and was only there because he had to make money to live. Then he set up the slide projector and just told us the barest information about each work of art, like the title, artist and time period. That was the whole course, just one long slide show.

I took that college level class in high school. Last year.. there was an excellent textbook. My teacher was the same as yours, but I just read all of the information at night :roll: I did well. Pretty fun class. I have an enduring appreciation for Neolithic art.. :)


After I transferred to a university I took another art history course and you could tell the professor really knew and loved his subject. He was so entertaining it was hard to remember to take notes sometimes.



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14 Jul 2010, 11:51 pm

Cheeseroyale34 wrote:
My personal peeve when it comes to professors though is inability to explain the subject coherently.


Word to your mother!

Describes my macro-econ professor to a tee!! ! He was a nice guy, but a horrible teacher!! !


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15 Jul 2010, 11:10 am

My 5th grade homeroom teacher was a big grouch. I have no idea what she was doing teaching elementary school--she was so grouchy.

I feel a little bad saying this, but my 11th grade Chemistry teacher was not very good, either. He just had a weird way of teaching that only got on the students' nerves. I didn't really learn much in that class because of his poor teaching style. To this day I have no idea how I managed to pass that class. He was a very nice person, though, and he took a liking to me, but I disliked his class.



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15 Jul 2010, 12:15 pm

Worst I had was a professor during a world history class I took. The guy started off the class by declaring that half the class would fail because we are all stupid cell-phone obsessed idiots.. then it turned out that the guy was a preacher in addition to being a professor - so half the class would be him reading crap from the Bible (having absolutely nothing to do with the topic), the other half he would spend whining about the liberals and Obama and global warming and saying how atheists are stupid. I absolutely hate when professors decide that they'd rather talk about whatever they want instead of the subject matter, especially when it's political/religious.



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15 Jul 2010, 12:39 pm

My main interest is computers, but every step of the way trying to learn about them or get qualifications has been thwarted by idiot lecturers.

The worst three were on the last degree I dropped out of.

The first one was giving the first lecture in computer systems, and he was the most highly qualified member of staff on the course (he had a PhD. in Computer Science, no-one else had higher than a Masters). As part of the lecture on hardware he said something like "only the lower surfaces of a hard disk are used to store data, as dust falling on the upper surface can damage the drive heads" (for those who don't know about hard drives, they've been in dust proof cases for at least 20 years). That was the second C.S. degree I dropped out of in the first year.

The second one was the guy doing 'hands on' computer hardware (basically pulling PCs apart and putting them back together again). 3 months into the course we didn't have a proper timetable, and were still arriving at lectures to find the room double booked with another course, and the lecturer nowhere in sight.

The third one was my course tutor. I turned up to the first lecture she was giving, and found a bunch of people doing the exact same double-glazing window area spreadsheet task I'd done as part of GCSE computer studies. I though that was a bit low level for the degree I was on, and asked her if I was in the right place for my course, and she didn't even know what course she was teaching. Later in the year she sent me an email asking me to come to her office to talk about my attendance, and I went to the room number she gave me, waited several hours, then went home again. Turns out her office wasn't in the main building, where all the other staff offices were, and she assumed I'd know where her building was, when I'd never been there before.


That was the second degree course I left because it was bloody obvious I knew more about the subject than any of the lecturers, was sick of not learning anything, and there being compulsory attendance for lectures. It takes the piss when you can get over 80% on all the exams at the end of the year after skipping most of the lectures, but you're going to get kicked off the course if your attendance doesn't improve.

The first degree I dropped out of for similar reasons, and because the first programming lecture started with FOR/NEXT loops in BASIC, and wouldn't get onto actual C++ programming at that level until the last year. I did FOR/NEXT in BASIC when I was 8 years old, on a ZX Spectrum.

I carried on teaching myself BASIC throughout high school, and my final high school C.S. project was an A.I. noughts-and-crosses program that learned by storing all the moves from games it won in a database, to use the best known moves in future games. I was accused of plagiarism by the staff, because I had turned up in class with a computer manual (for the scripting language for a PC mouse, so nothing remotely related to the BBC BASIC I was programming in). The staff there simply couldn't understand the first thing about my project, and rather than show themselves as idiots, they failed my entire coursework, worth 30% of the final grade. I got a C for the course after the exams, which was only possible by getting a 100% exam mark. Not getting an A kept me out of any decent University, and made sure I didn't bother continuing C.S. to A-Level, as the same staff would be doing it.

I think the whole problem with degrees in the U.K. came in when they scrapped student grants and switched to loans. When there were grants it was up to the government to make sure the degrees were of a good standard, because they were paying for them. When they switched to loans lots of small colleges decided they wanted to become universities and award degrees, and make money from all those course fees, and abused the fact that once a student has been through the course and bankrupted themselves, there's no way they can afford the lawyers to complain.



The last major programming project I did was a couple of years ago now. It was hand optimised assembly language, on a PIC microcontroller, controlling 4x RGB LEDs using pulse width modulation handled in code. The cycle speed had to be over 20KHz, or the pulses would be visible at the speed the lights would be moving. Everyone else who had tried it said it wasn't possible to write code fast enough to get that cycle speed, with even 1 RGB LED using that chip, so they were using the C compiler on chips with built in PWM modules. I succeeded with enough room to add a sequencer to the code, to put different color fades on each set of RGB LEDs.

These are the results:

Image


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