My college major is "media arts and studies," which is about as much bullshit as you'd expect. One of the more annoying aspects is my peers, a grotesque assemblage of film/tv/music snobs who collectively have some the worst facial hair of any single demographic on the planet. They all think they are the next Steven Spielberg but most have never touched a camera in their life. And inevitably, in every single class, the age old question "what is art?" pops up. A crossfire of incoherent ramblings vomits out of every wanna-be directors mouth, and I find my brain cells slowly start to off themselves one by one. Every class except one. Enter my favorite professor of all time. Somehow "what is art" rears its ugly head. Cascade of retardation floods the room. Everyone is belting out their own definitive definition. "Art is anything created by a human being," a particularly stupid person says. Just as I'm about to remark on the beauty of the shit I took this morning, Professor Awesome decides to make a point. When he was in Columbia film school they were required to enter this huge art competition for class. They would have to defend their art in a paper i.e "why is this art." Professor Awesome was a bit tired of this charade so he decided a performance was in order. To get into the festival he had to audition. At the audition there were three judges. Professor walks onto the stage with nothing except for an empty gallon jug. Without saying a word he puts the jug on the ground, turns around, pulls down his pants, and starts blasting a fountain of runny diarrhea* out his ass into the jug. At this point one of the judges vomits. The other judge didn't run out of the room and vomit until after Professor calmly buttoned up his pants, turned back around, and started chugging the diarrhea from the jug. The third judge sits quietly for awhile, appearing to be in deep thought. After a few moments he says "You're in." Clearly I have a lot to learn from this man. *Obviously he didn't chug his own diarrhea. There was a colostomy bag strapped to his side filled with chocolate milk and some assorted garnishes, i.e chunks of peanuts and corn. He snaked a tube around under his taint to get it to spray out realistically. Focus Share stories about cool teachers. Share stories about shitty teachers. But make them funny, no one gives a shit if Mr.David assigned so much homework in 8th grade that you only had time to masturbate once after school. It doesn't have to be a college professor, either. I know we've all had a few interesting/memorable/eccentric teachers over the years, so have at it.
My 10th grade Math Teacher was incredibly racist. He hated Asians and made no secret about it. The following statements were all-too-common during Grade 10: "Alex, if I catch you on your cell-phone again, I'm going to send back to China on a raft." "David, I don't teach Manderin, I teach Math. Stop talking in a language that I don't understand or I'm sending you back home for good." "Do they have homework in China? Well here in North America we do our homework when it's assigned to us." I can't believe he is still teaching. ----------- This weekend I learned that my buddy's former Chemistry teacher fisted her own ass while filming amateur porn.
The only truly interesting teacher I had I now can't remember the name of, but he was my Year 7/Year 8 biology teacher. The guy was, for want of a better term, a renegade hippy, cunningly disguising himself as a respectable teacher. Anyway, when we got to the mandatory sex ed classes, after the bit on reproduction he decided to hold a Q&A about sex, and gave us a few examples of questions he'd been asked before. ...this was one of the questions: "You can't get pregnant if you have sex with your cousin, can you?" (We never did find out who asked him that, sadly)
My class absolutely terrorized my 8th grade English teacher...Ms. Lawson. She was probably in her middle to late 20's (I don't know for sure) but she had absolutely no idea how to control the class. I think she was probably fresh from college since we were assigned a book to read The Chocolate War, which was actually banned from being read at the school. One of my friends was an absolute terror to the teachers since he consistently questioned their authority and was an all around bastard. I remember this day when he walked into class on time and she told him to go sit in the back room because she had a headache and didn't want to deal with him that day. He went to the back and sat in that room as she locked it, and then she forgot about him. It was two class periods later when she remembered and went and got him out of the back room....where he had sat patiently, fucking around or whatever. He proceeded to walk straight to the principals office and tell him what happened, and everyone in the class supported him. Ms. Lawson told the class the next day that she had gotten into trouble and she apologized, but from that point the students basically ran her class. After that she had absolutely no control over us and had emotional breakdowns like twice a day. She would be in front of the class and ask someone to read something and if they didn't feel like it they would just say "no". She would stare at them and start to tear up and then tell us to read a certain number of pages or do some random assignment while she sat at her desk and wiped her eyes with kleenex. I remember almost feeling bad for her, but then realizing she was a teacher in middle school and should expect things like that. The pinnacle of her lack of control occured at the end of the year, when me and my friends had a paper ball fight using The Chocolate War's pages. She sat at her desk and cried for like 30 minutes while we ran around the room pegging each other with paper balls. I have no remorse for her whatsoever.
I've had some of the best and worst teachers in my career. The best was an English teacher Brother Cullerton. Truly batshit insane, he had my sophmore class memorize an alphabetical list of prepositions. Throughout the year, if you pissed him off even a little bit, he'd ask you to recite all of them. Forwards or backwards, depending on his mood. He'd ask for random words in the list: "What is the seventh word in the list Mr.whatsyourass?". If you stammered or didn't know, he'd throw the text at you. He never missed and it would fucking hurt. During tests he would stand in the back of the classroom, chain-smoking. The worst teacher I had was a wood framing teacher in my appreticeship. He had no idea how to do anything. Use a framing or speed square? Nope. Building codes or width of rough-in doorways/windows? ADA? Proper use of any tools? Nuh uhh. He pinned the guard back on the saw (with a bunch of first year apprentices) and told us to "be a little careful.". After using the saw he tried to slow the saw blade with the side of his leg. If you can even imagine the look of horror on twenty peoples face when the blade caught itself on his pants and, blade still spinning, wrap itself around his thigh. Of course, we all laughed while he tried to explain that we should be more careful when we tried to do that. We didn't.
Am I the only one who doesn't really see how the teacher's story answers the question? I mean, Marcel Duchamp sort of did the same thing 100 years ago, andit's been called the most influential piece of art in the 20th century.
Why? Focus: My eighth grade English teacher was a short, hotheaded little dwarf of a man who'd been teaching for 20 years before we ever got to him. It was pretty evident that he was at the end of his rope when it came to children, and would routinely explode on students for the most idiotic reasons. He once berated this 5-foot-nothing, timid excuse for a girl for refusing to read the word 'nigger' out loud (Huck Finn). Imagine a Danny DeVito lookalike standing in front of his class, his face beet-red, screaming, 'SAY IT. SAY THE WORD. SAY 'NIGGER'.' It was absurd. One kid in particular, a guy I'd known for a long time who would eventually be arrested for grave-robbing, was this teacher's nemesis. One afternoon, they provoked one another to the point of screaming, and the teacher ordered the kid down to the dean's office. The kid flat-out refused, so the teacher walked down to the office to retrieve one of the administrators. While he was gone, and with the rest of the class watching, the kid got up, locked the door, jumped out the window into the bushes, and started taking a leisurely stroll around the athletic fields wearing the biggest smile you've ever seen. The teacher came back, realized the door was locked, and started wailing on it with his fist while the dean just stood behind him shaking his head. When someone finally let them in and told them what the kid had done, these two grown-ass men bolted out of the room and spent most of the rest of the period chasing him around the school grounds, leaving 29 other kids unattended and utterly confused about what we had just seen.
I don't know if Profs apply for this thread but whatever. By my 5th year of college I was putting the finishing touches on my economics degree. I was taking the necessary classes and passing them. There was one class to my surprise that I had to take that I had not done so already. It was Math 1080 Finite Math. For an economics student who is getting ready to graduate I figured this would be a snoozefest and I would pass the class with ease. Had I had a teacher of average or below average qualities this would have been the case because of I would have done the necessary studying and trying and such. But no, I had Wahab as my teacher. He had the funny ability of making the lecture so painful we had attendance rates of around 30% To describe this person imagine a disgruntled middle-aged man who is teaching a class he resents and a demographic he resents even more. This class was an into level freshman class so surely no teacher would enjoy having to instruct it for a semester. But Wahab didn't let professionalism get in the way of his hate and disdain. He had several archaic rules for the class that if someone so much as bent he would stop the class to address the minor infraction with a long winded and annoying speech. He had such rules as: 1. No computers in the class room. He said he was old school, fuck him, he was angry. 2. At the exact time of class he would shut the doors and lock them. Any person who came in innocently late into the lecture hall (that held around 200 seats) would be ridiculed by him loudly in front of the entire class. He would literally stop speaking mid sentence to address this travesty. It happened every dam time. 3. Any questions had would have to wait until after class during his office hours. He did not have office hours. 4. He was not to be corrected during lectures if he made a mistake because of rule number 3. But if however he caught his mistake later he would ask the class why they didn't see the mistake and correct him. My TA for the class was inept and a loser. So between the two people who were instructing me I had plenty of reasons to dread and hate the class. But humility is a funny thing. Between me not going to class, or trying on homework, or figuring there was a bell curve so making sure my quiz grades were just average enough to get a C, I failed the class. That was the only class in my entire school career I have ever completely failed. I was a 5th year senior finishing up a double major in economics and psychology and I failed an entry level math class. By my rough estimates about two-thirds the class failed a gimme math class. I will never forget that life hating bastard. And I will not forget him because of the loan I had to take out to retake the class. He owes me about $5K. Funny enough when i retook it, it was my last college class ever.
I had a professor at NYU Law argue, without a hint of sarcasm or irony, that women did not have to follow well established standards when it came to academic writing (such as using facts, providing sources, and obeying basic rules of logical reasoning), because the importance of those things was decided by men. This is what I paid $20k a semester to learn.
Reading carpenters post reminded me of my somewhat amazingly inept DT (design technology, I think the nearest analogy is woodwork in the US) teacher, a guy called Mr. McConville. He was both the shittiest and the best teacher I've ever had for one reason: He mumbled constantly. So at the start of the class he'd be describing whatever the weeks project was, which would consist of approximately 10 minutes of mumbling and the odd intelligible word (usually things like MDF, glue gun, and handsaw). Once he'd told us what we were supposed to do, he'd then yell out "Did you get that at the back?" with full drill sergeant clarity and vocal range. It was bizarre to see such a switch from one guy. So on the one hand, hardly anyone had any idea what we were meant to be doing. On the other, it meant we could waste two thirds of a class most of us didn't care about screwing around with MDF and hot glue guns.
My senior year of high school, I was editor of my school newspaper. The paper was run by the Journalism class rather than being a club on it's own, and the teacher was one of the greatest women I have ever met. She managed to get 8 self-absorbed teenagers to read the newspaper, voice opinions in an intelligent manner, care about what was going on in the world, and became the voice of reason in our absurd lives. She was the first teacher I had ever met that cursed in class. The senior newspaper staff's end of the year gift to her was a copy of Y tu mama, tambien and a six-pack of Miller Light, which she found hysterically funny.
My 2 favorite teachers were both absolutely brilliant and complete assholes. The 2nd one was as a junior in college. He taught "the history of western thought" I bought all the books expecting a tough philosophy course judging by the required course material, uh not so much. The first day he told us to sell the books back to the bookstore. When someone asked why he had us buy them, he bluntly told us "I co wrote two of those worthless fuckers, you want me to have gas for my boat, don't you?" We watched easy rider, do the right thing, all quiet on the western front, and Det sjunde inseglet (the seventh seal) but that's not the reason I liked him. He would constantly take a contrary position just to see if you could defend and articulate your thought process. It was the most challenging class I had taken to date. When it came time for the final he said we had to write a essay on our personal fears and rationalize them. He told us to be "creative" I took a risk and wrote mine in sharpie on the inside lid of a greasy discarded pizza box. Nervous as hell when I brought it to him, his response...he opened the box and skimmed what I had wrote, then he ate a peperoni that I had strategically placed for effect, threw the box on his desk and said "at least I got through to someone this year, fuck, kids get dumber every year..you get an A...now go get hammered and enjoy your summer." This got long and rambling so I will post about the other one later when I sober up.
I was a history minor in college and took a class in medieval history from a guy named Professor Burns. Professor Burns was a great lecturer. A lot of my professors just droned on, but Burns was a performer. He'd work himself into a rhythm, delivering his lecturers with a cadence that fell somewhere between that of a preacher and a political candidate. If he wanted to emphasize a point, he would point at a student or slam his fist on the table. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Middle Ages and could make even the dullest topic interesting and relevant. He also had a great sense of humor and could toss out some great lines: "[The Middle Ages] was an agricultural society, so chances are there was some bestiality going on. We don't know much about it, and no one's written about it. I guess no one wants to be known as 'that guy who writes about medieval beastiality.'" "People who predict the world is about to end have a very bad track record." "Masturbation: the old standby." But once the lecture was over, the real world came crashing down. Burns wore clothes that made him look like a homeless man from the 1980's and once started class while putting his belt on. He would walk with his shoulders slumped forward and his eyes pointed directly at the ground. Burns might have been great in front of a crowd, but he was incredibly socially inept one-on-one. I went to his office hours, and he responded to all my questions by mumbling and looking at his desk. Another time, I went up to him after class to tell him that I had decided to write my final essay about Topic B instead of Topic A. He looked genuinely terrified, and he started nodding very quickly. "Okay, okay, okay. That's okay," he said. I really wish I'd learned more about the guy.
I really never had any crazy ass teachers but there are three particular teachers I had in high school. Two of them were substitutes that were promptly fired. My 9th grade English teacher was batshit stupid. She was probably in his early 60s and seemed like she was new to teaching and damn was she emotionally unstable. She had absolutely no idea how to interact with the teachers and could not keep them under control. Almost no learning was to be had throughout the entire year. She tried to be nice but at the first sign of disrespect she would burst into tears. The crying was usually followed by fits of rage about how nobody listens. Towards the end of the year it became kind of funny. Some days she would send the same kids to the office at the beginning of class just so they didn't have to deal with them. One day she got so mad she hit a kid in the head with a clipboard after he made a remark as he was walking out of class. Another time she got a kid in huge trouble when she claimed he tried to shove her down. In reality she just walked into him when not looking and stumbled. Seven years later and I saw her picture in my sister's yearbook, I don't know how she hasn't been banned from school. Again in 9th grade, we had a substitute for a computer class I was taking. He was a hardcore Native American with the long greasy hair and feathers to boot. The guy stunk like he hadn't bathed in weeks. He spent the whole hour lecturing to the class about how the White Man stole everything from his people. He went on about how badly we raped his culture and women and went into detail about white people being gruesome murderers. A few girls started crying by the end of it all. I never saw this fucking prick again so somebody must have said something. Looking back, I wish this happened after I grew a pair because I sure would have a few words to say to him. In 10th grade, we again had a substitute, this time in English. She looked like a 50 year old cougar with about $50 grand worth of plastic surgery invested just in her face. She was the biggest retard in the world and reminded me of the character Mr. Gullible from The Amanda Show. The students tricked her into blasting music and then into watching a movie a kid had with him. Near the end of class (2 hour block scheduling sucks ass) she fell asleep at her desk and some lowlife though it would be a good idea to crack a window and smoke a blunt. Of course, someone saw him doing this from a classroom across the courtyard and he was caught immediately. The sub was later fired and banned from working in any school within the county again. How do I know this you ask? The assistant principle and our teacher forced us to write an apology letter to both the sub and the principal. Because, you know, it was all of our faults for the sub being a brain-dead asshole.
11th Grade Chemistry - Mr. Monaghan This guy was insane. Everyone had to walk on egg shells around him because he could snap at any moment. He was tenured, so he didn't really care anymore. There was a girl in my class who drove him absolutely nuts. I remember one time she asked if she could go to the bathroom and he lost it. "The bathroom?! BATHROOM?! What the hell are you going to do there and why didn't you take your shit before you got to my class?!" As he was screaming, he picked up a lab stool and hurled it across the room into a wall, destroying two of the metal legs. Another time the main office called in over the intercom to ask him to send down a student. He calmly stopped his lecture and walked over to the intercom speaker. He then yelled, "Fucking interuptions!?" (yes, it was a question) and punched through the speaker cover and started rooting his bloody hand through the internals. When that didn't destroy it to his satisfaction, he took yet another lab stool and used it as an improvised ax, chopping the speaker off the wall. When he was finished, his hand was bleeding profusely, so he wrapped it up and walked down to the nurse. 30 minutes later, before class was about to end, the principal came in and told us that Mr. Monaghan was going to be taking some time off. He was let go with the rest of that year's pay and two years severance. As crazy as he was, he was nice some of the time and he taught chemistry in a fun way, always coming up with great experiments and hinting that he could whip up some drugs in the back room if he wanted to. He also had the world's worst tupee.
Best: Senior year of high school, I had a choice of taking either pre-calculus, calculus, or probability & statistics for my math requirement. I opted for P&S which was taught by Mr. Carey, a compulsive gambler and alcoholic. What made his class so cool was that he used games of chance to illustrate everything, so everything was related to gambling. On days he was hung over, he'd have us break down in groups of 5, give each group a deck of cards and we'd play poker or blackjack. Worst: Pick any nun from K-8th grade, they were all the same.
Dr. Mel Zelanik in college changed my life. I took his other courses with no interest whatsoever in the material, he's just that good. First day of my first class with him, all the students arrived and he comes in, sits down at his desk, and opend a BMW magazine and puts his feet on the desk. 5 minutes go by, he's flipping through and not a single student says a word. 10 minutes, someone finally asks him if this is "Personal Finance 101". He glances up from his magazine, acknowledges it is, and tells the curious student to pass out the contents of an envelope on his desk. While the student passes out the contents which are time sheets, he plugs in the clock that stamps the time sheets. He tells everyone to line up and "clock in", and he goes back to reading his magazine. Meanwhile, he asks a student in line if the student likes his watch, it's a Rolex. After all the students are clocked in - "This is what the rest of your life is going to be like unless you take charge of your future. Most everyone in here will succumb to this 9-to-5 shit, but I'm here for the few of you that are willing to change". And so began a life changing experience that completely changed my outlook on employment. I owe him everything and plan on teaching part-time in retirement passing on his lessons. edit- Decided to look him up and found out he retired this past year. It's really a shame.
Best: 8th grade science with Mr. Grant. We were the very last class of his career and as a result, his give a shit meter was extra low. This guy was 68 years old and would leave class several times each day and go out for a cigarette. His rule was "you give me 45 minutes of solid work and I'll give you 45 minutes of fun." We gave him 0 minutes of work and he gave us 90 minutes of fun. Little did he know, I was feeling up some chick and making out with her in the back of the class every time he turned off the lights and turned on movies. My friends and I routinely set the counters on fire using Bunson Burners and rubber cement. He caught us once and said, "Gentlemen, please make sure it doesn't get out of control." Worst: Mr. Smith, my high school P.E. teacher and football coach. He had serious anger management issues and was fucking insane. He was eventually fired for hitting a football player over the head with a lunch tray because he didn't feel like the kid was putting forth enough effort in the weight room. Later, several parents sued him for sexual harassment and assault. He was also accused but never convicted of statutory rape because the girl would not testify against him in court so the DA dropped the charges. The last I heard, he became a college football coach.
I had a professor for a class on prison systems whose main area of research were serial killers. At one point he started telling us how if he ever couldn't teach anymore that he would become a serial killer(though I fail to see how that is somehow profitable.) He then went on to tell us he'd mentioned that to his undergraduates in an earlier class that day. This progressed into exactly how he would do it, and how killing former students would be his M.O. He would drive up to their apartment just as they got home and yell, "Hi" to them out the window. As he was a former teacher of theirs they would obviously trust him and just come right over to talk..."AND THEN I'D TAZER THEM." Keep in mind, he was a short, thin, bald man, with a seriously gay-lisp, so I suppose he's correct in assuming he's not intimidating. He would then take the body back to his basement and torture them by the most cruel method he could think of, which turned out to be shoving small rusty objects under their fingernails for a while. His continuing justification that it was the rusty part that makes it so bad was the most entertaining. The guy next to me, a VERY large black man that played for an NFL team for a season, laughed. When the wannabe Hannibel Lecter asked what was so funny, the following conversation ensued. Football Guy: Well, first off, I'd just shoot you. Wannabe HL: But i'd tazer you. FG: I've been tazed before, and yeah, that shit hurts...but you can get up. And then I'd shoot you. Probably a couple extra times for fun. We found out a few days later that some of the undergrads believed him, got scared, and reported him to campus security. He had to write a memo of apology to the department head explaining why he had, "Said he was going to be a serial killer and torture them all." What I wouldn't give for a copy of that.