Who was your worst teacher?Follow

And he was right, that's fucking hilarious.

Basetball class?

So you think that gives you the right to blow off his exam? Or that it makes you above the system?

You have some serious entitlement issues.

Most professors are proud of their doctorates, but if someone makes a mistake like that, they'll gently remind them and move on. Anyone who makes a big deal about it is automatically a prick.

My worst teacher was probably Mr. Gorton in 7th grade Geography. I don't think he was a bad teacher, but his teaching style and my learning styles were completely incompatible, and he was so soft spoken I ended up sleeping through half the classes. He was the only D I got in all of middle school, which put me at short term risk for losing my EIP status >_> It took me 3 months before I realized the "sheet" he was giving us every week was supposed to be kept and turned in, because he never specified it.

Two spring to mind. In undergraduate, upper division 3rd quarter electromagnetism we were supposed to study the standard stuff: waveguides, antennas, a little special relativity. My first instructor taught us plasma physics. Sure, they are similar fields, but we had an electromagnetism text, did that homework but were lectured on things only vaguely related. We had a guest lecturer. One of the instructor's friends. Brilliant plasma physicist. Starts off lecture asking if we are really studying plasma physics. Yup. We sure are. Ah. Well then you've seen this equation, right? No. All of us madly leafing through notes. No, we have not. Oh dear. Okay let's start. That was the only lecture on plasma physics I understood. Since I did want to learn the standard material, I dropped (so did about 2/3 of the class) and retook it the following year. This is very specialized stuff so it is only offered once a year at UCSD, which is a pretty big school. The re-take was one of my favorite courses.

In grad school, our statistical mechanics instructor decided to teach us the path integral method. You can actually re-formulate all laws of physics with path integrals. It's not frequently used, however, because the integrals are normally more difficult then the standard methods. Instead of doing a single integral over some path in space from A to B, path integral methods require integration over all possible paths from A to B. In very special cases, this is doable. The discoverer of the method, Feynman, wrote some lecture notes on it, which had been published, but were not required, recommended or even mentioned in class. There are much better textbooks on it now. So we study from the lectures and the notes we have. Then we get a copy of Feynman's notes and see what we have is basically word-for-word from these notes, except that the notes we had skip about 2/3 of the steps which are in Feynman. Once we had the actual text, things became a lot easier.

I'm really lucky I didn't have incompetent instructors, at least not when it counted.

I agree, teachers are grossly underpaid.

Really? How much is the state paying you once you retire?

Regardless of how much money the teacher makes or doesn't make, he was within his rights to decide the grade based on the student's failure to take an exam. If you skip a test without prior permission you deserve a zero grade for that test. I don't care if the class is a joke.

By my metric they enriched the Asylum. I never thought I'd say this, but I don't think killing someone is the right thing to do.