Being in college can be frustrating. There’s stressing out about schedules, expensive textbooks, waking up early, and completing multiple assignments on time. What makes the stress even worse is when there’s one professor who seems to be out to make everyone’s lives extra miserable. Whether they be pompous, airheaded, or even crazy, sometimes the only choices are to bear through it or run away fast. Read about these unforgettable professors who have infuriated their students with their teaching style or sometimes lack thereof!
1. Don’t Forget to Check Your Answers
I was fairly confident about a final exam I had taken, but I checked my mark and got a 56. I asked the professor to make sure it was correct, but he said no and that I obviously didn’t put any effort. After asking him to check again—turns out, my actual grade was 94 because only one side of my answer sheet was scanned.
2. Your Name, Please
I tanked my GPA because I’d miss half a semester for health issues. I was allowed to make an appeal to the dean to get my grades thrown out.
But I needed all my professor’s signatures to justify the appeal. One professor refused to sign, and I wasn’t allowed to submit my appeal and was left with my awful GPA.
3. Punish None or All
A kid cheated on the exam in a 300-person class, and the professor found out the day after the exam.
He wouldn't let us leave the class until someone fessed up. We sat there in silence until someone said they were going to their next class. We all slowly got up and left because he couldn't make us stay there.
4. Anything Could Happen
My group received a failing score on a lab report even though we thought we did everything in the rubric.
We went to ask about the score at our TAs office later who reversed the marks she deducted. A labmate worked with her the year after. She admitted she gave people random grades halfway through the year.
5. Thanks for the Heads Up
For a weekly assignment, the TA would take off 50% of your mark if you didn't include a separate cover page; even if you received a perfect mark on the assignment.
The best part of this “rule” was that they didn't tell us that we needed the cover page until after we had already submitted the first assignment.
6. Interpretive Differences
In my town, there are two colleges. One’s a university and one’s a community college. I opted for community college since it was cheaper.
In my English 101 class, I had to write a 3-page creative piece on why I chose the college. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stretch my “because it’s cheaper,” reason for 3 pages.
Instead, I wrote about how I struggled with menial jobs my whole life and wanted a better future for me and my family.
I was actually pretty proud of my essay. It was the classic relatable "overcoming hardship" story. When I got it back, I got a C. The teacher said I didn’t answer the question. I flipped out.
I circled the "creative writing" portion of the assignment sheet, stapled my graded paper to it, and gave it to the department head and dean. Later, because of “medical issues,” the teacher that marked my paper was replaced mid-semester. I assume I wasn't the first student to have problems with her.
Hate her.
7. Won’t Drink to That
One of my assignments was to attend an AA meeting and write an essay on the experience. It was seriously one of the most messed up things anyone's ever asked me to do. I thought it was a super weird/creepy invasion of privacy.
We had the choice to not explain why we were there or to “pretend” to be one of them. I actually took the assignment personally because my dad used to drink a lot.
It brought back upsetting memories, and I didn’t even want to look at the project. A couple of the students in the class just straight up refused to even do the assignment.
I got it done but only because I’d paid a friend of mine an eighth of something to write the paper for me instead and make up some stuff.
8. How Does It All Add Up?
I had recently bought a $300 loose-leaf textbook for math. Now, this isn’t any higher-level math. It’s college algebra. Something everyone at my school has to take.
Of course, it’s written by my professor, and of course it “changes” each year. I took off the shrink wrap and saw that the book was like 150 pages.
After I leafed through it, I saw that it was literally NOTHING. There is hardly any information. There’s only like two practice problems per topic and a glossary. The actual necessary information comes from a $100 access code that has more practice problems and actual information needed to complete the class.
So now, I’m out $300 dollars on a PAPERWEIGHT and $450 on One. General. Education. Class. There is nothing that can be done at this point. I can’t get a refund. All I can hope for is pawning it to some unsuspecting student for likely less than half of what I paid for.
Screw you, Professor J. I hate you a lot.
9. The Date is All That Matters
I was docked 10% of a final essay because I had the wrong date, so it wasn't following MLA standards. I put the date I submitted the paper instead of the date that it was due. I got a 90% on the paper.
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10. My Class, My Rules
I had a professor with serious mental issues. This guy was just a raging maniac with the scariest explosive temper. The smallest things set him off. One time, this girl had a bunch of papers on her desk, and he asked her what it was. She politely explained she was a TA and they were tests she needed to grade.
It's not like she was grading them in class. She was taking notes and being quiet. It just happened to be on her desk, and he shouted at her to put it away. He would get angry when anyone asked any questions. He almost threw a chair at somebody and yelled profanities.
Everyone in that class was scared of him, and finally, I'd had enough.
Another student and I went to the dean with a condition of anonymity since we were still in his class. The dean then betrayed us, and that's when things got scary. They disclosed our names to him, and our wild professor started cold calling us on our cell phones.
Of course, he gave me a B instead of an A, even though I made an A on every test and quiz, because my "class participation" was abysmal.
Nobody wanted to speak in his class anyway. The whole thing was aggravating. There are people at the company I work for who have been fired for less.
My brother is a college professor now, and he says the world of academia has its share of arrogant egotistical jerks. But, of course, there are also great ones.
11. Gravely Misunderstood
I was not a good student by any means, but when my father had cancer, I skipped as many classes so I could to visit him.
I met him for the first time after he was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer when I was 18. I went to my professor to explain the situation, and his response made me absolutely furious. He simply rolled his eyes and said that college probably wasn’t for me.
Rather than let me withdraw from class, he failed me, thus getting me kicked out of school for poor academics.
I saw him at a mall once about 2 years later and called him a piece of garbage right to his face. I don’t think he knew who I was. Hate that guy. I did go back to school and graduated top of my class.
12. Getting Our Money's Worth
One of the classes required for ANY degree was.
..wait for it..".Healthy Lifestyles". Apparently, one wife of a former college president had been a health instructor, and he wanted to justify putting her on the payroll. The class was literally "here's the food pyramid" and doing all different exercise classes. In COLLEGE.
13. Not the Disappoint of the Essay
I had an assignment where I was to write a reflection essay about my feelings when I was studying abroad.
After I completed the entire essay, my professor emailed me to told me to re-write it because, “That is not how you should be feeling”. She misspelled my name in the e-mail, and I had to resubmit anyways.
14. Expecting the Impossible
On the first day in a finance class senior year, the professor asked, "Who here is taking other classes"? Most of the class had their hands raised.
He asked, “Who here has a job”? The same thing happened. He said, “Well, that's a mistake because this class will take you at least 50 hours a week just to pass”. I was floored.
I thought he was just trying a tough act, but then the guy behind me confirmed that the class would indeed take that much time per week every week just to get by because it was his THIRD time taking the class and was otherwise an A student.
The time did not exist for this class, so I did eventually rage quit.
15. Pop Whizzed
My partner is doing her Master’s. Her professor assigned a huge project that wasn’t in the syllabus and won’t be graded. But without it, it’d affect their participation grade. Later, he said the project was a test to stand up for themselves.
He wanted the class to argue the project was trash. They all failed.
16. No Looking Back
With any math-oriented exam, you usually have to finish problems in a certain amount of time. This means you can go through 90% and have extra time for an “aha” moment solving the trickier problems. A professor gave us 15 minutes to solve a problem then collected it, giving no time to fix any earlier mistakes.
17. Judging the Cover
One time my English teacher had asked us what profession we wanted to pursue. When it was my turn, I told her I wanted to be a physician. Now, I was pretty "hood/urban" growing up and dressed the part, but was in honors classes and always was a black sheep. Then, in front of the entire class, she said something so horrible that I've never forgotten it.
“Well, sometimes we want to do things that are not really meant for us..”. No student should ever be told that they can't achieve their goals. In the end, it's all good since I now see patients after finishing my training and specializing in the field I've always wanted.
Never stop believing in yourself ever.
18. A-graph-ated
I had to give a presentation for a class. There were going to be lots of graphs and stuff, so the professor made a point of saying that we should be careful with the colors we used because if the graphs weren't legible, he would deduct points.
I spent hours going over color choices as to not lose easy points.
I loaded the presentation on the projector, and the bulb was messed up or something, so reds and, by extension, all other colors were not showing properly. I was looking at my screen, so I’d no idea. The professor gave me his comments and grade, and I lost marks for the graphs being too difficult to decipher.
19. What in the World?
I had to take this freshman US Geography class that was a 300-person lecture. The professor was in his 80s and tenured. He spent multiple lectures going over his evidence that global warming was a liberal hoax and that Al Gore was wrong, and since he was an academic, every slide on every PowerPoint was cited.
The most recent data he used to back up his climate change denial was from 1995. He also spent a lecture on how Costco was a Chinese company using deceptive marketing practices to appear American because he didn't realize that Costco and COSCO are completely different companies. I paid to sit in that lecture.
20. Just Tooting Along
On the first day of the semester, I walked into a classroom with a professor who had uncontrollable flatulence. She let the first one go, and all of the students looked at each other confused as the professor continued her lesson almost as if she didn’t know what she did. But she was just getting started.
It went on for the next hour and a half, and we just had to ignore it. Fortunately for her, outside of a few chuckles, no one in the class made a big deal that out of it, and fortunately for us, she got her gas under control for the rest of the semester, and we never had to put up with Vladimir Pootin' again.
21. Who’s in Charge Here?
I missed a quiz due to a medical emergency and had the documentation of my ER visit and all that. I emailed my TA about making up the quiz. The TA said to email the professor because it was his class. I emailed the professor who then told me to email the TA because the TA is the one who administered the quiz.
22. Trying Times
I was in a 300-level economics course once, and the professor who was the head of the department started talking about negative GDP growth. "The GDP declines by 2%," he said as he wrote, "GDP x 98%" on the board, causing a girl to raise her hand and ask one of the most stupid questions I think I've ever heard.
"How did you know to times it by 98%"? A bunch of other people in the class chimed in agreeing with her confusion. "...Because I said it declined by 2%.
..". he stammered out hopelessly. "Yea, I get that, what does that have to do with 98%"? another student asked. It derailed the class for around 5-10 minutes.
The professor spent that time trying desperately to get to the bottom of their misunderstanding. Then, at the end of his explanation, he looked at me and a couple of other people in the class who were just as visibly shaken as he was, asked us if we knew what he was talking about, and moved on when we agreed.
23. Collective Effort
I did my entire group project because the group I was assigned neglected to, you know, do any work. I submitted it in with their student cards also on it because I'd lose marks if I handed it in by alone. Bear in mind, this project received a first-class mark, and these guys did absolutely no work towards it.
Most of them did not even show for meetings. We lost marks because we did a post groupwork review, and one group member said I wasn't a team player or whatever. I was genuinely considering hurting the guy and curling out a poop on his twitching body.
But I decided to just let the pressure drop on him instead.
24. Ph.Don't
I had a lecturer who was fresh out of university. He would be very patronizing to anyone he thought below his intelligence level and tried to shove the fact he had a Ph.D.
into any lesson or conversation he had. He had favorites too. After some disagreements with him, I dropped out soon followed by many others.
25. The IT Crowd
The IT situation at my campus was usually described as "a lot of little fixes on an ancient set of software instead of upgrading". At some point, there’s a comical little issue where all campus services couldn't be accessed from campus Wi-Fi. You were only able to connect from off-campus Wi-Fi or mobile data.
If you didn’t have either, you were screwed. A professor got mad at us for not doing any online assignments because, "Well, then why aren't you contacting IT services yourselves and having them fix it"?...Because, you know, we could totally contact IT, and everything would magically start working and be fixed.
26. "High-Level" Education
I once took a class online named “The Internet” to fulfill a requirement. It taught you how to right click, navigate websites, and use search engines. This was way back in 2005. That’s probably the least ridiculous thing about my first college, but it only got worse; I noped out of that school after one year.
27. Music Therapy
All my work added up to an A, but the professor gave me a C because she "didn't like my attitude". I went to the dean to contest the grade.
He said that he couldn't do anything for me because I would have her as a professor in the future and he didn't want to make things "awkward". All I got was his trumpet CD.
28. TA > Prof
In a ComSci class, three lecturers taught the course. We had one jerk professor, and this guy was in charge of it all.
He seemed like he MIGHT’VE been a nice guy, but he was so condescending. More than once, I went to his office hours, and he basically told me I was dumb and would try to make me try to answer it.
I had no idea, which is why I was there in the first place.
I had run tests on my code, and he just said to run more. I quickly learned to go to the TAs instead. I did awful on my second. I talked to one of the graduate level TAs who had been in grad school for five years and actually knew what he was talking about.
He went over my test with me and said that he didn't know why I was marked so badly and that if I submitted it for a regrade, I'd get probably half of my points back, and the professor was fine with regrades. He'd given me some points back he deducted earlier for a missed bracket like they said they wouldn't.
So, I submitted it for a regrade, and a week later, I received the regrade back with, "stop complaining because you did badly," and he refused to even look to regrade it. It made me so angry.
29. That’s Just Grrrrreat
It was my first day and my first class.
I was a naïve freshman. It was packed with very attractive ladies. I was like heck yeah! The professor came and put his stuff down. He took a look around and said, "I'm going to take a wild guess that many of you are in the wrong building. This is Intro to Programming".
After a few minute
of confusion, half of the class filed out, including all the very attractive ladies. What was left was a sausage fest, and a guy in a Tony the Tiger shirt eating cereal with a half-gallon of milk.
That guy was kicked out the next week for putting inappropriate content on the campus network. I knew it had been too good to be true.
30. Being Present
I had a massive medical emergency and was hospitalized for a week. I was unconscious for two days. On one of those days, two of my classes met.
Later, I emailed and then called my two professors. The first professor received the email and sent me back her slides, her lecture notes, and anything else I missed.
She told me that she'd send me the stuff from the next few meetings if I couldn't make it to them.
The second professor? I might as well have used fire to send signals because I got nothing back, and he kept marking my missed assignments as zeros because I wasn't in class. I decided to drop all but one class.
I chose the one with the first professor I emailed.
The other professors were mostly disappointed but were understanding. The second professor I emailed insisted that I finish his class. I cussed him out in class and went over his head. He magically let me drop the course. I never saw him around campus after.
31. Can’t Use Your Hands
My Physics of Light and Color course was cool, but the teacher was such a witch that I had much contempt for the course.
I got chewed out for submitting a handwritten assignment because her policy was "all digital, so I don’t have to struggle with bad handwriting". How do I draw light ray diagrams on MS Word?
32. The Real Deal
I failed a course because my professor was a big stickler for grammar.
She failed everyone on the first paper, which was worth 35% of the class. She told us we all had middle school proficiency and ranted about how tough the real world was. When finals came, the other students and I couldn't take the pressure.
We also did poorly on our last paper.
It was my third year in college, and I thought about joining the Marines in 2004. Then I talked to my parents and powered through with summer courses to graduate my 4-year program. It has been 13 years, and I don't proofread my work. I send it over to others to proofread.
33. Read It MY Way
I was taking a British Lit course, and we were reading Heart of Darkness. I was really into Conrad, so I was super excited for the discussion class and came ready with a ton of notes. Well, my professor got sick, so Professor Bumcheese decided to fill in for him even though no one asked her to take his place.
What followed was the worst class I ever attended.
She started the discussion by telling us that she tried to read Heart of Darkness once but didn't get through it because of, "you know, how it treated women. It was just terrible to women"! If you've ever read Heart of Darkness, well, you’d find it mistreats lots of people, particularly native black Africans.
The thing is, though, that there are about five females in the entire book, and they are all in positions of power and influence.
Gender is basically a non-factor in the novel; it's literally too busy describing Africans as dying and rotting away like overused farm equipment to deal with issues of gender at all.
Professor Bumcheese was basically full of it, made up a non-excuse for not reading a seminal work of fiction by somehow making HERSELF a victim, and took over a class about the book.
34. What a Great Use of Time...
I dropped out of college first time around not because of grades, but because I was going through serious depression. I used the mounting debt and financial hold as an excuse. I went back to finish at 27. My advisers said I just needed 38 credits. I took 19 credits that fall and spring while working full time.
I came back with a few weeks left in spring. They proceeded to tell me I had 25 credits remaining, despite the fact that 38-19=19. I emailed several people up the chain for help, and nothing came of it. I wanted so badly to quit AGAIN, but I decided that I wanted to power through it and finally finish school.
That's when things started getting really bad.
Instead, I took 19 summer credits and lots more debt while falling victim to one lazy professor who never checked any of the work that we turned in online, tried to fail me, and claimed the work wasn't turned in. I complained to his superior, proved my on-time submissions throughout the semester, and got an A-.
The professor relented when my partner who did ZERO WORK throughout the semester went into his office and cried. He even had the audacity and called me to say, "You'd better thank your partner". My urge to quit was RISING. But I’d completed college. All for a degree that’s not worth the paper it's printed on.
35. Write or Wrong
I spent a year as a creative writing major.
We had to decide whether to focus on poetry or prose. I had chosen poetry. In high school, my creative writing teacher introduced us to the challenge and creativity of form poetry, which I grew quickly to love. I loved rhythm, rhyme, and meter and found great pleasure.
But in college, if you wanted to get a passing grade you had to write free-form, and if it was narrative, then even better. If I tried to play with form, I was criticized for not breaking free and finding my own voice. If I toyed around with rhyme, it was mocked as childish.
Do not even get me started on meters.
My passion for poetry was completely and utterly destroyed and aside from a few songs, I haven't written a poem since. When my professor made it abundantly clear, in very few words, that I would not find success as a poet in his department, I changed to prose and started taking those classes.
It was the same.
I was criticized for not "painting a bright enough picture" for the reader. If any of your story was "telling" instead of "showing," then it was wrong. If it wasn't verbose without specifics, it was wrong. I tested it on a 10-page short story where a character woke up, opened the curtains, and looked outside.
I spent 6 of those pages describing those curtains, while never using the word curtains, in stupid detail. I gave no other details on the story. I even wrote that they tasted sharp like the forgotten corner of a crowded city street. He deemed it the best in the class for the paper and shared it with everyone.
I told him this was specifically meaningless; there was no substance in what I wrote. It was just meaningless adjectives and ridiculous metaphors. He told me I didn't know what I was talking about and still had a lot to learn about being a writer because it was the words that I didn't use that told the story.
I never wrote like that again, ended the year with a low C- average, and haven’t written prose since. But aside from having all that passion stomped out, I still write.
I am now a playwright in residence and have had several shows produced, scripts published, and works commissioned. It's an outlet for my art.
It has garnered me admiration and praise for my way with words. I've gotten into podcasting and produce a series named Stories Telling Stories where I highlight a "fake book" that exists in pop culture and flesh it out into more of a complete story like "Harry Potter and the Half-Black Chick" from Family Guy.
36. Wait, What??
During grad school, my research adviser asked me to help out another fellow grad student in her research as both of our research has a lot of experimental parallels.
I spent much of 2 months of summer helping that colleague in her work, and then my RA said I couldn't use any of the data that I helped create.
Not only did I lose months of my precious time, but I also received no benefit other than my name being mentioned in a footnote on my colleague's paper.
37. Missing Something Important
Once, I wrote an optics midterm feeling very confident in getting close to 100. I got my mark back, and it was a 30%. I went to go check my exam and saw that the final grade was a 9/30. I looked through the exam and saw only 1 mark wrong.
It turned out the TA forgot to put the 2 in front of the 9 on the page.
38. Too Smarty for My Course
I failed an in-class math course the prior semester, so I took an online math course to make it up. This course required us to do all of our studying, homework, and tests on a website that would track your time.
About six weeks in, I had done all of my work and was getting a C or B on most of the assignments.
I tried to log into the site one day, and it rejected me. After asking the professor, he said the site auto-kicked me out since I hadn't spent enough hours on it each week.
I needed at least 15 hours and was only on for 3-6 hours. Well, sorry that I knew most of the early material and did not need five hours.
39. Only I May be Sick
In my freshman year, I got salmonella from a bad batch of peanut butter. I missed two weeks of class and couldn't get out of bed.
Most of my professors were cool, but the head of the math department was a notorious witch. I received a failing grade automatically for missing six classes. This was a huge problem.
It nearly cost me my full-time student status. After much begging through emails, I was able to schedule a meeting with the professor to discuss what happened and bring her a doctor's note.
You will never believe what happened that day. I showed up to her office for a meeting, and a sign on the door said she was out sick that day. My head nearly exploded.
40. Your Words, Not Mine
We had a statistics professor who made us use a corrupt plagiarism software that found any similar words used within the class's submissions.
It would pick up "strings of wording" such as "in conclusion," "illustrated by," or any specific terminology which NEEDED to be said to answer the questions correctly.
The system also didn't recognize any form of referencing. You can imagine how similar 40 submissions of the SAME FOUR TEXTBOOK QUESTIONS would be.
It’s important to mention that the questions were very specific and non-subjective. Some things HAD to be used for the answer with no room left for interpretation.
After he accused the entire class of plagiarizing and threatened to "call the dean" for half the semester, we finally called him out on his nonsense. He did not take any of it, called us "whiners" who’ve had it "too easy in the past," and said we were having a "whine-fest". I got a C- as a straight-A student.
41. Stapled to the Grade
I was studying electrical engineering at a Big 10 university, and it was beating me up. We had a big assignment coming up that would determine my grade. I got myself really pumped up and said, “I’m going to completely master this topic,” and proceeded to use the weekend studying and working on the assignment.
I was on my way to hand in the homework in the professor’s mailbox, and the stapler that was usually there was gone. There’s a strict deadline for which the TAs collect the homework from the mailbox, so I said whatever, and I just scrawled my name and the page number at the top of the 3 sheets I was submitting.
I got an email from the professor saying, “your inability to follow even basic instructions is startling. Out of the 300 students in the lecture, you’re the only one who didn’t staple your work. I’ve chosen to give you a zero on the assignment,” I was devastated. I got it back and had gotten everything right.
42. Rage Against the System
When I was supposed to graduate once upon a time, due to computer errors, they entered the wrong major AND minor 2.5 years before. I actually had an extra 18 hours of class, and when I went to fix it, they said the majority of the classes I took for the minor I wanted didn't exist in the current class log.
This meant that the course I took couldn't be counted towards my degree, and I'd have to start over. The reason I couldn't fight it more was because it was "my word" vs their system, and they have no way of knowing if I was right, which I was, or else it meant they’d just be handing out a "free" degree to me.
43. Breading Exams
I live in a residence hall.
I was taking a four-hour online exam last semester, and the fire alarm went off, and we had to evacuate. All because some loser burnt their toast that morning.
Wikimedia Commons, Ben Schumin
44. The Straw That Broke the Prof's Back
My English 109 professor came in one day with the entire class's papers that we had turned in the week before.
Apparently, I was not the only person who’d half-heartedly did the assignment. He proceeded to, one by one, deconstruct each paper and then worked himself into a frenzy over how awful each paper was.
He handed each one back and had literally scribbled out his name on the papers.
He said, "these papers are so bad...they're such a joke that I didn't want my name anywhere near them". I'm friends with that professor now. I think he was having a bad week, and our lack of effort had pushed him a little too far.
45. Early Signs of Apathy
My Intro to Psychology professor made me very angry.
The class was at 7 am, and she said, “I know this is an early class and for that reason, any excuse of being absent or tardy is likely a lie because you slept in. So, for each absence, it’s 1% off your final grade, and same for every three days you’re late”.
I didn’t live on campus, so I would wake up at 5:45 am to leave by 6:
30 am to get to class on time. And want to know the most infuriating part? This lady missed so many classes herself!! She would just have someone stick a note on the door telling us that class was canceled. We had school emails where she could’ve sent us notice, but nope, she never did.
A lot of the time, she would be in class to hand us back an assignment and say that was it for the day.
I never understood. If that’s all she wanted to do, why wouldn’t she just hand back assignments when she had a lesson planned? My next class didn’t start until 10, so I’d have to sleep in my car until then.
46. On Your Mark, Guess Set, Go!
I didn't have this professor, but I tutored his students.
It was a mess. The class was one of the most notoriously difficult required engineering courses to start. He never returned any work. He assigned a grade, and you never saw your work again. Students had no way of knowing what they were doing wrong.
They were all mysteriously getting the exact same grades, too, despite sitting apart during exams.
I had 5 of the 8 remaining students in the class in tutoring sessions. He also could not work through his own examples and would give up halfway. So, the students had no idea what they were doing right or wrong.
47. Veni, Vidi, Get the Heck Out
I had a Latin professor who, whenever a student did not get the question she was asking in Latin, she would just stare at them and repeat the phrase.
..as if saying it multiple times might make the student understand. When students asked for help or asked a question, she would just simply refuse to answer.
48. The Pompous-acity!
I had an art teacher in college. On the first day, he said, "Anyone who thinks we will be sitting here drawing and doodling may leave. This is to study art, not make it". Throughout the class, he’d remind everyone that he was an artist, had paintings in our local museum, and that he knew everything about art.
One day, he gave us an assignment to go to the local museum, find one of his paintings, and critique it:
What we liked, what we didn't, what mediums we thought he used compared to what we would use. The general response after this assignment was, "Well, this is why you're not a professional artist, and I am".
Another time, we were looking at this unfinished painting by Picasso.
One girl raised her hand and asked the professor, "How can you be sure this is unfinished"? He was extremely offended by such a question and said, "How do I know? Do you realize who I am? Do you know what my profession is!"? It was awkward.
49. I am My Own Master
My supervisor decided that I had to completely redo my master's thesis for publication at an angle that was complete nonsense and unpublishable. She gave me an ultimatum, so I refused to do any work she assigned. She delayed my thesis examination for 2.5 years until the university removed her from my project.
50. Cumberbatch Class
In my theater class, you could rest, play Call of Duty, or anything the whole time, and the teacher didn't care. I slept, but there was a group of guys who played COD in the back as a group. They even had headsets and controllers. our teacher sat at the front and preached for an hour.
We just took attendance.
The tests were group tests, and the actual theater majors got everyone together for the answers. You had to attend three free plays, but you could sleep through that and hand in a cliff notes version of the play later. She did count tickets, which blew.
If you did like theater, she rarely ever preached on it.
It was usually, “Such and such male actor butchered a role a woman could have handled a thousand times better. But he's probably a terrible pig anyway”. She did have a major crush on Benedict Cumberbatch though.
The slide show on him and how stalkerish it was creeped me out even as I was falling asleep that class.
51. No One Believes Me
I was student teaching in my junior year, and a fellow student teacher, a gay man, made several inappropriate comments to me about a boy in one of our third-grade classes.
He began hiding presents in the boy's desk after school. I reported him to my supervisor and was immediately summoned to the department head.
I was interrogated and then asked about my performance in the classroom. I was struggling and not very good at leadership with the kids.
So, because my male colleague was a star student-teacher and beloved by everybody, the head of the department consulted with my supervisor and then they decided I was lying.
They pulled me from my placement at my school, sent me to a new one across the county, and put me on “probation”. The department head told me I was doing this simply because my colleague was gay.
They gathered the education majors for a speech on why we need equality. I was so upset because that was NEVER me.
The experience messed me up quite a lot. I was upset that no one believed me and that students could be in danger. I struggled with my placement, was ostracized by staff and former friends, and started having panic episodes.
I ended up taking medical leave at the start of the next semester. I never went back.
I ended up going with a much different career where I really excel. I recently looked up my former colleague, and disturbingly, he teaches kindergarten now. I hope those kids are safe.
52. When the Student Becomes the Master
My friend basically blew off a whole semester of Econ and wanted to skip the final because, “What’s the point”? I convinced her that I could teach her enough material to pass the final, so we spent all day and night studying an entire semester of economics.
She received a higher grade on the final than I did.
53. Ouch...
For one of my classes, my professor asked us to write a paper about our personal struggles in life, so I wrote about my severe anxiety disorders. His response made my blood run cold. He wrote “who cares”? on it.
It was my first college class that I took between my junior and senior years of high school, and I was so disheartened by that comment.
54. Shattering the Barrier
My advanced foreign language professor dictated that we could not speak English at all during the class, or we would have marks taken away.
This was fine until this girl started coughing up blood, and we all stopped to see if she was okay. Professor took marks off because we spoke in English. I'm still angry.
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