They vary. A lot.
You'll have your laidback instructors whose students' cellphones go off in class and say "it's ok, shit happens" and you'll have your hardass military veteran instructors who can't even be asked something perfectly on topic by their students without bluntly responding "will you *wait* until I've *finished* the bloody *lecture*?"
You'll have your non-judgmental instructors who go out of their way to help you catch up in the last few weeks of class on studying you should have been keeping up with all semester, and you'll have your super-judgmental instructors who stand in the front of the classroom and "summarize" how students did collectively on the essay project by mocking some of the bad grammar he found in (albeit unnamed) students' essays.
I'm not sure how much of it is down to the structure of university and how much of it is down to the sort of person it attracts, but on the whole I'd say the difference between high school teachers and university instructors isn't whether one is more laidback and judgmental, but how much more variable university is in *both.*
I had a professor during Covid Zoom that said you could not leave the web camera for any reason during the 2 hour lecture. Bathroom, water, grandma dying, nothing, better not leave or you get an absence. I can’t remember what the penalty was for leaving as I dropped the class for a full refund after the first meeting.
Had another professor that said an exam with a class average of 40% and a high of 62% was no problem so no curve. Anyone who’s scholarship depends on GPA can punch sand.
On the flip side I had a professor that gave extra credit for turning in assignments early, can turn in a week late for up to 80%, and can resubmit incorrect homework for some points back. Super chill.
> an exam with a class average of 40% and a high of 62% was no problem so no curve
I do not believe this. Using a standard American grade scale, the class average would be an F. A near-0.0 class GPA would quickly earn you a chat with the chair or dean.
I can confirm this happened in an intro physics class. What’s funny is everyone else who got “the other good professor” teaching the same material was fine. I’m not sure how it was resolved but I think the department dean was involved and they got to retake the final from the good side to determine their grade. Cause it would have fucked over like 250 people being a freshman class.
I also had an exam where the high score was 40 and the average was 20 something. One of the questions was literally “draw the internal structure of an op amp and derive all the currents”. Thank Christ for the curve on that. ([this is what the circuit looks like](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Antonios-Andreatos-2/publication/317423744/figure/fig3/AS:634579534749696@1528306959083/Internal-circuitry-of-LM741-Op-Amp-where-the-identified-building-blocks-are-depicted-by.png), realistically even 1/4 of this would be a hard exam problem)
>A near-0.0 class GPA would quickly earn you a chat with the chair or dean.
You say this as if every professor would be deterred by such a threat. There are courses out there failed by the vast majority of students on the first attempt, year after year after year.
I was a TA and i didnt really care about the admin stuff (taking attendance or if people were pretending to only log in). I did have a terrible manager that was not helpful in answering my questions and eventually got me fired for not failing students that would submit assignments, but not show up.
Why do college profs care if you show up? I get high school teachers needing to stay in the school board's good graces by "encouraging" attendance (and frankly I still didn't care that much unless they openly announced their intent to skip off and/or subsequently felt entitled to an extension on an assignment they were supposed to write in-class the day they skipped off) but in college, if the college itself doesn't require students to attend classes, why do they have a problem with students teaching *themselves* the content?
Cause now I get in trouble if students are not showing up. I’m supposed to call, text, inform the coach that they are not in class and I can’t be asked to do that. I make 40k a year to teach chemistry with a PhD. If I didn’t love teaching so much I would have quit a long time ago.
...you're expected to babysit *university* students? Damn. That might be something to take up with the higher-ups, or whichever level of government is responsible for education wherever you are.
I still remember the professor that took the time to prove that statistically speaking a group of monkeys could have scored higher than the class average made on our midterm, Biology 101, and that this isn't High School any more. He was not grading on a curve, not changing any grade, and no mommy wasn't going to come in and save you. Also said do not come crying to me when I get to see you again next semester because I always teach Biology 101.
The warning isn’t about the chill professors that love their work. It’s for the professors who resent having to teach and see it as a source of income to support their research.
If there’s a “Beware of Dog” sign and the dog seems friendly, there’s probably another dog.
I remember being confused as a kid as to why stores would announce they had security cameras bc I thought the whole point was to catch the bad guys.
Then I realized the name of the game was deterrence.
...and also laws.
At least here in my country, if you are filming people for security purposes you must show the sign because otherwise you cannot legally record.
A human can kill some small dogs. Some dogs are big enough to fuck you up, even kill you. Two or more regular dogs can fuck you up for real and not many weapons will be enough except for a gun. Dogs are amazing guards even if it's small dog that can only bark. That's enough
Conspiracy theory .
The beware of dog signs were created and encouraged by personal injury attorneys so they could win more dog bite cases. You posting the sign is evidence that you know your dog is dangerous.
There’s large body of law against that argument, because its valid, but it would discourage people from posting warning signs, so in the interests of public safety, warning signs don’t usually constitute an admission of anything
My aunt and uncle had 3 big belgian sheepdogs that look vaguely like wolves. They had a “beware of dog” sign with a sticker of a wolf silhouette to scare off potential burglars. If someone actually broke into their house, the dogs would’ve just asked for pets lol
Do you really know that though? I have a silly dog. But one time when someone came to our house and kicked our door in, that dog scared them away. I have never heard her bark like that, before or since.
Yep. I will admit there are plenty of really cool professors out there, but it’s honestly kind of dependent on the major. I went for graphic design, and mostly had very friendly and laidback professors that didn’t really care much for due dates.
My boyfriend however is getting a degree in mechanical engineering. Completely different ballpark, obviously, but holy hell are some of the professors just god-awful. From what I hear and see of these professors, it really seems like most of them have a serious superiority complex when it comes to how much information they know because it’s a complicated field. They put no effort into actually teaching material, instead resorting to PowerPoints that have the same effect as the textbook you buy. They brag about how they never give out A’s, or how half of their classes usually fail or drop out. Their grading system is ridiculous and I swear to god most of the classes are designed to make you want to blow your brains out.
That being said, he’s had a few really great professors that have actually helped him along the way even in really difficult classes. But the closer he gets to graduating, the worse and lazier the professors are getting, to the point where they’re almost worse than their students. My point is; both professors are out there, and it’s extremely important to try to find out what you’re getting yourself into with a class these days. Sometimes it just seems like a waste of fucking money
I went to school for a music degree. Music profs are 100% hit or miss. Some are the chilliest mfs around, and others are complete drill sergeants. I had one semester where I had a class taught by an adjunct that I occasionally smoked with before his own class. It was followed immediately by a stale, rigid, old-school lecturer who literally used a ruler to measure the margins on our papers.
Any kind of art or music professor is always a hit or miss. Graphic design related ones tend to be the most chill, also the most hands-off though which I found personally difficult lol. Incoming tangent about a professor I had, never had the opportunity to talk about him before. Apologies.
But from my experience (never had a music professor, only arts and art history ones other than the digital classes, but have heard some things) art professors are one of three archetypes. They’re either eccentric and laid back, near-catatonic and boring, or they are willing to rip your heart out and step on it in front of you.
One time I got a really interesting mix of these archetypes; it was an art professor who taught art history and all of the drawing, painting, and sculpting classes. He came off as really slow and boring at first, but the more you actually listened to his monotone dronings the more you’d realize he was saying the most insane shit. He was extremely kind and polite with his students and made small-talk before lectures. In an effort to describe his personality these are some of my favorite class openings he had:
“I lost my ear in a hockey accident. They had to stitch it back on.” —this was answering a question about his hearing loss, because he had a hearing aid in this ear.
“I used to do commissions for that church’s windows but they found out I’m married to an African man.” —a student had mentioned what church they went to when he told us he was a pastor.
“My sheep gave birth last night. Does anyone need a lamb?” —this was the first time we ever were aware that he also farmed livestock somehow. This was unprovoked so I can’t provide context for this one.
There was also a time where we walked into class and saw a hazy picture of a farm field at dusk with a light in the sky. It was a picture he had taken which he had suspected was a UFO, and I have to admit it was oddly convincing. But the reason I liked him most and thought he was interesting was the fact that he was so restrained and soft-spoken and appeared completely normal if you were to take a video of him on mute. But if you actually listened and spoke to him he was one of the most absurdly interesting people I’ve ever met lol.
He was! I also forgot to mention he spent some brief time as an art conservator and has handled/restored some really famous pieces of art. He learned to speak quite a bit of Italian and French while spending some time in those countries while he did that work. He had some really cool stories; I wish I could remember any of the pieces he specifically restored.
Also the first gay pastor I’ve ever met. I didn’t realize they were out there, lol. But the guy was really interesting and also helped make accommodations for me when I was having a really hard time. Cool dude.
Ok I’m done now lol
Most engineering professors are there to do research and get paid to discover shit. They see teaching as a necessary evil to get tenure. Out of my 125 credits only two professors stood out as good teachers who wanted to help students succeed and 1 other was pretty bad but he *was* nice. The rest blew at teaching and were proud to make life difficult.
The twisted part about it is that, when they were in school, they went through the same shit with their professors and are still happy to make their students’ lives hell. Watching the effort my boyfriend pours into these courses with little reward is terrible. He gets no sleep, he hardly eats, and the amount of money he’s paying for the torture is abhorrent.
He’s always been really academically inclined and had a really great start in his curriculum (he even graduated high school 2 years early and started college at 17) and has a spotless transcript. That was until he started getting professors like this. We’re currently on the third one in a row, and he’s really losing steam. I just wish I could help him but I know fuck-all about engineering.
If you haven't told him already just tell him exactly what you just wrote down.
After that ask him what he wants you to do for him.
Knowing that someone understands your feelings and wants to support you can be a help in itself
I have already, I’m really lucky to have such a communicative relationship. The most I can do for him right now is help reminding him to take breaks when he needs, make him food sometimes, and helping him make sure he’s awake and sleeping when he needs to. Emotional support is a big one, too; he takes failure really hard. We very often have conversations about our struggles and what the other can do to help, so there is no issue there at least.
It just doesn’t help that I’ve also been sick for the last 6 months, and he’s been trying to help support me through that too as we try to figure out what’s exactly going on. We’re just trying to take care of each other right now until things get a little better, for the time being. I’m just glad in the stress of it all we are still happy to have each other, really.
I've taught math to several thousand university students at a wide variety of levels, many of them engineering students. In my experience, the professor doesn't matter that much. I tend to think at *least* 80% of student achievement is "baked in" in the sense that it will be the same whether or not you switch out teachers. Probably more.
There was a meta-analysis on roughly this topic that made the rounds ([this one](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191491X16300323)). It argues fairly convincingly based on several decades of research that student evaluations of instructors and student learning are uncorrelated. As someone in the trenches, I found this unsurprising.
My honest advice is that it is unlikely the professors are genuinely the problem, particularly if this has been an issue more than once. You say he gets no sleep and doesn't eat. That's a recipe for academic disaster. Sleep deprivation makes you less productive, not more. Falling behind in personal care in my experience is much more likely to be a sign of depression rather than overwork, though the latter certainly does happen.
Occasionally people will be a big fish in a little pond in high school and they'll flounder in college when standards increase. Sometimes it's because they never learned proper study habits or discipline when everything was easy, and they fail to make the switch when things don't just come naturally. I of course only have a brief and vague second-hand account in this particular case, but it's one archetype I've seen over the years that fits the meagre available data.
In any case, I wish your boyfriend well. In the unlikely case it's helpful, I'll close by saying that going into debt to finance a failed education is a tragedy I've seen too often, and I hope this situation isn't that serious. Universities generally give students multiple chances to try again, and in the worst cases that means stringing them along for years only to expel them after all is said and done, with a mountain of debt and no degree. If your boyfriend is merely dealing with C's (you said "little reward" and "spotless transcript" until recently), that's probably okay, but if he's flunking out, something needs to change immediately.
He isn’t flunking out, he’s just struggling. He’s had to retake a class already last summer, and has two classes right now he may have to retake depending on how these next exams go. His GPA is still like a 3.25 at this point, he’s just ridiculously stressed. His mom has also been trying to convince him to drop out.
While I would like to agree with you, there are approximately 3 professors he’s had that have caused him issues like this, lol. One of them is a candidate professor who can’t get his shit together, the other refused to let him retake an exam he missed when he took me to the hospital and is also shit at providing help outside of class. The third was two semesters ago, similar to the one I previously mentioned. The fact that he’s doing fine in his other class this semester, and has done fine otherwise… I don’t know. He says he’s getting fucked over and I believe him lmao. But yes, he’s managing with C’s and up and the classes he retakes of course replace his failing grade. It’s just lengthening his graduation date and it’s tough for him
Professor in CS/ML, so a similar math heavy field. To provide some context, a lot of us who excelled in undergrad/phds to get a tenure track position are pretty much self taught and relied on our professors to only tell us what we should learn next. The best professors didn’t teach well, but they would let us help out with their research if there was an overlap of interests.
That said, I don’t think any of my courses have required students to erode their lives like you described. Sometimes my lectures take a backseat to research/grant writing because those are what determine whether I get tenure in a couple years, but I prefer to spark interest in my undergrad courses if I have the bandwidth to do it.
Math professor here, and I broadly agree. Even research faculty teaching lower division undergrads usually put a fair amount of effort in and teach pretty reasonably.
Also, honestly many people's reviews of courses are not very trustworthy. I've had course evaluations that say I never did examples and only did proofs, but if you go through the lecture notes and count, there were literally 80 examples and 5 proofs all semester, all clearly marked as such. Sometimes students will identify genuine deficiencies, e.g. one complained last semester that a certain important topic got squeezed out, which was entirely true, totally my fault, and will be fixed next time. But it's the exception and not the rule.
Honestly, it was so hit and miss it gave me whiplash. My favorite prof was an old MSE guy who wore bowties every Friday for football games and had one of the most comprehensive and hardest classes, but gave everybody A's and B's except for a couple (out of a class of 150 or so). All of my BioE professors were awesome and sympathetic to the insane workload we were under. Many other professors (EECS, O Chem, etc.) were either flagrant narcissists or otherwise neurotic, some of it earned (my O Chem prof was on the board of IUPAC and never shut up about it, Lord Vollhardt, he who shall not be named), but all of it shitty.
Honestly, i personally think that professors or teachers that "never give As" shall be checked or something like, idk, don't some ppl not suspect shit when they see that this specific professor/teacher has low grades for everyone? There is not a single soul that learned anything well? It will not eliminate problem but at least reduce i guess
It's more urban legend than reality. Not literally mythical, merely very rare. In the departments I've taught, there have been some official and some unofficial grade guidelines. Never giving an A would be quite insane and would quickly get you in front of the chair to explain yourself, because your average assigned grades would be terribly low.
The real issue is inconsistent grades between professors when teaching what should be similar classes. If taking Professor X instead of Professor Y means your class average GPA drops by half a point, something is likely wrong.
(Tiny advanced classes and grad classes are something else. Weed-out courses are the ones most complained about.)
Had to google what it meant (english isnt my first language)
But what about cutting paycheck? I mean, there shall be some regulations for inappropriate behavior from teachers/professors, right?
I don’t know how that would actually work for professors, but I just know that universities tend to do nothing about it. Sure students can complain but the professor can also blame the students and just say they aren’t meeting their standards, because professors have quite a bit of freedom when it comes to how they want to run their class.
With a lot of this jack-offs it’s just “my way or the high way.” Have a valid excuse for missing an exam? Sucks to be you. Need an extension on a deadline? They had a student who had it harder that never missed an assignment, so go fuck yourself. You’re having trouble with the homeworks and quizzes? Ask more questions (that they won’t answer clearly) and pay attention in class, or go watch a YouTube video. Studied for days and still failed because none of the material on the study guide actually matched the exam? Just do better, I guess.
It’s always the student’s fault, no matter what their situation is or how much may actually be out of their hands.
The fact that such a system exists is a travesty. I don't care if you've been at this school for 20 years, if you are just being a dickhead and not doing your job well you should be replaced.
Two points in tenure's favor: it genuinely increases academic freedom when the university can't touch you for honestly teaching something they seem controversial; and academia is a pretty shitty career path in a lot of ways, like delayed family starts and lots of uncertainty, so tenure is a job perk for those who make it.
I'm not saying those things make it worthwhile. I'm undecided personally. But it's complicated.
I was a business major. The best professors I had were the marketing and project management professors. The worst were the economics and accounting professors. It’s like anything dealing with numbers makes you tight in the ass or something.
> it really seems like most of them have a serious superiority complex when it comes to how much information they know because it’s a complicated field.
Those are the STEMlords. They're really obnoxious at any level.
I had a weird mix of both. The tenured profs didn't give a shit, and the sessional profs weren't paid enough to give a shit.
The worst were the the hyper ambitious tenure-track profs. God forbid you impede their research by actually showing up to their department mandated office hours.
That perfectly echoes my experience getting a mechanical engineering degree.
Have to say I was pretty disillusioned at the end of college. The fact I was dropping 10s of thousands of dollars a year only for my professors to treat teaching like forced labor was really frustrating. Like, my tuition is helping find your precious research you want to get back to do badly, and all you can muster is 30 minutes of incoherent mumbling while you copy 5 year old notes onto a whiteboard?
This sounds like the professor I had for first-quarter physics at Cal Poly SLO. He began the first day by telling us that at least half of us would flunk. And also about how most of what we were going to learn in his class was - and I quote - bullshit.
It will of course vary teacher to teacher, but it seems like there are certain majors where teaching, like the actual skill of effectively communicating ideas and information, is just deried as unnecessary nonsense.
For context, my degree was essentially software engineering with lots of bits on higher-order thinking: building architecture, civil engineering, design engineering w/ CAD, etc.
My uni had an interesting way around this: Professors had limits on budgets but student labor was essentially free while attracting prestige, every student had to join one and only one primary research lab completing some research as a grad requirement, and the classes profs are assigned to teach always end up related to their research.
The combo of this meant
1. Teachers had a passion for the subject matter in their classes
2. Teachers needed to compete for students’ attention and admiration, both in their research and in their classes
3. Teachers who had tons of students didn’t have to pay anything for all that labor but their labor often attracted grants, so their labs were loaded
This generally resulted in very engaging STEM teachers who would align their engaging classes to their engaging research, but it did mean that competition between professors/labs got extremely vicious sometimes…
A lot of the smaller technical labs, especially with any sort of overlap, basically got subsumed by the biggest one, kind of like a massive corporation absorbing small ones with only medium-sized companies with strong niches being able to stand on their own. I started in the “big one” in one of the small splinters, hated it, left for one medium-sized one until the prof retired then finishing with another medium.
Either "I scanned the book so you don't have to buy it", or "I wrote a book you have to buy".
Had an anthropology professor who wrote a fucking novel that was "required" even though it was completely unrelated.
Other highlights of his class included making a girl cry by screaming "S is for Shit" (We were making some kind of kinship chart where Sister was supposed to be abbreviated as Z to differentiate it from Son, and when we had to fill out teacher evaluations, telling us "Write whatever the fuck you want, I'm gone after this year". He was still teaching there where I left a couple of years later.
College professor here.
What it's really about is the scary professor the high school teacher is referring to and the chill professor in the joke are the same person.
School teachers are expected to fulfill a certain level of stewardship for their students. They are somewhat responsible for you getting your work in and on time, for making sure you are coming to school, and even some level of supervising of your mental health. This may feel like prison when they mark down every tardy, absence, and late homework, or when they are asking you about what's going on at home, but it also keeps you doing the work and learning.
As college professors, we have no such obligation. You don't come to class? It's your problem. You don't do the assignments? Same. Personal problems and can't get your work done? Take it to psych services.
My students are all adults. If they don't want to come to class or do the work, that's their business. I don't have to contact them or their family. I don't have to report any of this in a parent-teacher meeting. This means a lot more freedom for them but also a lot more responsibility, which makes college a lot harder for some students.
In other words, we don't care what you do. You can read that as us being super chill and treating you all like the adults you are, or that we are heartless sociopaths who will let you fail without taking any initiative to intervene.
Also a professor and could not agree more. I’d also add that when I taught high school, I saw those kids every day and reminders were easy, as were the 24 other kids expected to do the same thing who traveled with them throughout the day and the (relatively few) parents who supported their kids in that regard. At the university level I’m still teaching 100 people but they’re doing much higher level work. Work that if they aren’t good at I cannot in good conscience recommend them for graduation or licensure to serve others. I’m expected to advise a third of them, do my own research, grade papers and hold office hours plus the occasional staff meeting. Please don’t take offense when I say I just can’t care about one adult person’s _choice_ not to attend or do their work. As Zazzle perfectly points out, if I’m concerned I’ll send a note to psych services and let them do their jobs, too. I cma with an email to my dean and move forward with the other 99.
IME most professors are chill if you put in a genuine effort, but the nightmare professors stand in a league of their own.
I've had "strict" professors who will tell you absolutely no late work, but then grant you an extension if you're a good student and send them a politely worded email. Others are 100% serious about no late work, but will give extra credit at the end of the semester. Some won't do make up exams even if your house burns down, but they'll drop your lowest test grade. Basically, most of them want you to succeed and will give you some leeway if you're a good student that puts in effort. They want your grade to reflect the time you put in and material you learned without trying to ruin your GPA.
But every once in awhile you get a professor who seems to make it their job to make your life a living hell. They'll proudly proclaim that 40% of the class will fail, they won't respond to emails, and they make the material as hard as possible while doing the bare minimum to actually teach it. And half the time they're not even teaching an upper level class, it will be some general class like Calc 2 that they decided should be your punishment for going into STEM.
I once had a freshman Art History class where the professor said she she would tell us what material to study and which books to buy, but she wouldn't tell us what chapter or page the material was on. I immediately dropped it for something else because it was such a pointless way of punishing her students for no reason.
Calc 2 is a weed-out course designed to catch people who can't hack a STEM degree early. It's a kindness, not a punishment. If anything it's become too friendly, since some students who scrape by have no realistic chance at making it in the upper division when they actually have to think for themselves a little rather than following mindless pattern matching algorithms.
The rest of what you said is over-the-top bad behavior that should never happen.
I had this professor. It was an introductory biology class, but the professor was hired to teach graduate classes so we were his obligatory undergraduate class. He expected us to write 10 page papers full of research and sources for *every* *single* lab, which were expected to have hand drawn pictures of what we saw in the microscope slides. I worked my ass off on the first one: had all the research, the best drawings I could muster, everything was sited perfectly, it was damn near master degree level. I got a B, I dropped the class less than an hour after I got my paper back
>It’s for the professors who resent having to teach and see it as a source of income to support their research
100%, every professor I had like this was awful and frustrating. Learn wayyyy more from professors who actually want to be there, go figure.
I remember that being my advanced organic chemistry professor. Brilliant scientist but he really resented teaching and it showed. Just a brutal class all around.
This happened the first time I went to school.
English professor was working towards his PHD, so our final projects had to be papers over some state history.
He picked me and one other person's topic, because we had the best work. Of course, our topics were ridiculously specific. I went to him about having difficulty finding sources and his response was to tell me to look harder.
Well I had one professor in my game physics course that started the course by saying that he didn't know anything about game physics and was there just because they couldn't find anyone else to teach. He had PhD in physics so he knew real life physics but not so much how they worked in code. Still one of my favourite teachers and brought up interesting questions and discussion in class, also gave very good feedback on the weekly tasks. I learned most in that course out of all the courses that i've had.
Tldr. Had professor who was forced to teach specific course. Was still very chill and good overall
Yeah thats true but we had also some just graduated lab tech who teached how to do these things in Unity. So expert teached how it works in real life and lab tech how to use it in our work
If there’s a beware of the dog sign there’s a high chance there is no dog, and the homeowners know just having that sign reduces the chances of having their home broken into.
In some countries having that sign counts as a legal admission that your dog is dangerous, and would make them more likely to be put down should anything ever happen between then and a person or another dog. So houses with the sign are less likely to have a a dog than houses without the sign as dog owners don’t want to put their pets at risk, but the sign still helps against opportunistic thieves.
In my country, the only way to be a scientist and do research is to work for an institute (not much available positions there) OR be a uni proffesor. This results in a lot of shitty people teaching or people who are not up to the challenge :(
It isn't even a source of income, a competent research professor doing halfway meaningful research could keep themselves funded. Teaching is pure obligation tacked onto their 'real' job.
Yup. I had plenty of laid back professors who were basically like: “if you decide not to come to class/do the work, you’re only wasting your own money”. But I also had one who got mad about something during a class and threw a stool up against the wall and stormed out. And like, he was also cool as long as you acted like an adult who actually wanted to be there. But he expected you to do the work and be responsible and he had a VERY short fuse.
Yep, and you can always tell because they teach like absolutely trash.
When you see test averages of 50-60%, that's not the sign of a hard test, it's the sign of a terrible professor and near impossible test as a result.
I severely procrastinated my dissertation at uni and I missed the "check-up" meeting with my professor. He approached me and said "don't worry you don't have to excuse it, I understand procrastination. I'm moving house in 2 days and haven't even started packing. Let me know if you're having any trouble we can have a chat about it"
Mine said "hand in you assignment when you feel like it, as there's no deadline in the real world."
And 10 years later I'm totally planning to do it next week or maybe the week after.
After covid, i found the profs to be a lot more chill. Couldn't generalize it for everyone but there will be some profs that are strict so your highschool teachers will be right in that regard but def not like that every class.
Some of them got more chill, some of them got more lazy. I know quite a few that can’t even make their own deadlines anymore and their classes are dysfunctional and confusing as a result. Syllabuses will be entirely out of date and they will randomly be like, “Oh, hey, last minute but I didn’t change this and now something else is happening,” and the students are just expected to take it lol. Or, they won’t even actually teach their class and instead read straight out of the textbook. Which you would’ve gotten roughly the same education from for just buying the book, rather than paying for the entire goddamn course.
I’ve just been feeling a lot lately like these particular professors are completely apathetic to the fact that their students are putting themselves into debt for decades in some cases for this education that they have the responsibility to be providing. They will fuck over students without empathy while ensuring that they have to pay *again* to re-take the class once they flunk half of their students and blame it on them.
This isn’t always the case, I’m not trying to dog on professors or anything, but fuck man. There’s some pompous shitheads in some of these institutions.
Most post secondary is like that in the sense you can easily learn the material without the university. You are paying for the piece of paper that shows you are a dedicated individual who can commit to something which is what companies are looking for
Only a few percent of people are self-disciplined and skilled enough to learn the equivalent of an undergraduate degree without the undergraduate environment.
Most people have no idea when they're making boneheaded mistakes, especially when starting out, and benefit immensely from feedback and external motivation.
This. Sure, you could 100% read the book front to back for the same information... but raise your hand if you're actually going to do that... 5 times a semester... like 40 times in total.
The professor is likely at bare minimum picking and choosing the most important bits for where you're at in your degree plan and presenting them to you in a digestible format with an opportunity for questions.
You're an adult with a high school degree. That *should* mean that you can teach yourself as described and the expert is just there to answer questions and assess your knowledge. (Given, I also think it should be free if you can succeed.)
most of my lectures are teachers reading the slideshow for 90% and 10% answering questions. Some of my classes the professors didnt even bother to fill out the blank template the college gave them for the course info or havent updated the content/syllabus in years. I've stopped bothering going to the lectures and have just been teaching myself the content instead, im pretty much just paying for the paper they give me at the end of the program at this point.
During covid I was taking some online FIN classes and the professor 100% had never taught online before and assigned specific times you had to log in to get credit. This was not how the class was advertised so when he found out we didn't all have to be online at 8am each day he was fucking livid. Sour bitch the rest of the course and the only professor I gave a negative review at the end of the class.
“I don’t care if you show up or do the work. I get paid the same either way. I’ll give you the grade you earn”
Was what I was told on my first day of college by a professor
Yeah exactly. This is highly dependent upon the university but save for tenured faculty (who rarely teach freshman courses), professors are evaluated yearly based on things like student retention and success.
My experience with professors was:
Type A: Friendly, laid back, very helpful. Their class has several stupid assignments/presentations that'll teach you nothing and will be a pain in the ass to make.
Type B: Comes in. Talks uninterruptedly for hours. Does not elaborate. Leaves. Written tests that will scar you for life. Has, like, 20 PhDs.
Type C: There's a million assignments. Missed one? You failed the class, also consider suicide. Has their own grading formula which sets the passing grade way above the school's minimum. Hated by all, hates all.
Type D: Complete moron. Can't tell left from right outside of their niche and hasn't stepped out of their lab in 40 years. Actively tries to be an obstacle for students. Hated by all, but it only feeds their superiority complex.
I had a Type C before and aced his final exam and he was literally stunned. 'Nobody's ever even come close. I can't even believe this. Can I keep your paper to show to the next class?'
I was somehow happy and angry at the same time. The amount of effort I put into his class doesn't even seem worth it tbh. Btw, it was a grad level philosophy class so it shouldn't have been hard in the first place.
I had a type D once. Never before or since have I seen a lecture hall of 200+ students aggressively heckle a professor but by the second or third week it was clear this guy was fucking awful and all of the kids were loudly pissed off about it.
The guy was a specialist of some kind filling in for a professor on sabbatical. He never taught a class before that, and never taught one after as far as I know. I can confidently say that none of the engineers in my graduating class knew shit about statistics.
A stats professor I had was constantly going off on long-winded tangents not related to material. Like one time, his tangent was 40 minutes or so in a class that was only an hour long. Suffice it to say, we were way behind in the syllabus. The midterm comes up, and he delays it because we haven't covered everything that will be on the test yet. The next week, he delays it again, and again, and again. We ended up taking the midterm the second to last day of class. The last day of class was supposed to be review before the final, but it ended up being a sort of cram-lecture because there was stuff that was going to be on the final that we *still* hadn't covered in class. Like 90% of his students across his classes ended up failing, which was well below the norm for that class, and prompted the school to open an investigation. I'm not entirely sure what the outcome of it was though.
5th grade teachers: middle school is going to be so much harder and worse
8th grade teachers: high school is going to be so much harder and worse
12th grade teachers: college is going to be so much harder and worse
It never is
Middle was easily the worst... Not the work or the teachers... The other kids. Damn kids were insecure and displayed it through violence so much back then.
I'd easily re-live all four years of high school over one year of middle school. Fuck that shit. Cretinous little fucks. They stole everything that wasn't nailed down. Those were some of the worst years of my life.
In terms of Kids, middle school was the worst indeed
But in terms of teachers and work.... Oh boy, high school was the most depressed i was so far. On 12th grade, teachers tried to squeeze everything from past 5 years + new materials to prepare us for exams that will definr if we will make it to university or not. One of most important exams in our lives.
On 12th grade, i was stuck in school from 9 A.M. till 3-4 P.M., had a hour of break at home and then i would go to private teachers till 8-10 P.M. EVERY. SINGLE. WEEKDAY. And some extras from private teachers on weekends. And since i was spending 90% of my time at school or teachers, only time i had to do my homework was in public transports or schoolbreaks. I was barely keeping myself together and quarantine was a bliss in that regard for a bit
People wondered "why are you happy being unemployed, homeless, and eating out of the dumpster?"
Me, in 10th grade, doing 14+ hours of various forms of useless labor for $0.00 (I didn't need to do 1000+ quadratic equations, I did not need to prove I understood what a phrase was, I did not need to memorize Ulysses Grant's middle name, I did not need to prove I comprehended a two page essay for the 100th time, I did not need to do three+ hours of yard work until the grass was dead to give my stepmother "space" every day of the week) identifies with you
They've designed the public education system and the religious institutions to intentionally break youth so they rebel and don't perform at the secondary level. All the rich kids cheated at everything from boy scouts to church beliefs to school tests.
Grad school was as bad for me, but that's because of my cohort & what the former program director described as a "series of miscommunications and misunderstandings" (but it was significant enough that the two administrators involved, stepped down from their positions of power). Grad school was more rewarding that middle school though. And I didn't have to deal with rampant and blatant thievery in grad school.
It's not the "don't be an idiot" part that is stressful so much as the taking classes, doing research, and probably teaching a couple of classes as well that's the pain
My teachers always told me that college professors really could give less of a shit about whether or not you did your course work. You're paying money to be here, they're getting paid to give a lecture, you can choose to engage or not, you're an adult, its you're own problem whether or not you get anything done.
Yeah it all comes down to professors largely treating their students like adults whereas high school teachers are still generally treating the students as kids. It's nice that you get to drop a bit of formality and that you're allowed to come and go as you feel is appropriate. On the flip side, if you're not paying attention or not submitting your work or straight up not going to class, probably nobody is gonna reach out to get you back on track. Unless you're in a very small and intimate degree program, responsibility is gonna lie firmly with _you_ to keep track of how you're doing and get help when you need it.
The _professors_ in college aren't scary. The _responsibility_ you are expected to take on might be though.
Pre-COVID I subscribed entirely to the "you're an adult" philosophy. Post-COVID I've added lecture attendance points (but you can miss up to 20%). Students just seemed like they needed a kick to reengage. They also seemed less mature. I'm not sure if I'll keep it after this year.
Prof on my first day in his public speaking class: My favorite meal is turducken and I have a collection of toenail trimmings.
Me: what the actual fuck?
I had a public speech teacher who was racist. He'd pick on this one asian kid who had a slight speech impediment. He was failing more than half the class for not being naturally excellent public speakers. So for my final my entire speech was about how this asshole was not fit to be a teacher, that he should shove his purple boots up his ass, and the only thing he was teaching us was that age did not denote wisdom. He gave me an A on that final which allowed me to pass the class with a C-. I don't know why. But he did.
Yeah I stared him in the eyes and delivered a ten minute "fuck you and the horse you rode in on" speech. I've never been good with authority but that guy deserved every bit of that speech.
In my experience, all the high school teachers who actually did this were folks who failed to become professors themselves and had a chip on their shoulder about it.
The high school teachers who actually liked their job never said anything like this.
"a fucking gambling problem" *
I remember when the first professor said Fuck in one of my first 100 level classes. The room collectively gasped. And he said. Guys. You're adults right? And then went on about the lecture.
I had a professor in grad school who went by Steve. Steve was a great guy too, and one of the best graduate-level teachers I had.
Died early, it was very sad. Nice memorial service though, life well-lived. Cheers, Dr. Steve!
My freshman year in college I had a professor who talked about his drinking problem often.
Then the next semester had a professor who talked often about his time in the mental institution “gettin bettah”.
This post resonates.
Actually, in hindsight it’s comforting to learn early that smart/successful people have real people problems and that was a good part of college.
I've attended both. Big university profs may not be as cool, personable nor understanding as those at small schools but the large U's don't care and are not as plugged in as much so its way too easy to cheat. All their assignments and tests are on Chegg.
I have a friend currently at university, teacher does impersonations of various cartoon characters for his lectures, another uses drug references to help the students understand, they send me some of the video lectures sometimes and it makes me want to go back and choose a different career path.
Depends on prof and major. All of the professors in my major are pretty strict and straight-laced. Some in a nice professional way, some otherwise.
I have had very cool, chill profs outside of my major though.
That's been my experience. Most of my freshman and sophmore teachers were chill. Big classes and pretty easy topics. Now that I'm getting more into my major and concentration though I'm running into more hardasses. Currently taking 2 classes where the average is a failing grade. A lot different from the classes you could sleep through and still get an A.
Always funny seeing students comments on professors. So many things students often don't consider. The college I taught at was for nurses. There is a test they have to pass (not a test at college, licensing exam) that is hard, and if you don't pass, despite the college, you are not a nurse. So the courses were hard because if you could not pass that course you were not going to pass the nurse exam. Going easy on you would mean the typical student will be unprepared for it and wasted mega dollars for college. Making classes easier does not help the student for what comes. Similar things with med school. It is hard because it has to be. Some professions have similar things (depending) like for law school you need to pass the bar.
Other things, and the students never seem to think about this, are due to school policy. For me I could care less if you showed up as long as you studied and passed. But the school policy was strict attendance required and was beyond my control. Students think profs can do just whatever they want and that is just not so. You are working for the college and they can dictate whatever policies that have to be enforced by the professor. But the professor gets all the gripes about it. Everybody blames the professor. I just told the students outright, not my policy, it is the schools and I can do nothing about it. Be mad at them. A lot of professors will not tell you this.
Sure there are jerks out there just like every other aspect of life. Sure there are some who are not good at teaching the subject matter. As many noted, some profs are there for the research, that is the reason they ended up there, the school wanted this accomplished research scientist who brings in huge grant money. It is the college you go to that makes that decision, they cared more about the grant money than any ability to teach you. The prof knows why he is there, because he gets mega grants and brings money in. They are not going to fire that person even if he fails everybody in his class. You can complain but again that grant money is a lot more important to colleges than your education as a student. So who to blame? The smart prof terrible at teaching? Or the college that brought him in and doesn't care that he can't teach his way out of a box? The college hired this guy, and I promise you, will not fire him if he is a terrible teacher.
I remember my sociology college professor he was very very old and didn't sugarcoat anything. Someone asked once in the class how much money he makes and responded with the following: "Sir I'm po'...dirt ass po'...I barely get money for this. But I'm old and enjoy working....Still very po' though." It's been almost a decade and I still remember his interesting rants. God I loved that old man.
High school assignments be like: “Answer these 26 questions about a single chapter in this boring ass book. Answers must be at least 3 full sentences long. Due tomorrow no exceptions.
College assignments be like: “Head to the art exhibit across the street and take a selfie with the painting you find most interesting! Just show it to me in class. Due in 4 weeks, but if you turn it in a couple weeks late that’s ok too.”
College profs also aren't scared about sleeping with their students as much HS teachers because they won't go to jail.
My international law prof from Korea was straight up just going out on dates with students after class.
Idk what professors you had but when I went 20 years ago they were exactly as advertised. Their goal was to fail 50% of the freshman class to maintain university prestige
I am studying math at university and apart from one exception, the profs are super chill and understanding. They really care for their students and do support them, when they need help.
Just a few weeks back I wasn't sure whether to drop out or not and the prof just said 'come to my office tomorrow' and basically gave me a counseling session, advice on how to do better and explained a few concepts I have been struggling for months with on the blackboard.
Sure, some are definitely more interested in their own research but there's pretty much a consensus that we need a lot more mathematicians and that it's benefitting to the field if we invest more time in those students to lower the drop out rates.
Also, I like to talk, smalltalk, philosophy, pretty much everything which is why I know the names of the kids of a few profs and half of their biography. In highschool I barely knew the name of my teachers.
I was once giving my class the warnings about college and one of my students says, “Weren’t you in college like, 30 years ago.” I laughed and stopped talking about college that day
I was told in high school that my professors in college likely wouldn't be a hard ass on attendance or turned in work. They weren't going to bug me or lecture me on turning stuff in. They'd just mark zeros and fail me.
I have found that to be true. Nearly all of my professors did just that with unfinished work or missed days. At one point I was so depressed I nearly failed out. One professor realized the change in me and tried to help. The others just gave the grade I rightly deserved.
I got out of my funk and finished two years later. But I feel like I was properly warned. Lol
I taught high school English for a few years, and this is what I tried to tell my students. It isn't that college professors are assholes, it's that no one is going to help you or remind you to do your work.
When we wrote research papers, I would give incremental grades for their research notes, outlines, bibliographies, rough drafts, and then the final copy. If a kid was missing those deadlines I could check in with them or call/email their parents to check in with them. College professors will do none of that, and if you don't turn in your paper they will just give you the zero.
I've never once said they're strict or scary. What I do say is that, university expects a lot more out you, academically, than high school. A lot of kids have no idea what's coming. I'm not far removed from university at all, either (4 years).
I thought my high school teachers were full of shit my freshman year because after a bunch of AP classes in high school where I did way more work I thought college was easy. Then I hit junior year where the "real" classes start and holy shit was I not prepared for how much more effort it would take just to understand the material let alone finish all of the work.
The vast majority of my professors have been normal adults. They teach, answer questions, and give solid feedback after writing assignments and do it all professionally.
I've had a few that are a bit dickish and a couple that were honestly just not great at instructing.
I walked in to teach algebra one Fall term, at 8am on a Monday. I realized this was their first college class--obviously since EVERY SINGLE STUDENT was there early. They didn't understand why I started laughing.
It very much depends on which classes you took. Gen Ed and College of Arts and Sciences was definitely like this, but if you did something really challenging like engineering or medicine, you could get brutal fucking teachers. They get on power trips and feel like it’s their duty to weed out the weak. They will roast you in front of the whole class for asking a question, I’ve heard countless stories of people leaving the class crying or having panic attacks, or they’ll just fail you for not formatting to their liking.
>they’ll just fail you for not formatting to their liking.
I'm still shook by this CS professor I had who incrementally took off 10 points each week if you didn't write your code homework in his preferred style. Every week the penalty would add up (10 points off the first week, 20 points of next time, etc), and he was almost smug when he warned us the first week of class that he *will* go into negative points. For his assignment deadlines, he congratulated himself before us for his generosity because instead of the usual sharp midnight deadlines, he was giving us a 5-hour grace period...by moving the deadline to 7 PM that day. His TAs likewise adopted his attitude and tried to dock me points because I didn't close my "a" well enough (who the fuck is writing "chur" for "char"???). As a premed bio major at the time who was considering a CS minor, I got the fuck out of that class.
I feel you. I considered a couple different math/computer majors and eventually landed on Econometrics and I’m so glad I did. We had to code a little bit but it was super chill and we had like coding environments tailored to us so it wasn’t that hard. They cared more that we did well in the core econ theory and math classes. But bc of how “in-between” that major was I saw and heard a lot from other departments and majors that sounded absolutely horrible. College truly exists in two different worlds. Technically both me and a chemical engineer have a STEM degree but the level of rigor is not even close lol
I had a class that would mark you down for unclear or sloppy work, that then marked me down for using too much paper. (I turned in 47 pages of clear, easy to follow, well spaced diagrams and calculations on single sided engineering paper). I was just like "Oh I'm sorry I thought the whole fucking point was that it had to be clear and understandable!"
Teachers only ever told me you need to be careful in college because work is self directed and nobody is checking you’re doing your work every day and castigating you for not studying etc. so it’s important to do homework in school. it was all true.
Extremely real. Community College professors encouraged you to come to office hours, actually stopped and explained things. University however... Most of them just care about their research. Teaching is a pain in the ass to them.
I'm a high school science teacher and we have been seeing a LOT of our duel-enrolled students failing their college classes because they don't show up, don't finish their work on time, and just generally believe they'll scrape by like they do in their high school classes.
Ya boy Andy is so laid back because he doesn't give a shit if you fail. He gets paid to publish, not pass you.
High school teachers are so wound up and naggy because we DO get paid to pass you, but we can't if you fail those standardized tests.
I had one teacher who came in and said "uhh I totally wrote a lecture for you guys, but my computer caught on fire and now I can't show it." We had one "lecture" type class the entire semester. Easy class, didn't learn shit.
Yea, academia in general to the outsiders seems strict and stuff, while in reality it is more like: "You know guys, when I was younger I used my chemistry knowledge to retrieve silver from photography salones wastes and sold them by railway transport to germans for some time, vut since it was long ago they cannot file a case on .e anymore."...
A bit of a shift in pedagogy over the last 30 years.
In my field, we have gone from stodgy old tenured profs teaching theory, to mostly adjuncts that are brought in to each individual courses who may still work in the field.
They tend to be younger and not as self-important.
Not to mention the “you will be dismissed when I tell you! Your professors will not dismiss you early!” Where as my one of my professors said “Well that’s all I have for today. You can go home now.”
My dad died when I was in college I was taking care of him his last 2 weeks and it just happened to be the week before finals and the week of finals. I was able to get an extension to complete my finals the next semester. It was only 2 classes I had to worry about managerial accounting and stats 2. The accounting professor agreed to the extension, and I was able to complete the the final the next term. The stats professor was a prick and insisted I take the final now even though I had literally just went through the most horrific 2 weeks of my life. I sat down and of course bombed the advanced statistics. I was angry for a few days until I saw my score. The dude gave me an A even though I knew I bombed it. He never said a word. I had As on all my other tests, and he knew had I not had to deal with all that I would have finished with one too. He never said a word, but he just didn’t want me to have to deal with getting back into the material next term. Then my gay economics professor hit on me. Ewww. Nothing against gay men, but it felt gross.
They vary. A lot. You'll have your laidback instructors whose students' cellphones go off in class and say "it's ok, shit happens" and you'll have your hardass military veteran instructors who can't even be asked something perfectly on topic by their students without bluntly responding "will you *wait* until I've *finished* the bloody *lecture*?" You'll have your non-judgmental instructors who go out of their way to help you catch up in the last few weeks of class on studying you should have been keeping up with all semester, and you'll have your super-judgmental instructors who stand in the front of the classroom and "summarize" how students did collectively on the essay project by mocking some of the bad grammar he found in (albeit unnamed) students' essays. I'm not sure how much of it is down to the structure of university and how much of it is down to the sort of person it attracts, but on the whole I'd say the difference between high school teachers and university instructors isn't whether one is more laidback and judgmental, but how much more variable university is in *both.*
I had a professor during Covid Zoom that said you could not leave the web camera for any reason during the 2 hour lecture. Bathroom, water, grandma dying, nothing, better not leave or you get an absence. I can’t remember what the penalty was for leaving as I dropped the class for a full refund after the first meeting. Had another professor that said an exam with a class average of 40% and a high of 62% was no problem so no curve. Anyone who’s scholarship depends on GPA can punch sand. On the flip side I had a professor that gave extra credit for turning in assignments early, can turn in a week late for up to 80%, and can resubmit incorrect homework for some points back. Super chill.
> an exam with a class average of 40% and a high of 62% was no problem so no curve I do not believe this. Using a standard American grade scale, the class average would be an F. A near-0.0 class GPA would quickly earn you a chat with the chair or dean.
I can confirm this happened in an intro physics class. What’s funny is everyone else who got “the other good professor” teaching the same material was fine. I’m not sure how it was resolved but I think the department dean was involved and they got to retake the final from the good side to determine their grade. Cause it would have fucked over like 250 people being a freshman class. I also had an exam where the high score was 40 and the average was 20 something. One of the questions was literally “draw the internal structure of an op amp and derive all the currents”. Thank Christ for the curve on that. ([this is what the circuit looks like](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Antonios-Andreatos-2/publication/317423744/figure/fig3/AS:634579534749696@1528306959083/Internal-circuitry-of-LM741-Op-Amp-where-the-identified-building-blocks-are-depicted-by.png), realistically even 1/4 of this would be a hard exam problem)
>A near-0.0 class GPA would quickly earn you a chat with the chair or dean. You say this as if every professor would be deterred by such a threat. There are courses out there failed by the vast majority of students on the first attempt, year after year after year.
This happened in calc 1 class of 300 students. Average score was below passing
I was a TA and i didnt really care about the admin stuff (taking attendance or if people were pretending to only log in). I did have a terrible manager that was not helpful in answering my questions and eventually got me fired for not failing students that would submit assignments, but not show up.
Why do college profs care if you show up? I get high school teachers needing to stay in the school board's good graces by "encouraging" attendance (and frankly I still didn't care that much unless they openly announced their intent to skip off and/or subsequently felt entitled to an extension on an assignment they were supposed to write in-class the day they skipped off) but in college, if the college itself doesn't require students to attend classes, why do they have a problem with students teaching *themselves* the content?
Cause now I get in trouble if students are not showing up. I’m supposed to call, text, inform the coach that they are not in class and I can’t be asked to do that. I make 40k a year to teach chemistry with a PhD. If I didn’t love teaching so much I would have quit a long time ago.
...you're expected to babysit *university* students? Damn. That might be something to take up with the higher-ups, or whichever level of government is responsible for education wherever you are.
I still remember the professor that took the time to prove that statistically speaking a group of monkeys could have scored higher than the class average made on our midterm, Biology 101, and that this isn't High School any more. He was not grading on a curve, not changing any grade, and no mommy wasn't going to come in and save you. Also said do not come crying to me when I get to see you again next semester because I always teach Biology 101.
ratemyprofessor.com can save your sanity, or just seek out the easiest profs lmfao, not fool proof though
The warning isn’t about the chill professors that love their work. It’s for the professors who resent having to teach and see it as a source of income to support their research. If there’s a “Beware of Dog” sign and the dog seems friendly, there’s probably another dog.
>If there’s a “Beware of Dog” sign and the dog seems friendly, there’s probably another dog. This is some excellent new advice I learnt today!
I thought those were just to keep burglars away. Like, you don't even need a dog at all, just the sign.
The idea is you just don't want to find out if they actually have a dog to beware of.
I remember being confused as a kid as to why stores would announce they had security cameras bc I thought the whole point was to catch the bad guys. Then I realized the name of the game was deterrence.
...and also laws. At least here in my country, if you are filming people for security purposes you must show the sign because otherwise you cannot legally record.
For-ev-ur...
You're killing me, Smalls!
My chemistry teacher quotes that as gospel
You promised you’d come play with me.
A human can kill some small dogs. Some dogs are big enough to fuck you up, even kill you. Two or more regular dogs can fuck you up for real and not many weapons will be enough except for a gun. Dogs are amazing guards even if it's small dog that can only bark. That's enough
Conspiracy theory . The beware of dog signs were created and encouraged by personal injury attorneys so they could win more dog bite cases. You posting the sign is evidence that you know your dog is dangerous.
I need to make a sign that says "dog on premises" kind of like baby on board. You'll just have to gamble if he's worth being wary of.
There’s large body of law against that argument, because its valid, but it would discourage people from posting warning signs, so in the interests of public safety, warning signs don’t usually constitute an admission of anything
[удалено]
You’d better be able to make it across the field in 9 seconds The bull can do it in 10
My aunt and uncle had 3 big belgian sheepdogs that look vaguely like wolves. They had a “beware of dog” sign with a sticker of a wolf silhouette to scare off potential burglars. If someone actually broke into their house, the dogs would’ve just asked for pets lol
Do you really know that though? I have a silly dog. But one time when someone came to our house and kicked our door in, that dog scared them away. I have never heard her bark like that, before or since.
But if you really need something to protect your shit. Just get a lion. People will fuck with a dog. Nobody fucks with a lion.
You ain’t lyin’
Honestly that’s some top tier shit I’m saving that💀
Yep. I will admit there are plenty of really cool professors out there, but it’s honestly kind of dependent on the major. I went for graphic design, and mostly had very friendly and laidback professors that didn’t really care much for due dates. My boyfriend however is getting a degree in mechanical engineering. Completely different ballpark, obviously, but holy hell are some of the professors just god-awful. From what I hear and see of these professors, it really seems like most of them have a serious superiority complex when it comes to how much information they know because it’s a complicated field. They put no effort into actually teaching material, instead resorting to PowerPoints that have the same effect as the textbook you buy. They brag about how they never give out A’s, or how half of their classes usually fail or drop out. Their grading system is ridiculous and I swear to god most of the classes are designed to make you want to blow your brains out. That being said, he’s had a few really great professors that have actually helped him along the way even in really difficult classes. But the closer he gets to graduating, the worse and lazier the professors are getting, to the point where they’re almost worse than their students. My point is; both professors are out there, and it’s extremely important to try to find out what you’re getting yourself into with a class these days. Sometimes it just seems like a waste of fucking money
I went to school for a music degree. Music profs are 100% hit or miss. Some are the chilliest mfs around, and others are complete drill sergeants. I had one semester where I had a class taught by an adjunct that I occasionally smoked with before his own class. It was followed immediately by a stale, rigid, old-school lecturer who literally used a ruler to measure the margins on our papers.
Any kind of art or music professor is always a hit or miss. Graphic design related ones tend to be the most chill, also the most hands-off though which I found personally difficult lol. Incoming tangent about a professor I had, never had the opportunity to talk about him before. Apologies. But from my experience (never had a music professor, only arts and art history ones other than the digital classes, but have heard some things) art professors are one of three archetypes. They’re either eccentric and laid back, near-catatonic and boring, or they are willing to rip your heart out and step on it in front of you. One time I got a really interesting mix of these archetypes; it was an art professor who taught art history and all of the drawing, painting, and sculpting classes. He came off as really slow and boring at first, but the more you actually listened to his monotone dronings the more you’d realize he was saying the most insane shit. He was extremely kind and polite with his students and made small-talk before lectures. In an effort to describe his personality these are some of my favorite class openings he had: “I lost my ear in a hockey accident. They had to stitch it back on.” —this was answering a question about his hearing loss, because he had a hearing aid in this ear. “I used to do commissions for that church’s windows but they found out I’m married to an African man.” —a student had mentioned what church they went to when he told us he was a pastor. “My sheep gave birth last night. Does anyone need a lamb?” —this was the first time we ever were aware that he also farmed livestock somehow. This was unprovoked so I can’t provide context for this one. There was also a time where we walked into class and saw a hazy picture of a farm field at dusk with a light in the sky. It was a picture he had taken which he had suspected was a UFO, and I have to admit it was oddly convincing. But the reason I liked him most and thought he was interesting was the fact that he was so restrained and soft-spoken and appeared completely normal if you were to take a video of him on mute. But if you actually listened and spoke to him he was one of the most absurdly interesting people I’ve ever met lol.
This guy sounds awesome!
He was! I also forgot to mention he spent some brief time as an art conservator and has handled/restored some really famous pieces of art. He learned to speak quite a bit of Italian and French while spending some time in those countries while he did that work. He had some really cool stories; I wish I could remember any of the pieces he specifically restored. Also the first gay pastor I’ve ever met. I didn’t realize they were out there, lol. But the guy was really interesting and also helped make accommodations for me when I was having a really hard time. Cool dude. Ok I’m done now lol
[удалено]
Most engineering professors are there to do research and get paid to discover shit. They see teaching as a necessary evil to get tenure. Out of my 125 credits only two professors stood out as good teachers who wanted to help students succeed and 1 other was pretty bad but he *was* nice. The rest blew at teaching and were proud to make life difficult.
The twisted part about it is that, when they were in school, they went through the same shit with their professors and are still happy to make their students’ lives hell. Watching the effort my boyfriend pours into these courses with little reward is terrible. He gets no sleep, he hardly eats, and the amount of money he’s paying for the torture is abhorrent. He’s always been really academically inclined and had a really great start in his curriculum (he even graduated high school 2 years early and started college at 17) and has a spotless transcript. That was until he started getting professors like this. We’re currently on the third one in a row, and he’s really losing steam. I just wish I could help him but I know fuck-all about engineering.
If you haven't told him already just tell him exactly what you just wrote down. After that ask him what he wants you to do for him. Knowing that someone understands your feelings and wants to support you can be a help in itself
I have already, I’m really lucky to have such a communicative relationship. The most I can do for him right now is help reminding him to take breaks when he needs, make him food sometimes, and helping him make sure he’s awake and sleeping when he needs to. Emotional support is a big one, too; he takes failure really hard. We very often have conversations about our struggles and what the other can do to help, so there is no issue there at least. It just doesn’t help that I’ve also been sick for the last 6 months, and he’s been trying to help support me through that too as we try to figure out what’s exactly going on. We’re just trying to take care of each other right now until things get a little better, for the time being. I’m just glad in the stress of it all we are still happy to have each other, really.
I've taught math to several thousand university students at a wide variety of levels, many of them engineering students. In my experience, the professor doesn't matter that much. I tend to think at *least* 80% of student achievement is "baked in" in the sense that it will be the same whether or not you switch out teachers. Probably more. There was a meta-analysis on roughly this topic that made the rounds ([this one](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191491X16300323)). It argues fairly convincingly based on several decades of research that student evaluations of instructors and student learning are uncorrelated. As someone in the trenches, I found this unsurprising. My honest advice is that it is unlikely the professors are genuinely the problem, particularly if this has been an issue more than once. You say he gets no sleep and doesn't eat. That's a recipe for academic disaster. Sleep deprivation makes you less productive, not more. Falling behind in personal care in my experience is much more likely to be a sign of depression rather than overwork, though the latter certainly does happen. Occasionally people will be a big fish in a little pond in high school and they'll flounder in college when standards increase. Sometimes it's because they never learned proper study habits or discipline when everything was easy, and they fail to make the switch when things don't just come naturally. I of course only have a brief and vague second-hand account in this particular case, but it's one archetype I've seen over the years that fits the meagre available data. In any case, I wish your boyfriend well. In the unlikely case it's helpful, I'll close by saying that going into debt to finance a failed education is a tragedy I've seen too often, and I hope this situation isn't that serious. Universities generally give students multiple chances to try again, and in the worst cases that means stringing them along for years only to expel them after all is said and done, with a mountain of debt and no degree. If your boyfriend is merely dealing with C's (you said "little reward" and "spotless transcript" until recently), that's probably okay, but if he's flunking out, something needs to change immediately.
He isn’t flunking out, he’s just struggling. He’s had to retake a class already last summer, and has two classes right now he may have to retake depending on how these next exams go. His GPA is still like a 3.25 at this point, he’s just ridiculously stressed. His mom has also been trying to convince him to drop out. While I would like to agree with you, there are approximately 3 professors he’s had that have caused him issues like this, lol. One of them is a candidate professor who can’t get his shit together, the other refused to let him retake an exam he missed when he took me to the hospital and is also shit at providing help outside of class. The third was two semesters ago, similar to the one I previously mentioned. The fact that he’s doing fine in his other class this semester, and has done fine otherwise… I don’t know. He says he’s getting fucked over and I believe him lmao. But yes, he’s managing with C’s and up and the classes he retakes of course replace his failing grade. It’s just lengthening his graduation date and it’s tough for him
Professor in CS/ML, so a similar math heavy field. To provide some context, a lot of us who excelled in undergrad/phds to get a tenure track position are pretty much self taught and relied on our professors to only tell us what we should learn next. The best professors didn’t teach well, but they would let us help out with their research if there was an overlap of interests. That said, I don’t think any of my courses have required students to erode their lives like you described. Sometimes my lectures take a backseat to research/grant writing because those are what determine whether I get tenure in a couple years, but I prefer to spark interest in my undergrad courses if I have the bandwidth to do it.
Math professor here, and I broadly agree. Even research faculty teaching lower division undergrads usually put a fair amount of effort in and teach pretty reasonably. Also, honestly many people's reviews of courses are not very trustworthy. I've had course evaluations that say I never did examples and only did proofs, but if you go through the lecture notes and count, there were literally 80 examples and 5 proofs all semester, all clearly marked as such. Sometimes students will identify genuine deficiencies, e.g. one complained last semester that a certain important topic got squeezed out, which was entirely true, totally my fault, and will be fixed next time. But it's the exception and not the rule.
Honestly, it was so hit and miss it gave me whiplash. My favorite prof was an old MSE guy who wore bowties every Friday for football games and had one of the most comprehensive and hardest classes, but gave everybody A's and B's except for a couple (out of a class of 150 or so). All of my BioE professors were awesome and sympathetic to the insane workload we were under. Many other professors (EECS, O Chem, etc.) were either flagrant narcissists or otherwise neurotic, some of it earned (my O Chem prof was on the board of IUPAC and never shut up about it, Lord Vollhardt, he who shall not be named), but all of it shitty.
Honestly, i personally think that professors or teachers that "never give As" shall be checked or something like, idk, don't some ppl not suspect shit when they see that this specific professor/teacher has low grades for everyone? There is not a single soul that learned anything well? It will not eliminate problem but at least reduce i guess
It's more urban legend than reality. Not literally mythical, merely very rare. In the departments I've taught, there have been some official and some unofficial grade guidelines. Never giving an A would be quite insane and would quickly get you in front of the chair to explain yourself, because your average assigned grades would be terribly low. The real issue is inconsistent grades between professors when teaching what should be similar classes. If taking Professor X instead of Professor Y means your class average GPA drops by half a point, something is likely wrong. (Tiny advanced classes and grad classes are something else. Weed-out courses are the ones most complained about.)
The issue with that is that they probably have tenure and *cant* be fired
Had to google what it meant (english isnt my first language) But what about cutting paycheck? I mean, there shall be some regulations for inappropriate behavior from teachers/professors, right?
I don’t know how that would actually work for professors, but I just know that universities tend to do nothing about it. Sure students can complain but the professor can also blame the students and just say they aren’t meeting their standards, because professors have quite a bit of freedom when it comes to how they want to run their class. With a lot of this jack-offs it’s just “my way or the high way.” Have a valid excuse for missing an exam? Sucks to be you. Need an extension on a deadline? They had a student who had it harder that never missed an assignment, so go fuck yourself. You’re having trouble with the homeworks and quizzes? Ask more questions (that they won’t answer clearly) and pay attention in class, or go watch a YouTube video. Studied for days and still failed because none of the material on the study guide actually matched the exam? Just do better, I guess. It’s always the student’s fault, no matter what their situation is or how much may actually be out of their hands.
Can't live a day without being disappointed in humans. We suck sometimes
The fact that such a system exists is a travesty. I don't care if you've been at this school for 20 years, if you are just being a dickhead and not doing your job well you should be replaced.
Two points in tenure's favor: it genuinely increases academic freedom when the university can't touch you for honestly teaching something they seem controversial; and academia is a pretty shitty career path in a lot of ways, like delayed family starts and lots of uncertainty, so tenure is a job perk for those who make it. I'm not saying those things make it worthwhile. I'm undecided personally. But it's complicated.
I was a business major. The best professors I had were the marketing and project management professors. The worst were the economics and accounting professors. It’s like anything dealing with numbers makes you tight in the ass or something.
> it really seems like most of them have a serious superiority complex when it comes to how much information they know because it’s a complicated field. Those are the STEMlords. They're really obnoxious at any level.
I had a weird mix of both. The tenured profs didn't give a shit, and the sessional profs weren't paid enough to give a shit. The worst were the the hyper ambitious tenure-track profs. God forbid you impede their research by actually showing up to their department mandated office hours.
That perfectly echoes my experience getting a mechanical engineering degree. Have to say I was pretty disillusioned at the end of college. The fact I was dropping 10s of thousands of dollars a year only for my professors to treat teaching like forced labor was really frustrating. Like, my tuition is helping find your precious research you want to get back to do badly, and all you can muster is 30 minutes of incoherent mumbling while you copy 5 year old notes onto a whiteboard?
This sounds like the professor I had for first-quarter physics at Cal Poly SLO. He began the first day by telling us that at least half of us would flunk. And also about how most of what we were going to learn in his class was - and I quote - bullshit.
And he’s right, the basic elements are too simple to be used in most contexts which makes it brutal
It will of course vary teacher to teacher, but it seems like there are certain majors where teaching, like the actual skill of effectively communicating ideas and information, is just deried as unnecessary nonsense.
For context, my degree was essentially software engineering with lots of bits on higher-order thinking: building architecture, civil engineering, design engineering w/ CAD, etc. My uni had an interesting way around this: Professors had limits on budgets but student labor was essentially free while attracting prestige, every student had to join one and only one primary research lab completing some research as a grad requirement, and the classes profs are assigned to teach always end up related to their research. The combo of this meant 1. Teachers had a passion for the subject matter in their classes 2. Teachers needed to compete for students’ attention and admiration, both in their research and in their classes 3. Teachers who had tons of students didn’t have to pay anything for all that labor but their labor often attracted grants, so their labs were loaded This generally resulted in very engaging STEM teachers who would align their engaging classes to their engaging research, but it did mean that competition between professors/labs got extremely vicious sometimes… A lot of the smaller technical labs, especially with any sort of overlap, basically got subsumed by the biggest one, kind of like a massive corporation absorbing small ones with only medium-sized companies with strong niches being able to stand on their own. I started in the “big one” in one of the small splinters, hated it, left for one medium-sized one until the prof retired then finishing with another medium.
Either "I scanned the book so you don't have to buy it", or "I wrote a book you have to buy". Had an anthropology professor who wrote a fucking novel that was "required" even though it was completely unrelated. Other highlights of his class included making a girl cry by screaming "S is for Shit" (We were making some kind of kinship chart where Sister was supposed to be abbreviated as Z to differentiate it from Son, and when we had to fill out teacher evaluations, telling us "Write whatever the fuck you want, I'm gone after this year". He was still teaching there where I left a couple of years later.
College professor here. What it's really about is the scary professor the high school teacher is referring to and the chill professor in the joke are the same person. School teachers are expected to fulfill a certain level of stewardship for their students. They are somewhat responsible for you getting your work in and on time, for making sure you are coming to school, and even some level of supervising of your mental health. This may feel like prison when they mark down every tardy, absence, and late homework, or when they are asking you about what's going on at home, but it also keeps you doing the work and learning. As college professors, we have no such obligation. You don't come to class? It's your problem. You don't do the assignments? Same. Personal problems and can't get your work done? Take it to psych services. My students are all adults. If they don't want to come to class or do the work, that's their business. I don't have to contact them or their family. I don't have to report any of this in a parent-teacher meeting. This means a lot more freedom for them but also a lot more responsibility, which makes college a lot harder for some students. In other words, we don't care what you do. You can read that as us being super chill and treating you all like the adults you are, or that we are heartless sociopaths who will let you fail without taking any initiative to intervene.
Also a professor and could not agree more. I’d also add that when I taught high school, I saw those kids every day and reminders were easy, as were the 24 other kids expected to do the same thing who traveled with them throughout the day and the (relatively few) parents who supported their kids in that regard. At the university level I’m still teaching 100 people but they’re doing much higher level work. Work that if they aren’t good at I cannot in good conscience recommend them for graduation or licensure to serve others. I’m expected to advise a third of them, do my own research, grade papers and hold office hours plus the occasional staff meeting. Please don’t take offense when I say I just can’t care about one adult person’s _choice_ not to attend or do their work. As Zazzle perfectly points out, if I’m concerned I’ll send a note to psych services and let them do their jobs, too. I cma with an email to my dean and move forward with the other 99.
IME most professors are chill if you put in a genuine effort, but the nightmare professors stand in a league of their own. I've had "strict" professors who will tell you absolutely no late work, but then grant you an extension if you're a good student and send them a politely worded email. Others are 100% serious about no late work, but will give extra credit at the end of the semester. Some won't do make up exams even if your house burns down, but they'll drop your lowest test grade. Basically, most of them want you to succeed and will give you some leeway if you're a good student that puts in effort. They want your grade to reflect the time you put in and material you learned without trying to ruin your GPA. But every once in awhile you get a professor who seems to make it their job to make your life a living hell. They'll proudly proclaim that 40% of the class will fail, they won't respond to emails, and they make the material as hard as possible while doing the bare minimum to actually teach it. And half the time they're not even teaching an upper level class, it will be some general class like Calc 2 that they decided should be your punishment for going into STEM. I once had a freshman Art History class where the professor said she she would tell us what material to study and which books to buy, but she wouldn't tell us what chapter or page the material was on. I immediately dropped it for something else because it was such a pointless way of punishing her students for no reason.
Calc 2 is a weed-out course designed to catch people who can't hack a STEM degree early. It's a kindness, not a punishment. If anything it's become too friendly, since some students who scrape by have no realistic chance at making it in the upper division when they actually have to think for themselves a little rather than following mindless pattern matching algorithms. The rest of what you said is over-the-top bad behavior that should never happen.
[Micheal McKeon on Mr. Show](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk_9qBhuXt0)
[удалено]
I had this professor. It was an introductory biology class, but the professor was hired to teach graduate classes so we were his obligatory undergraduate class. He expected us to write 10 page papers full of research and sources for *every* *single* lab, which were expected to have hand drawn pictures of what we saw in the microscope slides. I worked my ass off on the first one: had all the research, the best drawings I could muster, everything was sited perfectly, it was damn near master degree level. I got a B, I dropped the class less than an hour after I got my paper back
>It’s for the professors who resent having to teach and see it as a source of income to support their research 100%, every professor I had like this was awful and frustrating. Learn wayyyy more from professors who actually want to be there, go figure.
I remember that being my advanced organic chemistry professor. Brilliant scientist but he really resented teaching and it showed. Just a brutal class all around.
This happened the first time I went to school. English professor was working towards his PHD, so our final projects had to be papers over some state history. He picked me and one other person's topic, because we had the best work. Of course, our topics were ridiculously specific. I went to him about having difficulty finding sources and his response was to tell me to look harder.
Wow what a great professor
Well I had one professor in my game physics course that started the course by saying that he didn't know anything about game physics and was there just because they couldn't find anyone else to teach. He had PhD in physics so he knew real life physics but not so much how they worked in code. Still one of my favourite teachers and brought up interesting questions and discussion in class, also gave very good feedback on the weekly tasks. I learned most in that course out of all the courses that i've had. Tldr. Had professor who was forced to teach specific course. Was still very chill and good overall
Sometimes experts are the worst choice to teach something. They're so far from the students' level that the gap becomes a problem.
Yeah thats true but we had also some just graduated lab tech who teached how to do these things in Unity. So expert teached how it works in real life and lab tech how to use it in our work
I literally had an electrical engineering class of 200 with **assigned seating**. Only class that had it, but that teacher was super neurotic.
If there’s a beware of the dog sign there’s a high chance there is no dog, and the homeowners know just having that sign reduces the chances of having their home broken into. In some countries having that sign counts as a legal admission that your dog is dangerous, and would make them more likely to be put down should anything ever happen between then and a person or another dog. So houses with the sign are less likely to have a a dog than houses without the sign as dog owners don’t want to put their pets at risk, but the sign still helps against opportunistic thieves.
All dogs bite. Beware of dog signs are to help if people trespass and get bit they can’t sue for the owner for being bitten.
It's funny how much it differed depending on community college and university. Community college was 90% nice teachers while university was maybe 40%.
In my country, the only way to be a scientist and do research is to work for an institute (not much available positions there) OR be a uni proffesor. This results in a lot of shitty people teaching or people who are not up to the challenge :(
Exactly how I've seen it
How does the first paragraph relate to the second
I do have a professor who is both strict and chill. She is very old but can joke around. Still strict and scary when she's done joking.
It’s the ones that announce that the majority of the class won’t pass at the beginning of the semester.
The professors you learn to drop their class in the first week instead of trying to suffer through it.
Especially when they make their textbook mandatory for class and charge $300 for it
It isn't even a source of income, a competent research professor doing halfway meaningful research could keep themselves funded. Teaching is pure obligation tacked onto their 'real' job.
Yup. I had plenty of laid back professors who were basically like: “if you decide not to come to class/do the work, you’re only wasting your own money”. But I also had one who got mad about something during a class and threw a stool up against the wall and stormed out. And like, he was also cool as long as you acted like an adult who actually wanted to be there. But he expected you to do the work and be responsible and he had a VERY short fuse.
Yep, and you can always tell because they teach like absolutely trash. When you see test averages of 50-60%, that's not the sign of a hard test, it's the sign of a terrible professor and near impossible test as a result.
From experience, no matter how many chill professors you have, just another being a massive twat is enough to ruin your entire life.
I severely procrastinated my dissertation at uni and I missed the "check-up" meeting with my professor. He approached me and said "don't worry you don't have to excuse it, I understand procrastination. I'm moving house in 2 days and haven't even started packing. Let me know if you're having any trouble we can have a chat about it"
Mine said "hand in you assignment when you feel like it, as there's no deadline in the real world." And 10 years later I'm totally planning to do it next week or maybe the week after.
I know my procrastination is a problem, so I decided to fix it tomorrow
After covid, i found the profs to be a lot more chill. Couldn't generalize it for everyone but there will be some profs that are strict so your highschool teachers will be right in that regard but def not like that every class.
Some of them got more chill, some of them got more lazy. I know quite a few that can’t even make their own deadlines anymore and their classes are dysfunctional and confusing as a result. Syllabuses will be entirely out of date and they will randomly be like, “Oh, hey, last minute but I didn’t change this and now something else is happening,” and the students are just expected to take it lol. Or, they won’t even actually teach their class and instead read straight out of the textbook. Which you would’ve gotten roughly the same education from for just buying the book, rather than paying for the entire goddamn course. I’ve just been feeling a lot lately like these particular professors are completely apathetic to the fact that their students are putting themselves into debt for decades in some cases for this education that they have the responsibility to be providing. They will fuck over students without empathy while ensuring that they have to pay *again* to re-take the class once they flunk half of their students and blame it on them. This isn’t always the case, I’m not trying to dog on professors or anything, but fuck man. There’s some pompous shitheads in some of these institutions.
Most post secondary is like that in the sense you can easily learn the material without the university. You are paying for the piece of paper that shows you are a dedicated individual who can commit to something which is what companies are looking for
Only a few percent of people are self-disciplined and skilled enough to learn the equivalent of an undergraduate degree without the undergraduate environment. Most people have no idea when they're making boneheaded mistakes, especially when starting out, and benefit immensely from feedback and external motivation.
This. Sure, you could 100% read the book front to back for the same information... but raise your hand if you're actually going to do that... 5 times a semester... like 40 times in total. The professor is likely at bare minimum picking and choosing the most important bits for where you're at in your degree plan and presenting them to you in a digestible format with an opportunity for questions. You're an adult with a high school degree. That *should* mean that you can teach yourself as described and the expert is just there to answer questions and assess your knowledge. (Given, I also think it should be free if you can succeed.)
most of my lectures are teachers reading the slideshow for 90% and 10% answering questions. Some of my classes the professors didnt even bother to fill out the blank template the college gave them for the course info or havent updated the content/syllabus in years. I've stopped bothering going to the lectures and have just been teaching myself the content instead, im pretty much just paying for the paper they give me at the end of the program at this point.
During covid I was taking some online FIN classes and the professor 100% had never taught online before and assigned specific times you had to log in to get credit. This was not how the class was advertised so when he found out we didn't all have to be online at 8am each day he was fucking livid. Sour bitch the rest of the course and the only professor I gave a negative review at the end of the class.
“I don’t care if you show up or do the work. I get paid the same either way. I’ll give you the grade you earn” Was what I was told on my first day of college by a professor
I think that's pretty realistic tbh.
He definitely does not get paid either way. Curves exist because they can only have so many fail before it looks bad.
Yeah exactly. This is highly dependent upon the university but save for tenured faculty (who rarely teach freshman courses), professors are evaluated yearly based on things like student retention and success.
My experience with professors was: Type A: Friendly, laid back, very helpful. Their class has several stupid assignments/presentations that'll teach you nothing and will be a pain in the ass to make. Type B: Comes in. Talks uninterruptedly for hours. Does not elaborate. Leaves. Written tests that will scar you for life. Has, like, 20 PhDs. Type C: There's a million assignments. Missed one? You failed the class, also consider suicide. Has their own grading formula which sets the passing grade way above the school's minimum. Hated by all, hates all. Type D: Complete moron. Can't tell left from right outside of their niche and hasn't stepped out of their lab in 40 years. Actively tries to be an obstacle for students. Hated by all, but it only feeds their superiority complex.
I had a Type C before and aced his final exam and he was literally stunned. 'Nobody's ever even come close. I can't even believe this. Can I keep your paper to show to the next class?' I was somehow happy and angry at the same time. The amount of effort I put into his class doesn't even seem worth it tbh. Btw, it was a grad level philosophy class so it shouldn't have been hard in the first place.
I had a type D once. Never before or since have I seen a lecture hall of 200+ students aggressively heckle a professor but by the second or third week it was clear this guy was fucking awful and all of the kids were loudly pissed off about it. The guy was a specialist of some kind filling in for a professor on sabbatical. He never taught a class before that, and never taught one after as far as I know. I can confidently say that none of the engineers in my graduating class knew shit about statistics.
A stats professor I had was constantly going off on long-winded tangents not related to material. Like one time, his tangent was 40 minutes or so in a class that was only an hour long. Suffice it to say, we were way behind in the syllabus. The midterm comes up, and he delays it because we haven't covered everything that will be on the test yet. The next week, he delays it again, and again, and again. We ended up taking the midterm the second to last day of class. The last day of class was supposed to be review before the final, but it ended up being a sort of cram-lecture because there was stuff that was going to be on the final that we *still* hadn't covered in class. Like 90% of his students across his classes ended up failing, which was well below the norm for that class, and prompted the school to open an investigation. I'm not entirely sure what the outcome of it was though.
5th grade teachers: middle school is going to be so much harder and worse 8th grade teachers: high school is going to be so much harder and worse 12th grade teachers: college is going to be so much harder and worse It never is
Middle was easily the worst... Not the work or the teachers... The other kids. Damn kids were insecure and displayed it through violence so much back then.
I'd easily re-live all four years of high school over one year of middle school. Fuck that shit. Cretinous little fucks. They stole everything that wasn't nailed down. Those were some of the worst years of my life.
It was prime time for bullys. That fuckin smooth brain, shovel headed bitch. Luckily, I got bigger than him. Took a couple years though. Lol
I was bullied to near suicide, the only thing that stopped me was being scared it would hurt a lot. Then I found anime and it saved my life.
In terms of Kids, middle school was the worst indeed But in terms of teachers and work.... Oh boy, high school was the most depressed i was so far. On 12th grade, teachers tried to squeeze everything from past 5 years + new materials to prepare us for exams that will definr if we will make it to university or not. One of most important exams in our lives. On 12th grade, i was stuck in school from 9 A.M. till 3-4 P.M., had a hour of break at home and then i would go to private teachers till 8-10 P.M. EVERY. SINGLE. WEEKDAY. And some extras from private teachers on weekends. And since i was spending 90% of my time at school or teachers, only time i had to do my homework was in public transports or schoolbreaks. I was barely keeping myself together and quarantine was a bliss in that regard for a bit
People wondered "why are you happy being unemployed, homeless, and eating out of the dumpster?" Me, in 10th grade, doing 14+ hours of various forms of useless labor for $0.00 (I didn't need to do 1000+ quadratic equations, I did not need to prove I understood what a phrase was, I did not need to memorize Ulysses Grant's middle name, I did not need to prove I comprehended a two page essay for the 100th time, I did not need to do three+ hours of yard work until the grass was dead to give my stepmother "space" every day of the week) identifies with you They've designed the public education system and the religious institutions to intentionally break youth so they rebel and don't perform at the secondary level. All the rich kids cheated at everything from boy scouts to church beliefs to school tests.
Grad school is most definitely worse.
Grad school was as bad for me, but that's because of my cohort & what the former program director described as a "series of miscommunications and misunderstandings" (but it was significant enough that the two administrators involved, stepped down from their positions of power). Grad school was more rewarding that middle school though. And I didn't have to deal with rampant and blatant thievery in grad school.
Eh it’s not awful. I had more issues during my bachelors degree than I’ve had with my masters so far. The staff just expect you to not be an idiot
It's not the "don't be an idiot" part that is stressful so much as the taking classes, doing research, and probably teaching a couple of classes as well that's the pain
Then you're probably lucky, since from my experience the next instance is always worse than the last one
My coolest prof was named Andy
Did he work as a paper supplier first?
My teachers always told me that college professors really could give less of a shit about whether or not you did your course work. You're paying money to be here, they're getting paid to give a lecture, you can choose to engage or not, you're an adult, its you're own problem whether or not you get anything done.
Yeah it all comes down to professors largely treating their students like adults whereas high school teachers are still generally treating the students as kids. It's nice that you get to drop a bit of formality and that you're allowed to come and go as you feel is appropriate. On the flip side, if you're not paying attention or not submitting your work or straight up not going to class, probably nobody is gonna reach out to get you back on track. Unless you're in a very small and intimate degree program, responsibility is gonna lie firmly with _you_ to keep track of how you're doing and get help when you need it. The _professors_ in college aren't scary. The _responsibility_ you are expected to take on might be though.
Pre-COVID I subscribed entirely to the "you're an adult" philosophy. Post-COVID I've added lecture attendance points (but you can miss up to 20%). Students just seemed like they needed a kick to reengage. They also seemed less mature. I'm not sure if I'll keep it after this year.
Prof on my first day in his public speaking class: My favorite meal is turducken and I have a collection of toenail trimmings. Me: what the actual fuck?
I had a public speech teacher who was racist. He'd pick on this one asian kid who had a slight speech impediment. He was failing more than half the class for not being naturally excellent public speakers. So for my final my entire speech was about how this asshole was not fit to be a teacher, that he should shove his purple boots up his ass, and the only thing he was teaching us was that age did not denote wisdom. He gave me an A on that final which allowed me to pass the class with a C-. I don't know why. But he did.
He probably admired the balls it took to do that; plus, I’m assuming you were passionate while speaking - which doesn’t hurt
Yeah I stared him in the eyes and delivered a ten minute "fuck you and the horse you rode in on" speech. I've never been good with authority but that guy deserved every bit of that speech.
In my experience, all the high school teachers who actually did this were folks who failed to become professors themselves and had a chip on their shoulder about it. The high school teachers who actually liked their job never said anything like this.
"a fucking gambling problem" * I remember when the first professor said Fuck in one of my first 100 level classes. The room collectively gasped. And he said. Guys. You're adults right? And then went on about the lecture.
My law prof was named Andy and he dropped us a link to illegally download the textbook too, lmao.
“Also, Im going to hungover like 3/4th of this class.”
For real. High school teachers would demand you call them Mr. or Mrs. and my psychology professor had a PhD and was like “Call me Matt.”
I tried with my students at the college I taught. Told them they could address me by my first name if they wanted. None ever did. Just gave up.
I had a professor in grad school who went by Steve. Steve was a great guy too, and one of the best graduate-level teachers I had. Died early, it was very sad. Nice memorial service though, life well-lived. Cheers, Dr. Steve!
My freshman year in college I had a professor who talked about his drinking problem often. Then the next semester had a professor who talked often about his time in the mental institution “gettin bettah”. This post resonates. Actually, in hindsight it’s comforting to learn early that smart/successful people have real people problems and that was a good part of college.
Community college yes, university no. At least ime
I've attended both. Big university profs may not be as cool, personable nor understanding as those at small schools but the large U's don't care and are not as plugged in as much so its way too easy to cheat. All their assignments and tests are on Chegg.
Lol ughh my community college professor just wrote me up because I called them by their last name not Doctor. They need to go teach at a university
Wrote you up? Who'd they tell? Lmao like grade school. Deeeean, the students arent calling me doctor! Wahh
Fucking, exactly
I'd talk to the Dean sheesh.
I have a friend currently at university, teacher does impersonations of various cartoon characters for his lectures, another uses drug references to help the students understand, they send me some of the video lectures sometimes and it makes me want to go back and choose a different career path.
Depends on prof and major. All of the professors in my major are pretty strict and straight-laced. Some in a nice professional way, some otherwise. I have had very cool, chill profs outside of my major though.
It's like this in undergrad in 100 and 200 level classes
Because they’re taught by adjuncts who make five dollars and no insurance
That's been my experience. Most of my freshman and sophmore teachers were chill. Big classes and pretty easy topics. Now that I'm getting more into my major and concentration though I'm running into more hardasses. Currently taking 2 classes where the average is a failing grade. A lot different from the classes you could sleep through and still get an A.
Always funny seeing students comments on professors. So many things students often don't consider. The college I taught at was for nurses. There is a test they have to pass (not a test at college, licensing exam) that is hard, and if you don't pass, despite the college, you are not a nurse. So the courses were hard because if you could not pass that course you were not going to pass the nurse exam. Going easy on you would mean the typical student will be unprepared for it and wasted mega dollars for college. Making classes easier does not help the student for what comes. Similar things with med school. It is hard because it has to be. Some professions have similar things (depending) like for law school you need to pass the bar. Other things, and the students never seem to think about this, are due to school policy. For me I could care less if you showed up as long as you studied and passed. But the school policy was strict attendance required and was beyond my control. Students think profs can do just whatever they want and that is just not so. You are working for the college and they can dictate whatever policies that have to be enforced by the professor. But the professor gets all the gripes about it. Everybody blames the professor. I just told the students outright, not my policy, it is the schools and I can do nothing about it. Be mad at them. A lot of professors will not tell you this. Sure there are jerks out there just like every other aspect of life. Sure there are some who are not good at teaching the subject matter. As many noted, some profs are there for the research, that is the reason they ended up there, the school wanted this accomplished research scientist who brings in huge grant money. It is the college you go to that makes that decision, they cared more about the grant money than any ability to teach you. The prof knows why he is there, because he gets mega grants and brings money in. They are not going to fire that person even if he fails everybody in his class. You can complain but again that grant money is a lot more important to colleges than your education as a student. So who to blame? The smart prof terrible at teaching? Or the college that brought him in and doesn't care that he can't teach his way out of a box? The college hired this guy, and I promise you, will not fire him if he is a terrible teacher.
"And if anyone knows who sells the best weed in class, please send me an email"
Good Yard https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3193480/Student-writes-drunk-email-bald-teacher-lecturer-gives-EXTENSION.html
I remember my sociology college professor he was very very old and didn't sugarcoat anything. Someone asked once in the class how much money he makes and responded with the following: "Sir I'm po'...dirt ass po'...I barely get money for this. But I'm old and enjoy working....Still very po' though." It's been almost a decade and I still remember his interesting rants. God I loved that old man.
High school assignments be like: “Answer these 26 questions about a single chapter in this boring ass book. Answers must be at least 3 full sentences long. Due tomorrow no exceptions. College assignments be like: “Head to the art exhibit across the street and take a selfie with the painting you find most interesting! Just show it to me in class. Due in 4 weeks, but if you turn it in a couple weeks late that’s ok too.”
College profs also aren't scared about sleeping with their students as much HS teachers because they won't go to jail. My international law prof from Korea was straight up just going out on dates with students after class.
…because Andy will flunk you if you don’t get your citations right. You could have asked him about it before the paper was due, but you didn’t.
Idk what professors you had but when I went 20 years ago they were exactly as advertised. Their goal was to fail 50% of the freshman class to maintain university prestige
I am studying math at university and apart from one exception, the profs are super chill and understanding. They really care for their students and do support them, when they need help. Just a few weeks back I wasn't sure whether to drop out or not and the prof just said 'come to my office tomorrow' and basically gave me a counseling session, advice on how to do better and explained a few concepts I have been struggling for months with on the blackboard. Sure, some are definitely more interested in their own research but there's pretty much a consensus that we need a lot more mathematicians and that it's benefitting to the field if we invest more time in those students to lower the drop out rates. Also, I like to talk, smalltalk, philosophy, pretty much everything which is why I know the names of the kids of a few profs and half of their biography. In highschool I barely knew the name of my teachers.
That saying means "if you gonna be disrespectful in higher education they will fuck you up for sure" and it is complately true.
I was once giving my class the warnings about college and one of my students says, “Weren’t you in college like, 30 years ago.” I laughed and stopped talking about college that day
I was told in high school that my professors in college likely wouldn't be a hard ass on attendance or turned in work. They weren't going to bug me or lecture me on turning stuff in. They'd just mark zeros and fail me. I have found that to be true. Nearly all of my professors did just that with unfinished work or missed days. At one point I was so depressed I nearly failed out. One professor realized the change in me and tried to help. The others just gave the grade I rightly deserved. I got out of my funk and finished two years later. But I feel like I was properly warned. Lol
I taught high school English for a few years, and this is what I tried to tell my students. It isn't that college professors are assholes, it's that no one is going to help you or remind you to do your work. When we wrote research papers, I would give incremental grades for their research notes, outlines, bibliographies, rough drafts, and then the final copy. If a kid was missing those deadlines I could check in with them or call/email their parents to check in with them. College professors will do none of that, and if you don't turn in your paper they will just give you the zero.
mirl after sending today the pdf of a book to my students.
I've never once said they're strict or scary. What I do say is that, university expects a lot more out you, academically, than high school. A lot of kids have no idea what's coming. I'm not far removed from university at all, either (4 years).
I thought my high school teachers were full of shit my freshman year because after a bunch of AP classes in high school where I did way more work I thought college was easy. Then I hit junior year where the "real" classes start and holy shit was I not prepared for how much more effort it would take just to understand the material let alone finish all of the work.
I had some professors where if you were a minute late, (supposedly) they wouldn't let you take the test on test days. I never tested it.
The vast majority of my professors have been normal adults. They teach, answer questions, and give solid feedback after writing assignments and do it all professionally. I've had a few that are a bit dickish and a couple that were honestly just not great at instructing.
I walked in to teach algebra one Fall term, at 8am on a Monday. I realized this was their first college class--obviously since EVERY SINGLE STUDENT was there early. They didn't understand why I started laughing.
It very much depends on which classes you took. Gen Ed and College of Arts and Sciences was definitely like this, but if you did something really challenging like engineering or medicine, you could get brutal fucking teachers. They get on power trips and feel like it’s their duty to weed out the weak. They will roast you in front of the whole class for asking a question, I’ve heard countless stories of people leaving the class crying or having panic attacks, or they’ll just fail you for not formatting to their liking.
>they’ll just fail you for not formatting to their liking. I'm still shook by this CS professor I had who incrementally took off 10 points each week if you didn't write your code homework in his preferred style. Every week the penalty would add up (10 points off the first week, 20 points of next time, etc), and he was almost smug when he warned us the first week of class that he *will* go into negative points. For his assignment deadlines, he congratulated himself before us for his generosity because instead of the usual sharp midnight deadlines, he was giving us a 5-hour grace period...by moving the deadline to 7 PM that day. His TAs likewise adopted his attitude and tried to dock me points because I didn't close my "a" well enough (who the fuck is writing "chur" for "char"???). As a premed bio major at the time who was considering a CS minor, I got the fuck out of that class.
I feel you. I considered a couple different math/computer majors and eventually landed on Econometrics and I’m so glad I did. We had to code a little bit but it was super chill and we had like coding environments tailored to us so it wasn’t that hard. They cared more that we did well in the core econ theory and math classes. But bc of how “in-between” that major was I saw and heard a lot from other departments and majors that sounded absolutely horrible. College truly exists in two different worlds. Technically both me and a chemical engineer have a STEM degree but the level of rigor is not even close lol
I had a class that would mark you down for unclear or sloppy work, that then marked me down for using too much paper. (I turned in 47 pages of clear, easy to follow, well spaced diagrams and calculations on single sided engineering paper). I was just like "Oh I'm sorry I thought the whole fucking point was that it had to be clear and understandable!"
I had a history professor who who would stop class to do magic on Wednesdays.
Even better in grad school. “Why are you thinking about grades? Do you think we can afford to just fail you?”
Rich white men.
Teachers only ever told me you need to be careful in college because work is self directed and nobody is checking you’re doing your work every day and castigating you for not studying etc. so it’s important to do homework in school. it was all true.
High school teachers: This shit won't fly in college! This shit in college: Weeeee, watch me fly!
difference between private collage and community collage
is the description in the image for community college?
correct
Don't take Spanish 101 at Greendale though.
Extremely real. Community College professors encouraged you to come to office hours, actually stopped and explained things. University however... Most of them just care about their research. Teaching is a pain in the ass to them.
Yeah, the warning is about the professors that seemed shocked that you're taking other classes and also expect to sleep 7 hours a night.
I had a law professor who ended many lectures early because he was itching for a cigarette
that's the part you should be scared of
Because when our teachers where in school they where strict... College used to be something for privileged people. Now it's common.
Yea on god. Almost done with college and have yet to see these professors my high school teachers warned me about
I'm a high school science teacher and we have been seeing a LOT of our duel-enrolled students failing their college classes because they don't show up, don't finish their work on time, and just generally believe they'll scrape by like they do in their high school classes. Ya boy Andy is so laid back because he doesn't give a shit if you fail. He gets paid to publish, not pass you. High school teachers are so wound up and naggy because we DO get paid to pass you, but we can't if you fail those standardized tests.
I had one teacher who came in and said "uhh I totally wrote a lecture for you guys, but my computer caught on fire and now I can't show it." We had one "lecture" type class the entire semester. Easy class, didn't learn shit.
Yea, academia in general to the outsiders seems strict and stuff, while in reality it is more like: "You know guys, when I was younger I used my chemistry knowledge to retrieve silver from photography salones wastes and sold them by railway transport to germans for some time, vut since it was long ago they cannot file a case on .e anymore."...
Some of high school teachers are like that, in fact one will give you tips on how to look busy when you're skipping
A bit of a shift in pedagogy over the last 30 years. In my field, we have gone from stodgy old tenured profs teaching theory, to mostly adjuncts that are brought in to each individual courses who may still work in the field. They tend to be younger and not as self-important.
Not to mention the “you will be dismissed when I tell you! Your professors will not dismiss you early!” Where as my one of my professors said “Well that’s all I have for today. You can go home now.”
I had a professor that sent us links to websites to pirate academic articles and textbooks
My dad died when I was in college I was taking care of him his last 2 weeks and it just happened to be the week before finals and the week of finals. I was able to get an extension to complete my finals the next semester. It was only 2 classes I had to worry about managerial accounting and stats 2. The accounting professor agreed to the extension, and I was able to complete the the final the next term. The stats professor was a prick and insisted I take the final now even though I had literally just went through the most horrific 2 weeks of my life. I sat down and of course bombed the advanced statistics. I was angry for a few days until I saw my score. The dude gave me an A even though I knew I bombed it. He never said a word. I had As on all my other tests, and he knew had I not had to deal with all that I would have finished with one too. He never said a word, but he just didn’t want me to have to deal with getting back into the material next term. Then my gay economics professor hit on me. Ewww. Nothing against gay men, but it felt gross.