100 Most Irritating Things Professors Do in (or maybe outside of) Class.

1. Going through PowerPoints too quickly and talking really fast so that you cannot possibly get all of the information down. Especially annoying when s/he does not post them online and they are relevant for an exam.

2. Being condescending to questions about a text, or being "shocked" that students don't already know everything that s/he does.

3. Tell the cops

4. Ask questions with insultingly obvious answers or otherwise refusing to attempt any sort of intellectual engagement (W

5. Get drunk before coming to work.

Ask questions with insultingly obvious answers

wait--this is called teaching!

...

6. don't get through the material and fall way behind, so that the readings are weeks ahead of the lectures.

7. assign tons of reading that is never once alluded to in lecture or discussion. assign more reading than can possibly be even broached in class. this isn't whining about quantities of reading, just noting a basic pedagogical faux-pas.

8. post to ilx

9. shoot their co-workers when they don't get tenure

10. deny the holocaust

11. give "exam review" sheets consisting of literally everything that was in the notes+readings and then only using 1/4th of it on the exam (why fucking bother?)

hey, that's an old trick though! the whole point of the exam is to get you to review stuff, and why eliminate a big chuck of what you're supposed to have learned just because you may not put it on one exam?

review sheets are mostly b.s. in the classes i've taken and taught, anyway--just a way of getting students off your case. the wonderful notes you took during lectures are your review sheets!

Yeah, I mean I don't at all feel entitled to review sheets or anything, but if you're going to fucking post one, post one. If you want us to review EVERYTHING, do not post one.

12. peer reviewing a medium-sized/large class that's not an upper level course in a writing/writing intensive major

haha here is a new one that i just encountered 30 seconds go

13. upload a mandatory reading and scan it in so the pdf opens upside down

almost faint in class, as per today's brilliant pedagogical moment

14. not show up to your own class. repeatedly.

YES. i once took music lessons through my school and the teacher showed up only three times over the first half of the semester. i stopped going myself.

15. abdicate responsibility for moderating the class, so that one student ends up taking over completely and talks more than the professor and the rest of the class put together.

student who talks more than the rest of the class and professor could go on the other thread, too

Oh man, I've seen #15 happen a couple of times and it filled me with blind rage at the prof.

16. feign ultra high standards on the first couple days of class when they're actually teaching a blowoff

Upside down PDF's? Oh please, I get those at least semesterly. What is really aggravating is:

17. upload a mandatory reading and scan it in so the pdf is illegible/blurred at the spine, or the tops/bottoms/sides of the pages are cut off, or the odd pages are missing.

18. have content-free class sessions. as a teacher myself nothing makes me angrier than this. i have taken classes (recently) where perhaps two class sessions of nearly 30 had anything resembled a planned discussion or a prepared lecture.

resemblING

19. not take the time to find the cheapest place to have their Course Reader printed--seriously, you can't sell those, you know

20. fail to have any kind of structure to your lessons, or the whole semester, apart from 'literature of the late 16th century'

(even tho you are the head of the entire english department)

21. Having a 400-level senior "seminar" with 15 people and lecturing the entire time without at all fostering discussion or encouraging questions.

22. Making online (and open-book) quizzes in which you phrase questions by taking sentences from the book, removing a word, and putting it in a multiple choice question with some synonyms.

actually I want to post some examples

23. Beginning class with "What did everyone think about the reading?" -- works fine when everyone is already super-engaged in the class and the reading is provocative, otherwise probably the laziest way to direct a discussion. (I think profs also maybe don't realize that open-ended questions like this can be intimidating, because even though they may intend it as a jumping-off point for a freewheeling discussion, students may still think that there's a "right" answer.)

________ is responsible for the image we see on the screen.

A. The editing
B. The agent
C. The light
D. The director
E. The producer

Realistic characters are expected to do things that ________ our experiences and expectations of real people.

A. conform to
B. confront
C. confirm
D. challenge
E. change

What two categories do horror movie settings fall into?

A. familiar small town and untamed remote rural area
B. big cities and small towns
C. human world and the monster world
D. prior to and after the event
E. studio and location

Which of the following is a science fiction masterpiece that transcends conventional attitudes toward genre?

A. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
B. Star Wars (1977)
C. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
D. Alien (1979)
E. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

#23 OTFM

yeah jaymc otm -- the best discussion classes that i've had have been meticulously planned out with a bunch of topics ready in case some stuff fizzles -- trying to let students drive discussion almost never works as well as intended

Character types are ______.

A. mostly found in westerns
B. the same in all genres
C. specific to different genres
D. specific to individual genres
E. usually one dimensional

uh what is the difference btwn C and D?

almost faint in class, as per today's brilliant pedagogical moment

Wait ... you almost fainted today?

I have been in some form of Lolcollege off and on for like 10 years now, so:

Undergrad: Nothing was worse than the professors who thought they were absolutely blowing your mind with their next-level ideas. Like, I actually had my mind blown many times in college, but it was ALWAYS in a class where the professor was just teaching really interesting material in a really engaging way, and my view of the world kind of shifted a little as a result. Whenever the professor was like "Do you see how this is unlike any view of the world you have ever imagined?" I just wanted to die a little inside.

Grad (Social Sciences): Would have to go with receiving a hand-delivered copy of my final exam, then not telling me that they no longer had that copy, and then assigning me an "Incomplete" grade for the course, which stayed on my transcript even after I got it cleared up (which cost me like $10 or something!).

Med: The fact that there are course directors in med school who seem openly hostile to the idea of students doing well (throwing out gotcha exam questions on irrelevant details, refusing to let lecturers make corrections to the student notesets, lack of responsiveness to student concerns) is pretty intolerable. Med school is necessarily difficult enough to make the addition of any unnecessary difficulty incredibly irritating.

john, yes - i had an iced coffee at 1:30, was teaching at 2:30. started sweating profusely and blood sugar/pressure/whatever the fuck started crashing at 3:15. class fucking dismissed early. awful feeling, awful day.

This is kind of a crossover irritating things students do/irritating things professors do; my least favorite thing that would happen in grad school classes is a student basically taking over the class by asking endless digressive questions about some minor trivial point, and the professor not doing anything to stop this and get the class back on track.

Yeah, at some point the prof has to moderate. It's even worse in an undergrad course, when a lot of the students don't even know what the hell they're saying (which is why Feminist Grad Student I mentioned upthread surprised me).

7. assign tons of reading that is never once alluded to in lecture or discussion. assign more reading than can possibly be even broached in class. this isn't whining about quantities of reading, just noting a basic pedagogical faux-pas.

― by another name (amateurist), Monday, 15 February 2010 23:33 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

This I don't mind if it is couched in the language of "If you are interested look at this"

yeah, the assigning too much reading always bugged me to, since I am an earnest mf who does all the reading. I took my first real humanities (philo) classes in grad school, while my classmates had all been philo majors and were like of *course* we don't do *all* the reading. Now, as a philo prof I teach toward earnest old me and teach a very pared-down syllabus...to the point where we can spend a whole 75 minute course talking about a single line of Plato, e.g. We'll spend 2 months of class time on a single Platonic dialogue (these days, the Symposium). It's worth it, and students can learn something about close reading this way.

that sounds great. high school was like that for me so college has been major disappoint.

18. have content-free class sessions. as a teacher myself nothing makes me angrier than this. i have taken classes (recently) where perhaps two class sessions of nearly 30 had anything resembled a planned discussion or a prepared lecture.

^^^agreed so strongly. I have had many profs I did not care for but few I actually disrespected, and the latter were because of this problem. The worst was an art prof who seriously started almost every class by saying to the students "SO what are we doing today?" He also had a tube of something labeled "retardant" once and showed it to me, saying, "Don't give this to Andrew! It'll make things worse" (Andrew was a guy in our class in hid mid-30s who seemed kind of like an acid casualty, who was not "retarded" but just kind of socially odd and took a long time explaining things.) When we turned in assignments, instead of doing critique sessions, he'd say a few superficial, menaingless pleasantries about each piece. One time he brought in a slide show of art he'd done around town, which COULD have been useful if it was a discussion about the nature of public art, or how to get grants, or really anything other than the self-congratulatory brag show it was.

On the last day we each brought in our portfolios to talk w/him one-on-one & get a final grade. He gave me a C. I'd been every day, he never had a grading policy, he never even assigned anything half the time so I had stuff in there he hadn't assigned I'd done just to fill the time. After a half hour of arguing I got him to give me an A (he made me write "A++" in the gradebook myself, as though it were some shaming ritual).

So I guess

24. Talking shit about students to their fellow students (extremely unprofessional and just plain mean)
25. Having no grading system (I don't mind more subjective/holistic grading so long as there's SOME rationale there)
26. Using class time to show off personal accomplishments for no reason

lol students want to talk shit about other students to me all the time and I'm always like "uhhh save it for your xanga"

I have a professor whose teaching style I really dislike but he's a v v v old man so the part of my brain that adopts v v v old men as "grandpa I never got to have" makes me unable to hate him. He handed out hard candies at the start of class last week!

27. Being unwilling to even hint or suggest that a student might be even partly incorrect or wrong

28. ART PROFESSORS: flat out refusing to give any actual criticism during crits, and just telling everyone the strengths of their piece.

29. Prof, clarifying feedback on a fellow student's essay: "Yes, the essay was too structured. Don't lose structure, but try to be less structured."

i was in one class that mixed graduate and undergraduate students, all of whom had to give one course presentation at some point in the semester. the undergrad presentations (and one or two of the grad ones) were so awful, and most were so obviously plagiarized, that i made a point of not attending on days when most of the class would be taken up with their presentations. a dick move, i suppose, since the rest of them sat through my presentation, but i felt that if the professor wasn't going to call students out on it, i really didn't want to sit through it.

i should note that most were not wholly, but partially plagiarized. still.

MOST???

the course materials for a class I'm teaching this year are almost completely plagiarized from various english help sites around the web. really wish I was a student and could call him out on his bullshit.

so for our midterm, this professor had everyone in the class write two potential essay questions, and then from all of those he would select two for the actual test. and he told us that after we all submitted our questions, he would upload them so we could look at them before the midterm, yada yada. so today i go to look at them and he has merely uploaded everyone's separate word document, so i'm now supposed to download 25+ different word documents, which i obv will not be doing for moral reasons

good lord that's lazy

(i meant him, not you -- although not wanting to download documents does count as a special kind of laziness imo)

hell is not students; hell is people in other departments trying to get up in your department's business

once a week i have a lab led by a TA & in the past two classes he's started off by weirdly asking questions about grooming -- this past friday he goes "so ladies, how many of you wax?" and everyone's like "..." and he went on to talk about how at his wife's salon he waxed the inside of his nose (or something) and the whole time the whole class was all http://i43.tinypic.com/33bny1v.jpg

and the week before he took a survey asking the guys in the class how we shave, and then he spent 5 mins advocating shaving w/o shaving cream -- i almost brought up the seinfeld episode where kramer shaves w/ butter but it was too early in the morning

no way this doesn't end in tears

he's working toward his PhD in depilation?

what class is this J0rdan

I think I would hang out with that guy.

Just try it out, you know, to see what we had in common.

what is the course actually supposed to be cover? You didn't drop out and go to beauty school, did you?

it's a lab so i deduce it is a science class so maybe there is actually some tenuous substantive reason for these inappropriate questions

Talk about how rap has no emotional depth, disparage all contemporary music, etc.

lol no -- it's a political science class that mostly focuses on statistics -- it's a "lab" because we're in a computer lab, not a science lab -- there's no reason for the topic of grooming to come up

pube lab

Most Non-Irritating Thing My Professor Did This Semester: he allowed us to bring wine today for our last class (one I'm auditing).

i can't even explain what's going on in this class right now

the grooming dude has just structured this whole lab around the nfl draft... and now we're arguing about the nfl draft...

oh maybe he kind of rules. i'm confused.

one of my professors pronounces words like "if" and "it" like "eff" and "et", and it was only a slight irritant until today when she repeatedly seemingly said "menstrual show"

ha, profassor valleygirl?

no not at all actually altho she may be from out west cuz she used to teach at u of wash

my remedial math professor insists on standing directly in front of the chalkboard in order to work out his problems and comes to the result before i even have the chance to copy down the work/see what the hell is going on, thus extending my years to be spent in remedial math courses.

my remedial math professor insists on standing directly in front of the chalkboard in order to work out his problems and comes to the result before i even have the chance to copy down the work/see what the hell is going on, thus extending my years to be spent in remedial math courses.

This is a never-ending cycle. If you're at a good school, it will subside at infinitesimal calculus. If you're not, it might subside with algebra. So, hot tip: self-learn.

It's incredibly easy if you're motivated. Check out http://www.khanacademy.org/. Start from scratch (i.e. counting and arithmetic). You should also read age-appropriate material (e.g. Steven Strogatz's columns for the New York Times -- http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/steven-strogatz/). A college student should be able to go from numerical illiteracy to infinitesimal calculus in a month, maybe two. Really.

A college student should be able to go from numerical illiteracy to infinitesimal calculus in a month, maybe two. Really.

A college student without a math disability, you mean? Not everyone can do or comprehend higher math. (Oh, and try to avoid using words like "age-appropriate" when you are referring to adults.)

No. I didn’t. I assume if someone had Dyscalculia, they’d be excused. Otherwise, the cognition necessary to comprehend infinitesimal calculus (which, by the way, is not “higher math”) is ready available to literate adults (i.e. you).

Furthermore, my use of “age-appropriate” was deliberate and not malicious. Most material is intended for adolescent children. Therefore, I believe it’s completely reasonable to emphasize that you should pursue material that isn’t the default.

A college student should be able to go from numerical illiteracy to infinitesimal calculus in a month, maybe two.

This is a massive bubbling cauldron of wrong. I mean, unless by "calculus" you mean "understand calculus as well as you would understand it from reading Strogatz's columns" or something like that. I think Strogatz's columns are great! But he would be the first to say that reading his column is not going to put you in the position of "knowing calculus."

seriously, that's like the ingles sin barreras method of learning math
ie, so not gonna happen

"Annoying Habits of College Professors" (circa 1935 to 1937)

Among the habits judged by students as being “very annoying,” some of the most frequently listed were rambling, “riding” students, pausing too long, and using pet expressions. I’m not sure how these particular pet expressions would go over in today’s college classroom, but in Moore’s study, some of the more bothersome ones apparently included “Ain’t that right, pal?;” “In the final analysis;” “Interestingly enough;” “Like an old mule” (I can only guess what this was referring to.); “If you please, gentlemen;” “Yes suh! Yes suh!” and perhaps my personal favorite, “That’s the meat of the cocoanut.”

That’s the meat of the cocoanut.”

so tired of this lol

“Yes suh! Yes suh!”

yessah massah?

polisci_4995_jk: For Friday


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Unless I hear that somebody is allergic, Friday is officially "Capstone Puppy Day."

huh?

we're allowed to bring dogs to class

What class?

Oh wait - polisci?

yeah, cuz we're gonna discuss this http://www.economist.com/node/17468228

it's actually a fun class & the professor gives us tons of control over the direction of it, but in this case the direction is "people want to bring puppies to class"

How is that not awesome???

J0rdan be bringing bitches.

look, i love dogs as much as the next person, but i kinda just want to show up to class w/o having to worry about barking dogs running around and making noise & shit -- we're adults here

I love my parents' dogs but no one else's.

Yeah, I see that. I like dogs but they can be stinky/slobbery/sheddy/bitey/humpy, which is nagl on a dog that you don't already know and love.

true of professors as well

Haha!

beleaguered haha as a professor who also is a dog owner
(though i have NEVER EVER taken my dogs to class nor would i -- who could concentrate? it's the same reason i don't allow students to have their kids with them in class)

please never with the "how 'bout that sarah palin" -style digressions.

trying to compare stuff to facebook is *always* the wrong way of explaining it.