Have you ever had a professor who was simply stupid? I was given

No, you must be mistaken. I've never encountered any morons in academia and sincerely doubt any exist.

i think i did, but i got over it and forgot about it, but i'm still blasted about that time a computer science t.a. marked down my assignment because since it was a c++ based class i used sprintf instead of printf, i was like come on pajeet get it together, i'm not even a cs major, how do i know this shit and u don't

No, but I never studied at an university that wasn't ranked in the top 10 so that might be why.

No, most of my professors have been highly knowledgable and passionate about their field. One even gave me a good mark when I almost explicitly disagreed with his own ideas in an essay.

That's not to say University was good. It was fairly well-ranked, but the structure was awful and most of what I learned I had to push myself to learn.

The situation in my final class was of an intelligent professor trying to coax out rudimentary answers from a class who, after 3 years, were still incredibly stupid and poorly-read (and I include myself in that). It was really depressing and I'm glad it's over.

>>9401791
Are you sure the prof marked it, and not a tired, cranky, incredibly-underpaid grad-student marker who hasn't even taken the course and is looking for little beyond coherent grammar and clean citation format?

>>9401791
Have you considered the possibility that you failed to express your point?

Yes I've had it happen before but what I took away from it is that even if they had understood me it was poor writing. Reading itself should be near effortless so that your brain can focus on the ideas expressed.

>>9401797
>C++
>sprintf or printf

You're supposed to use cout you fucking humanitiesfag.

>>9401791
>Have you ever had a professor who was simply stupid?
Maybe not, but I have had professors who were so god-awful at teaching that they made themselves look like they didn't know what they were talking about even if they did know their shit. And none of them are passionate. Probably because they have to dumb down their courses because most of their students are borderline retarded because the university passes them through classes they were supposed to fail because otherwise the university wouldn't get that sweet tuition money.

My political science TA is pretty stupid. For her dissertation she is talking about the Cambodian genocide and she didn't know the events that led to it. That's just one example but I think she's genuinely stupid.

had a biology teacher try and tell me blood is blue in the veins and only goes red outside of the body.

>>9402272
>You're supposed to use cout you fucking humanitiesfag.
>assuming the assignment was about printing shit to std::out

this is what happens what faggots watch youtube tutorials and think they know something about cs

kys my dude

My school's Spanish teacher couldn't speak any Spanish beyond really basic shit.

I had a professor in college who believed the Berlin Wall was made and maintained by the Nazis. (She was an art teacher of sorts, so retarded about a whole host of other things, I imagine.)

Other than that, I had a bunch of teachers who were bad at their jobs or just careless in general, but I never had anyone else who didn't know their shit.

I had one. She had degrees from some of the most respected universities in the world, but nonetheless displayed a worldview that was childishly simple. At first I thought she was just giving us a break with easy material, but the more she was prodded by students the more she seemed simple-minded. On the bright side the class was easy as fuck and I got an A.

Personally, no. But I'm a Master's student (social sciences) and transitioning to doctoral studies this fall.
Out of my current cohort of 4 other students, only 1 is definitively intelligent, whereas two of them are undoubtedly stupid. And they're also applying to PhD programmes with the expectation of teaching full time. So it's definitely possible.

>>9402313
I had a teacher in primary school scold me for questioning her grasp of the decimal system as in 0.1 actually means 0.01 rather than 0.10

>>9401791
I had dumb assignments. Like the time I was forced to cut a podcast in audacity despite having proficiency in audition and hindenburg. The professor told me we had to use audacity because it was a industry standard. Had to bite my tongue for that one.
As for out and out dumb professors, no. I've had a few people who were clearly not teachers but none were out and out dumb.

>>9402321
This is a common problem with Spanish teachers. Especially those who have a technical understanding but no cultural one (i.e. slang and colloquialisms)

>>9402271
I've had one in highschool, I got a lower grade in oral because I knew more than her about a question and she thought I was wrong. But she was a mindless just-required-fact-fetishist who had no real common knowledge on history so it happened to everyone.
What really struck me this year was a teacher on the faculty of architecture, she's considered pretty stupid among other architects and architects are in general pretty illiterate. She told me to correct citations/quotes on my own writing. I cited the sources that I used like supposed to, but she thought parts of my text were direct citations or how you say quotes when they weren't. 2 pages that I wrote myself from what i knew about the topic from lectures, books and articles were marked because she thought I didn't write it myself. She also used to discredit my ideas before and not greet me in the hallways, but whatever. Now I know i have a niche in architecture to pursue, because at least in our country no architect/urbanist reads any books so the standards for writing are really low and they really need someone to back plans and sketches with drawings to produce decent studies

The principal in my Catholic Grammar school hired a former Priest with no teaching experience as head Religion teacher over all the others. Turned out he was a complete idiot who thought he could give vague sermons and took all his teaching material from the others and had a mental breakdown towards exam season leaving the other s with stressed work load. Worked out better for me though cause we got proper lessons

Well I go to a High ranked uni that's been in the news recently because of one certain Prof (/lit/ can probably guess who I'm talking about) and while there were no overtly shitty profs, there were definitely profs who were pretty firm in their ideology, although it never seemed to effect their work.
That being said, I had to drop a class because a prof. gave me a low mark because I offended her political sensibilities, at least that's what I assume.

>>9401791
there are plenty of stunningly dumb people in academia. socially they're like high schoolers. lots of drama. academia has and always will be a bastion for people who'd never survive "real world"

fart

>>9401791
Let's be honest, if you're talking about university then you're the one who failed to explain your ideas properly, not the prof being too stupid. There are people in academia who are exceedingly stupid in most ways except the narrow subject of their expertise, and there are lower level teachers who can be dumber than their students, but if it is a university professor who was teaching in their field of expertise, then you are at fault.

>>9401796
/thread

>>9402441
What country are you from?

>>9401791
>im just too deep for them mane

>>9401791
Accept that the marker is only human. Perhaps he was at fault but it's more likely you were writing was shit.

>>9403090
Why?

>>9401791
I went to a university with a very liberal academic staff.

I barely had to do any work since I pretended to have only a basic grasp of the English language in front of all of my professors.

I had only been living in the United States for a year but I had known English since I was a child but I was not about to let them know that.

I cruised by getting straight A's with minimal effort.

What's the point of writing something no one else can understand?

>>9402315
>cee plus plus
>doesn't know how to use ostreams
>calls others faggots and pajeets
>kys
Ah, to be 14 and on the internet.

>>9404523
Unless you're from Vatican or Pitcairn Islands you're not going to be doxxed. Come on now.

>>9404743
I might be recognised and I wouldn't want that. I know some people from my university who post or at least lurk on /fa/. It's not Vatican but it's a small place.
Back to my question - why do you ask?

>>9404789
I'm not the one who asked, but your paranoia is unsubstantiated and silly. Also:
>people from my university who post or at least lurk on /fa/
My condolences for living in a hopeless shithole.

I had a professor of my language and literature in high school that insisted on saying that antisemitism didn't exist until the 1930s.

>>9404794
>smallcountryfeels.jpg
my friend
It's not that bad. Where are you from?

File: 1487735036351.jpg (6KB, 487x423px) Image search: [Google]

6KB, 487x423px

Only teachers in highschool because I would go completely insane at a university
It was always enraging to me that my English and history, teachers claimed they used objective marking, arbitrarily assigning numerical values to entirely qualitative concepts. Coincidentally, 75% of the classes would invariably end up with the exact same "score" with no critical explanation.
I have always had no faith in female teachers.

>>9404736
>using iostreams

>>9404822
Austria

On the contrary, I have professors who are too smart, with fail rates for their classes at around 40%. And I'm not talking about autistic intelligence in to a specific area, it's the scarier version of general-intelligence.

one assignment was to imitate a certain national folk story teller and the female teacher would systematically value uninspired rip-offs over honest and more difficult attempts at imitation. i didnt expect her to be so shallow because she seemed smarter than most other teachers up to that point. weininger did nothing wrong.

>>9401791

One of my professors is unironically dyslexic to some degree, and frequently cannot read or else mispronounces some of the words she includes in her lecture slides.

>>9405422
>her

what a surprise.

File: 1492549350213.jpg (54KB, 555x547px) Image search: [Google]

54KB, 555x547px

>>9405364
>decide to check out the fail rate for last year's midterm
>90%

>>9405460
Either your classmates are literally retarded or you're professors have been told to thin the herd.

your

>>9405479
I thought we were retarded too but I've had exchange students complain about how hard our exams were too. Once I scored a failing grade and was still in the Top 5 grades for that particular midterm, I just feel like some teachers like to see us suffer.

>>9405483
You've gotten me curious, what were you studying?

It looks bad on the professor if essentially the whole class is failing so there must be something more to it.

>>9405496
Physics, and a lot of people do bounce back in the finals and with other coursework and whatnot but it's really not outside the norm to have 40 or 50% failing rate, and even those who pass have generally low grades, scoring top mark really is something for the few truly talented ones. I've had professors who seriously think that just scraping by a passing grade should be the norm.

>>9405515
For physics teachers, you'd think they'd like to mark papers to produce a nice little bell curve but from everyone I know that studies that subject, they all affirm what you say. Huge chunks of the class pooling at the bottom end.

>>9405543
Yeah, some classes it's downright traditional to fail them on your first try. The funniest part about it is that there's this tendency that when you fail you fail really hard, most people who fail a class tend to do so with an embarrasingly low grade rather than almost making it.

>>9405551
The average for my vector calculus final was 23% lel

File: 1393534416380.jpg (181KB, 884x1092px) Image search: [Google]

181KB, 884x1092px

>>9405554
Good shit, takes me back to my college days.

>>9401905
I feel the same way, my university was well rated but it was an utterly dreary experience.
felt like high school but with over-qualified teachers who often stopped giving a shit entirely

>>9402420
and where do you stand?

>>9401791
My psych professor was a complete joke. She clearly never read the actual works she cited. And my english II rofessor was the kind of guy who would blame 36 students for not understanding something because it couldn't possibly be that he expressed himself badly. Yes, OP. No matter how high you climb up the ladder of academia where the savvy thinkers are supposed to live, you're going to find dumb, delusional assholes. But don't get too eager to throw around the "My professor is an idiot" mantra of every twenty year old edgelord. People won't believe you every time.

>>9401796
I know a master's in English who wants to teach college who unironically thinks Shakespeare is shit. Let. That. Sink. In.

>>9401791
I've had a math teacher who could barely solve the math problems he prescribed his students. Foreigners go home.

I'm in university, and I never got a grade below an A and I mostly get A+. Funny how the people complaining about the teaching always are the ones with lower grades. You don't see good students complaining, it's always the rabble ; the fat, dumb girls, the austic acne-ridden losers, the faggots, etc. I'd say that ugly people complain more often and have worse grades ; it's fucked up, I know.

But I got this one teacher last year, a woman ; and she really wasn't good, she'd only read her notes all day long and couldn't answer a single question. It was a class with 150+ students, I stopped attending after like 3 weeks. I went back one day when I ended over my essay, and there were like 25 people attending. She looked despaired and I kind of felt bad for her, so I sent her an email saying I enjoyed her class and how she was a great teacher.

I think teaching isn't easy at all, and a lot of people don't master it in their first few years, especially women who tend to feel intimidated.

I had an economics professor who proudly stated that refused to read Milton Friedman, because "No Logo" sufficiently covered his writings. She gave me a C for a paper, which was updated to an A after I made a complaint and another professor marked it. I still can't believe she was allowed to teach.

>>9401791
I teach English in a Canadian university and can confirm that there are dipshit academics who make terrible teachers, people that have somehow gotten by in ways that I cannot fathom. But most are not like that. Most people have one way or another earned their way into their position with some luck.

I suspect that your poor grade was not because the teacher couldn't understand your point, but that there was some other problem that was not clearly communicated to you. You could ask for more explanation... most professors appreciate when their students try to understand with the intent of improving.

Maybe the person was an idiot. Or maybe it was a grad student grading it. Or maybe someone who recently graduated and is still learning. That said, I have colleagues, recent post-docs, who literally cannot perform the sort of analysis that is expected of first-year students in English. I mean, they cannot close-read, don't know how metaphors work, know little about grammar, and nothing about the history of English. I knew them when they were TAing and they couldn't grade 3rd year essays in Shakespeare because they genuinely did not understand how to do close-reading assignments. Utterly shameful. When confronted about it, they pleaded that they "do ideas, not language." Fucking disgrace.

Anyway, if it really bothers you, talk to the prof. If you think something unjust has actually occurred, go to the undergrad chair of your department and lodge a complaint. These things can matter when it comes to job reviews, though many of these shits are protected by tenure.

>>9407183
>especially women who tend to feel intimidated.
Saying this openly in universities can get you lynched, but there's something to this. I know a number of young female profs and grad students teaching who struggle both with their own sense of presence in the class and with fuckwits who disrespect them openly in class. It's a real challenge that most male profs don't ever encounter.

>>9407368
If they are intimidated it is because they have no business teaching and should have stuck to office work

>>9407361
Fuck you, Professor Faggot.

I got into a pretty long, drawn out argument with a professor because i put something in quotes, but it wasn't quote, I just made up some phrase and put it in quotes to show it's absurdity.

So he is super serious and says I need to cite my source, and I tell him there is no source, it's a made up phrase. he's like, yeah, but who made it up? You need to cite that! I say I made it up. He says I still need to cite it. I'm like....uh...cite what? Am i supposed to cite the sentence I just wrote, where I made the phrase up, within the sentence? So the citation would just point to itself?

This argument went on for about 45 minutes, and to this day I have honestly no idea what he was trying to say. In the end I just put a foot note, then copy and pasted the sentence in my works cited, and he seemed happy.

I think he just didn't want to look like an idiot, because he didn't realize it wasn't an actual quotation, probably because he didn't actually read the fucking paper, so he just refused to back down.

>>9408105
Such cheek from such a small boy. See me after class, young man. I'll need to have another private meeting with your mother.

>>9408084
No argument from me on this point. It gets on my tits that teaching is considered the lesser task at the university... that research and publishing are more important and teaching is the inconvenience that the faculty must suffer. So they pawn it off on grad students, most of whom have no fucking business trying to teach. I don't know why it happens this way, but in my experience the male grad students make better teachers while the female students are poorer for various reasons. Maybe there's some sense of having to prove something that hinders a better performance in front of the class. Anyway.

>>9408135
>I think he just didn't want to look like an idiot, because he didn't realize it wasn't an actual quotation, probably because he didn't actually read the fucking paper, so he just refused to back down.

What a shit.

>>9404789
Mostly curiosity. I'm also planning on studying architecture so knowing that might've been useful.

>>9402437
You're most definitely right about the Spanish teachers.

I spent most of my schooling career in a very latin town, and the Spanish teachers were all actual immigrants - their Spanish was honestly better than their English, so no problems there. Then I spent my junior and senior year in a really white town in the middle of nowhere, and the Spanish teachers barely knew anything. I knew more than them (granted, I already spoke it since my parents came to the US from Colombia, but they definitely weren't good at Spanish).

>>9402499
What college?

Some teachers teach for a living and not as a passion. This unfortunate aspect of academics (more prevalent in community colleges and public high schools) leads to uncredited student genius.

TLDR bring your work to knowledgable peers whom you respect, teachers are not infallible.

>>9408561
vic

>>9401796
>5 shekels have been deposited in your account.

>>9408610
t. "autodidact" who barely reads

>>9409072
>(You)

>>9406659
Tolstoy thought Shakespeare was shit as well. You wanna talk shit about Tolstoy?

>>9409828
Tolstoy didn't teach English.

>>9406659

Lmaooooooooo I have a friend who majored in Eng Lit and shills Shakespeare on the daily, is now at an Ivy for Law, whose main goal is to become a fucking Yelp Reviewer Elite

KMFSSJDHFSHSHHA

>>9409847
Are you 14?

>>9408294
don't study architecture

>>9401791

Not a professor that I can think of, but many TA's. I had this retarded red head TA for an anthropology class who just could not understand people's papers. I was not alone thankfully. She marked far too subjectively and basically she would just assign people an B.