Current Events > When you guys were in College did many of you have a bunch of Professors who...

(+) Yeah! (+)

Only one that sucked imo. On average they were by far better than teachers in regular school.

oh you mean like far better than your high school teachers?

I dont remember too much for my elementary teachers but yeah better than middle and high school teachers by far.

Which is how it should be to be fair, but i wasnt expecting the gap to be as big as it was.

had one with a very bad accent that made it very hard to understand. then when asked questions, would always say we weren't paying enough attention and that we should all just understand since it was a simple subject

I had two who were a bit too pretentious (for law and literature courses).

I had two who had written their own expensive books to buy as a mandatory part of the course, felt a bit like a scam.

However I did have a few great professors, especially for some philosophy courses.

I only had one that was anything other than amazing and he ended up quitting due to ill health, so that may well have been affecting his performance, in hindsight.

i remember you , the univ was in england, what subject? Like many math profs are kinda like that imo

My undergrad and masters courses were both at universities in England. My undergraduate degree was in philosophy and my masters was in developmental psychology.

yeah math ones sometimes seem kinda bad. How much did their books cost anyway? Oh...you are a lawyer now?

It was a bit too long ago to recall exactly. I just remember them being 3x as expensive as they should be for the value you get from them (could be different for other faculties, though interesting yourself or others had a similar experience with mathematics).

I quit law to be honest, now work in psychology.

yeah i remember , your school in vietnam you think they would not have hired you if not for your 2 degrees, they were required?

oh , interesting. So you paid for and graduated from the expensive law school anyway right? Though i heard that law school is not as much as medical school and business

Not really. The English professor was kind of out there and talked to us all like we were 10. He gave me an A though so whatever.

My discrete math professor was also horrible, and for the same reasons you mentioned!

have vaguely even heard of discrete math. Is it hard, like calc 2, engineering stuff?

have vaguely even heard of discrete math. Is it hard, like calc 2, engineering stuff?

My Romanian math teacher was the worst.
The entire class hated her.

Had an awful one for four classes.

First had him for a web design course. I had issues with CSS on our final project and tried getting assistance, being told it'd be a moment while he was at his desk doing his own thing. That was fine, but the moment a (admittedly cute) lady asked for help, he immediately ran over to assist before going back to his desk. I even reminded him I still needed help when he finished with her. Nada. Eventually figured things out at home, but my laptop hard drive fried and I lost everything. Tried emailing him to tell him what was going on and asking what I should do to get as much credit as possible with so little time left with no response. Eventually submitted a project made entirely with Dreamweaver, attached it to an email telling him I've been trying to get assistance for a while and he'd been ignoring me, and... still never got a response. He silently gave me full credit, but I felt like I left not learning the last few weeks of work properly.

...then the next quarter happened and I had him for all three classes: Animation I, Animation II (yes, they gave me both in the same quarter, fuck ITT), and something with a focus on Adobe Premiere. Quickly learned I shouldn't ask him for anything and sure enough, he prioritized the ladies over us gents in those classes as well. Had similar issues in the Adobe Premiere course and never bothered talking with him. Ended up being the first class I didn't get an A in, which kind of stung.

Fuck you, Mr. Virgin.

Interesting story, community college, your prod was an older dude, though?

• Inner product / Hilbert spaces
• Laplace, Fourier transforms and some applications
• Ordinary differential equations, some on Green's functions & Sturm-Liouville problems
• Partial differential equations
• Series convergence/divergence
• Some special functions (gamma, Bessel)
• Vector calculus & Einstein notation

I had two who had written their own expensive books to buy as a mandatory part of the course, felt a bit like a scam.

Only one that sucked imo. On average they were by far better than teachers in regular school.

Y'know, as someone teaching college myself (albeit lower-level math, and only one class a semester) I'm still surprised when I hear that students go to office hours.

Not that I think it's bad, quite the opposite.

But rather I've had maybe three students visit me in my entire time of teaching (about 8 semesters now?) for things that couldn't be handled via email. Most of the time I just sit around, play video games, speedrun, grade, or - honestly - fucking nap.

(Open door policy, office hours for 2 hours weekly in the afternoon, so it's not a lack of availability. Even if it was, no one's arranged for any other times or whatever.)

Not only is it a scam, they're probably not getting much money off of that. Textbook writing is not very profitable, so if they're getting from it it's not from students.

Tbh if I were to write a textbook I'd be straight-up just giving the PDF to my students or distributing it for free or telling them how to pirate it. Textbooks are a fucking scam. I haven't bought a physical textbook since early undergrad, and have probably saved >$1000 for it.

oh yeah , textbooks scam. Like are they still like 100 bucks per book? like great advancements in calculus over a few yrs , they have to change books...

more like 150 for a pdf, gt

edit: 150 to RENT access to said pdf

lol exactly

Math especially is one I can speak for, you'd have to hit senior year of undergrad to be touching math invented in the past century. Abstract algebra and applications thereof mostly, unless your curriculum is more rigorous with analysis/differential equations I guess. (Though this is largely just based on my own experience.)

Like, God. The typical scary "this is the hardest class you'll take in undergrad" real analysis (the rigorization of calculus, basically) - most of that was done in the 1800s IIRC.

$150 is generous. My students have a $200 online textbook for this semester. They lose access to it after a year.

(Obviously this decision is well above my head - I'm not paid enough to be allowed to have opinions.)

Fun fact: the textbook we're using is on the 13th (14th?) edition. I pirated the 11th edition for the first time I taught this course 2 years ago, and have gotten by completely fine with it as far as using it for teaching material & guiding the course go.

you are an undergrad university prof?

So in your opinion is most of that math stuff , like trash?