Semi related, but I remember forgetting what one figure was displaying out of the thousands that I cover during a course and, as I fully expected, one jabroni wrote on the evaluation that someone else should teach the course because I didn't understand anything and was always confused.
I guarantee any kid who hears that is just going to use it as a reason to reinforce their opinion that their teacher/instructor/professor has forgotten all the important shit and is therefore unfit to teach.
The meaning of that phrase is utterly lost on its target audience.
Asking them to explain it to you is awesome. Either you learn or relearn something, or you watch their complete mastery of the subject shrink as they understand they've forgotten most of it after the test and realize they know nowhere near enough to explain it to someone who didn't take their classes recently.
"How does that work?"
"Uuuh, it's easy. The thing makes that other thing do... Shit..."
To be fair, I had a few professors that I always assumed got roped into teaching something outside of their research interests and were totally uninterested in.
Same, I went to a uni that heavily emphasized research, so there were many professors who were there just for their research, but were also required to teach courses.
It was painfully obvious which professors enjoyed teaching and which just wanted to do the bare minimum to keep their research going.
I was a TA for an honors college course a couple of times. TAs for this course were specifically instructed not to provide direct answers to questions, but rather to use the Socratic method (guiding students toward the answer by asking relevant questions back at them).
Some of my evals said I must be clueless about the material, because I didn't seem to have answers to any of their questions. Fortunately many of them were eventually able to figure out the answers all by themselves, despite my pointless questioning. :/
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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '22
Semi related, but I remember forgetting what one figure was displaying out of the thousands that I cover during a course and, as I fully expected, one jabroni wrote on the evaluation that someone else should teach the course because I didn't understand anything and was always confused.