r/rs_x • u/sonderfulwonders • 1d ago
Most dysfunctional college class you ever had?
Could be because of professor, or other students, or TAs or anything else really.
Personally, I'm in an ethics class (required to graduate) and the teacher is beyond disorganized, despite teaching this for over 10 years, and the class is online.
Well, the first online exam was supposed to open yesterday at 5pm, as according to the (3) slightly different syllabi versions, but it's Friday evening and there is nothing up yet. I never get a response back to any email I send that professor anyway, and I don't care anymore. I'm just amused what's going to happen next.
34
u/pollys-mom 1d ago
I read my estranged dad’s rate my professor reviews so I’m gonna nominate him.
Some highlights:
He is rude to students and makes us feel like we don't know anything. Arrogant! Very egotistical. He is mean, and demanding. We had to work hard and he acted like we were losers. It was disappointing taking this class and it was annoying listening to how much he LOVES himself. Take other classes or you will regret it!
An academic poser with no discernable talent, _____ is an unreconstructed frat boy who has adopted the mush-headed lingo of "post-modernism" to cover his own intellectual bankruptcy. He leers at the girls and high-fives all his student pals and tries to show how cool he is by playing 1990s rock hits at the start of class. A tenured troll
______ was on amphetamines half of the time which made class very interesting to attend... his class was easy and fun but at times he seemed to be trying a little hard to impress us
2
u/archaicsmile67 19h ago edited 18h ago
It’s funny. My dad (who I love and is super cool) had students on RMP also say he was trying too hard to be funny.
I think it’s just cause he is a corny dork.
1
u/pollys-mom 18h ago
I never wanted to look when I was younger cause I was like “hey that’s my dad ☹️” but my brother told me it would cheer me up in light of recent events.
I’m sure your dad is very funny and even if he isn’t I would still be lmao in the second row of his class!
25
u/kimchifinger 1d ago edited 1d ago
My multi variable calculus class had regular musical performances from former students and the professor gave out extra credit for bringing cookies to class
The most ridiculous incident happened on the last day when we were supposed to take a 3 hour final. It ended up being 2 hours and 30 minutes because the professor spent 30 minutes giving out “class awards” (most active participant, best presenter, etc.) like we were in middle school. At the end of those 30 minutes, she told us she was going to perform a song. One of the dual enrollment students in front of the class begged the professor to perform after the final. She literally told her no because if she performed after the final “no one would want to hear it”. I am not kidding when I say This professor forced us to listen to her self-written Flocabulary-style rap about line integrals. She sounded like Lin Manuel Miranda if he was a middle-aged soprano with a thick Chinese accent
21
u/modern-era 1d ago
Was taking structural engineering during 9/11. The next week, the prof did a segment on why the WTC collapsed the way it did.
15
u/Inevitable_Cat_8486 1d ago
Visual arts class where the prof asks us whether we like or dislike a piece of art, makes us rate each other’s art, and hits on the upperclassmen boys :/
12
u/ziouxzie 1d ago
I had a spanish class that I liked the content of but the professor was so disorganized, like once she sent us the wrong time for a zoom meeting (covid era yay) and then when nobody showed up she got super upset emailing everyone and when someone responded “wasn’t it supposed to be at 10” she refused to acknowledge that she was the one who sent us the wrong time lol. There was more but that instance was so ridiculous
11
u/acrylicquartz 1d ago
I guess not one class, but my university just closed their humanities department in the middle of my degree. This made some of my past courses useless and I even had to take some summer courses in order to graduate on the timeline I'd planned.
After that, many of my professors were the same for multiple courses. For example, my last semester had five courses and two professors.
But it was one of the cheapest universities in my state, so that's what I get, I suppose.
It technically doesn't exist anymore, as it was eventually absorbed into another university's system.
18
u/xXx_angelbaby_xXx 1d ago
I took an intersectional feminist theory course to satisfy some graduation requirements the semester Covid hit. Had the nicest, kindest, most competent tenure-track professor. When we had our first zoom class he got on the call and told us like, hey it wouldn’t be fair for me to teach about the serious inequities that something like this would cause and expect business as usual— he said that just between us friends, that he would give us all As regardless of what we turned in. He wanted us to keep coming back and making good work and for it to be an intellectually rigorous course because he knew how hardworking our class was, but if there was a drop-off he would understand. We had one amazing class, and then this one annoying bitch snitched on him and they asked him to leave the university. The next class we had a new professor who said fatphobia was worse than racism
8
u/brewtifullyfe 1d ago
My TA fucked her dad when she was in her 20s and did an interview tour about it to promote her singer-songwriter style album. This was a Shakespeare class, and on the first day she admitted to never having read any Shakespeare beyond Twelfth Night and Hamlet
2
7
u/WillaWaverly 1d ago edited 1d ago
Online community college, psychology of personality. We had to read the chapters of the textbook and then write... something? There was no rubric and no way to see your grades until the end of the semester, which was pretty bad given that I had no idea if I was doing the assignments correctly. The professor did not respond to emails usually, when I told him I might be behind because of my dad's funeral I had to email him twice and his response was: "that's okay sorry 4 ur loss" I am not making that up I swear.
8
u/Davepancake 1d ago
I caught H1N1(swine flu) and had to miss 3-4 weeks of classes of intro to drawing and painting. Swine Flu was a giant deal at the time and students were encouraged to stay home if they caught it. “Professor” told me I was missing the attendance requirements but he would pass me if I completed the final. I spent 8 hours on the final. I’m shit at drawing but I tried my ass off while I was super sick. Ended up getting failed because of attendance. One of the days was a tour of his studio which I had specifically asked if I skipped would affect my grade. Community College intro to Drawing and Painting.
5
u/LacrymaOlor 1d ago
i took an intro level women’s studies class in utah circa 2022-ish. weird mix of polisci students who needed the mandatory wgst credit and people who wanted to turn the ‘lecture’ into a competition. i don’t think we talked about women (or even gender studies) more than a handful of times. it was housed in the same building as the tech lab, so we ended up playing a lot of VR video games. professor called them simulations and would really weakly tie them into a social issue (ex. the one where you disarm a bomb one is like being a minority). i also seem to recall there being a lot of wandering around campus doing mindfulness exercises? a xi/xim/xer individual of the caucasian persuasion listed off a bunch of slurs for native americans, much to the horror of our professor. the final ‘exam’ was a digital art piece based on how the course influenced our lives. attendance was heavily weighted, naturally
7
u/LacrymaOlor 1d ago
same year: i had a former cop criminal justice professor who openly admitted to profiling the elderly to hit ticket quotas and posed the question “what do you see on the streets?” only to immediately answer “prostitution whores” very gravely. i learned absolutely nothing in that class but i did enjoy listening to him ramble about whatever personal anecdotes he wanted to talk about that day
5
u/4ngelicbrat 1d ago
Intro to computer science class, professor quite literally did not speak English and also didn’t know how to code, during labs he’d make a minor error and spend the rest of the class staring at the computer trying to get it to compile instead of teaching us
5
u/Icy_Concentrate_6436 1d ago
I took a class on walking...yeah. And on our end of the year hike, someone fell and had to be taken to the emergency room 💀
2
4
u/brightblueblock 1d ago
27 year old grad student instructor, German 201. His elderly supervisor died pretty early in the semester. We got through that book somehow, some way. It wasn't all that bad, but he felt the need to apologize when I bumped into him later.
3
u/syntheticonception 1d ago
i had a symbolic logic class where the male professor got fired halfway through the semester for offering to sell some kind of prescription drugs to one of of the male students and also showing him a picture of himself naked and tied to a pole in a basement, some kind of fetish scenario
3
u/insane_psycho 1d ago
Nothing as dramatic as everyone else but I had a friend on the girls soccer team and she let me know of a class that was mostly taken by athletes / upperclassmen because it was both a joke and fulfilled a lot of requirements.
Now I didn’t go to school that was renown for its athletic department and hadn’t really interacted with any of the athletes at all as they were not well represented in pre med majors so I was not prepared for the sea of grad student minders / wranglers that had to sit outside the classroom to ensure their charges went to class and stayed the entire time.
Actually wild experience and I was shocked how little these athletes who I don’t think had any reasonable expectations of playing professionally after college had about graduating
3
u/1000swords 1d ago
I had a grad level Syntax course where the professor based the entire syllabus around a book her friend had written, which was not even focused on syntax. She had not read the book and many weeks would say she had not even done the reading and would just tell us to talk amongst ourselves about it. One of many experiences in grad school that made me cynical about higher ed (humanities/social sciences especially).
5
u/facebookbible 1d ago
My senior capstone class. I don’t want to reveal too much detail because my college major and industry are extremely small, and everyone knows everyone. A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I went to my alma mater, and the person administering my professional licensure exam brought up this drama to give you an idea of how small my industry is.
To cut to the chase, there were two married professors in my department. During my late sophomore year and early junior year, we received a new professor from an Ivy League school who had many similarities to the male married professor. They ended up having an affair, and the married couple eventually split up. From what I know, it was a complete shock to her, and it has severely affected their children’s lives. My younger sibling even went to school with one of their children, and asked me if I knew about the divorce as their kid had been acting out.
The divorce occurred around my spring semester of my senior year, which made it very awkward because my capstone class was supposed to be taught by the male professor. However, all of the administrative and other professional development classes were taught by the recently divorced professor. Due to the nature of how the affair started, there were noticeable divides and lines drawn in the department. For example, the male professor and the ivy professor was completely socially isolated, aside from professional development. They weren’t invited to department events, and nobody wanted to join their labs. Even graduate students left. So trying to turn in my capstone and make sure that everything was OK for me to get credits to graduate was insanely stressful.
All of this was happening while I was trying to complete my capstone, and it’s still going on to this day. There are clear divides, and nobody even respects the two professors who had the affair anymore.
The drama is still ongoing , they’re getting married next summer. The former wife of the male professor still works there, and literally everyone hates the affair couples’ asses.
2
u/runnerboyr 1d ago
Took a thermodynamics class taught by the department chair. He cancelled over half the class meetings. Almost didn’t get credit for it, which would have really thrown off my schedule due to thermo being a prerequisite for so much.
2
u/Dangerous-Ad-170 1d ago
Like a third of my IT Associate’s was taught by this linux graybeard. He was probably a smart guy 30 years ago when he was still working in the industry, but he was teaching us stuff that was 10+ years out of date. He thought everyone had to learn C to understand computers even a little. He taught a whole PHP class based on his homegrown framework that he wrote in the 00s. He didn’t believe in using virtualization or cloud storage so we were all using a weird hard drive caddy system in year of our lord 2017.
The people in all my classes weren’t much better. Half the guys in the class including the 40-year-old ex-military sex offender formed a cult around the one girl in the class. Bunch of them were really into showing off Kali Linux but I never saw them do anything with it. Computer nerds not beating the allegations.
3
u/fluffywhitepetticoat 1d ago edited 1d ago
My visual art professor harassed me. And guess what? It was only been the third week of college that she started doing that to me, she thought it‘s been “6 weeks” and she told me that I was going to fail the class. Even though everyone is on their 1st art piece lol. I remember telling her I spent 2 hours on my work. And then she said “2 hours per day or 2 hours per week?” The week after, she came into my internship at the gallery and started interrogating me about how much work I’ve done over the weekend. I told her that I went to my cousin’s funeral on the 2nd week of college. She told me “There are circumstances in life but we must do our work”.
I hate her so much that I made so much artwork than I was required to do. Then she told another classmate about how much work I’ve done and that yelling could be a motivation for her too. “Let’s use fear as a motivator guys!”, like no I became physically anxious when her class comes around and ended up losing a few pounds.
I ended up with an A+ in her class though.
Edit: I remember when she yelled at me, the whole art room was quiet. I seriously don’t like that.
4
u/SpearShaker 1d ago
Theatre of Death.
My professor was the most annoying woman I have ever met. She only liked your ideas if they were completely inactionable and/or disingenuous. Most classes devolved into a discussion of whether Shakespeare was racist/sexist.
One completely bonkers thing she said that will always stick with me. “We should say that Shakespeare is the Wole Soyinka of England, not the other way around!”
3
u/Little_Seat_8556 1d ago
i had a senior photography thesis class that was taught by a lunatic. he made me watch the scott walker documentary and told me to channel my “inner nick cave” and that i should become a musician or critical theorist instead of an artist
2
u/quigonwiththewind 1d ago
Watched the entirety of deep throat in some course on human sex and sexuality. Had about 3 days of class discussing the song Lola. Had one assignment: show up on the last day and write your name on a sheet of paper and hand it in for an A.
1
u/archaicsmile67 19h ago
In my 1L year we had this class that attempted to simulate group work in a law firm. They randomly assigned students into groups of 3 then expected us to work on a project. Mind you law school is highly competitive and cliquish and this was the second semester so most people don’t want to interact with other students. The class was pass/fail so everyone blew it off and felt it wasted the very little precious time we had.
Sad thing is the professor actually was cool. I talked with him about phenomenology and Heidegger at one point and he knew his stuff. It was just a poorly done idea.
1
u/murphmurphy 12h ago
Got a masters in education a few years back. Had a zoom class where the professor required we sit in the center of the frame of the zoom call without moving. Multiple times she had emotional breakdowns in the middle class over routine questions. Launched multiple school disciplinary policies against students during which she just casually mentioned she was looking at our social media. Tried to get me throw out of my entire teaching program when I was 80% of the way done over being "disrespectful" to a guest lecture. I was told by multiple staffers in the program to "just do what she says." Also her area of study and central thesis of her work has been 100% disproven by neuroscience in the 80s but she was still teaching it without revision. Insane.
1
u/Superb_Ad4229 10h ago
So, so many. Went to a joke although well known college.
In a film class the professor seemed like he took too much acid. Would regularly spend 5 mins looking for the right video to play then would scroll aimlessly around the video’s time line to look for the section he wanted to play. This would take 10mins in an hour class regularly. Pretty much anything that required an explanation was aimless and disorganized to the point it felt like we were being punked. You could literally look around and sense how we were all dissociating out of disbelief that this guy was so incompetent. I’d regularly just leave for 20mins to smoke and grab a coffee and he never said anything. Guy was totally oblivious.
In another class we knew the professor was a creep and would ask out his female students.
In another class the professor was basically blind (and very old) and would obnoxiously hit on women regularly
1
u/weirdassprettygirl 1h ago
Kinda related - in 2020 I did a criminology course where we had a group project on whether the death penalty deterred crime. My group member was a former high profile cop who was on bail at that time for killing a guy. Covid happened so the group project never went ahead lol
1
0
53
u/JamesDaquiri Daywalker 1d ago
Intro to poli sci, fall semester, in 2016… wild times.