Most Hilarious/Bizarre Undergrad Professor

[EricH]

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Looking back at my undergrad journey there was a wide variety of learning experiences and some fairly strange professors. I thought it would be fun to recap....I'm sure we've all had such experiences.

Mine:
One professor stands out as particularly weird. I was a freshman and my first thought of the the guy was that he looked like popeye.....if popeye was 75 years old. He wore a tweed blazer over hawaii shirt and had a captains hat. He was complete with a santa beard and a smoking pipe. The class was English Comp. He didn't lecture, instead we spent the time writing a set of assignments. When we were done with one we wrote our name on the board in a list and he called us up one by one to review our work. While reviewing the work it was common for him to put his arm around the student, girl/guy didnt matter. This made so many people uncomfortable that droves of people dropped. Often, he would take the instruction outside so that he could smoke his pipe while talking to the students. He was fire up the pipe, take a couple of puffs and place it, still smoking, in his jacket pocket. I thought that he was likely to die from catching himself on fire. As if this wasn't enough, he would do these full face winks....the likes of which I haven't seen before or since. He wasn't winking to drive his point home, he would do it in the middle of a sentence.

Of course, he was an outrageously good writing coach...the best I ever had.

Let's hear your story!

 

[Pony46]

Looking back at my undergrad journey there was a wide variety of learning experiences and some fairly strange professors. I thought it would be fun to recap....I'm sure we've all had such experiences.

Mine:
One professor stands out as particularly weird. I was a freshman and my first thought of the the guy was that he looked like popeye.....if popeye was 75 years old. He wore a tweed blazer over hawaii shirt and had a captains hat. He was complete with a santa beard and a smoking pipe. The class was English Comp. He didn't lecture, instead we spent the time writing a set of assignments. When we were done with one we wrote our name on the board in a list and he called us up one by one to review our work. While reviewing the work it was common for him to put his arm around the student, girl/guy didnt matter. This made so many people uncomfortable that droves of people dropped. Often, he would take the instruction outside so that he could smoke his pipe while talking to the students. He was fire up the pipe, take a couple of puffs and place it, still smoking, in his jacket pocket. I thought that he was likely to die from catching himself on fire. As if this wasn't enough, he would do these full face winks....the likes of which I haven't seen before or since. He wasn't winking to drive his point home, he would do it in the middle of a sentence.

Of course, he was an outrageously good writing coach...the best I ever had.

Let's hear your story!

In my experience the really weird ones are the awesome ones. 😉

 

[rmsgolfer]

I had an organic professor who once was the chemical manger for Merck and Pfizer pharmaceuticals at different times who was the spitting image of Beaker from the muppets. Im not kidding, it was frightening. He even had a picture of Beaker stitched into his lab coat pocket as a reference.

I also had an exercise physiology professor who grew up as a ranch hand in texas. He is now a vegetarian with hair slightly resembling that of Einstein, wears Hawaiian shirts everyday, and on the days he comes wearing dress slacks, shirt, and sport coat, he makes sure to jazz it up with his old pair of running shoes.

Both amazingly brilliant people.

 

[ilovefishing]

My Anatomy Professor was crazy (in a funny kind of way). He prided himself in having the lowest pass rate at the school. Two moments in particular will always stay in my mind:

For our lab final, he walked around the room holding a dead, dissected cat by one of its hind legs and pointed to random parts for us to identify. He literally gave us 3 seconds to look before he hurried on to the next student. A lot of times the cat would be spinning or in an awkward position where we couldnt see what he was pointing to. When my classmates began complaining that they were going to fail the final because he didn't give enough time for them to see what he was pointing at, he got a big grin and said "See You Next Year!"

Another one of my classmates always bragged about her good grades and how she wanted to be a neurosurgeon. She pretty much bombed the first exam and when the professor handed back her test he said (with that same goofy grin) "Maybe you should just become a talking head (that's what he called psychologists)." When he saw how sad she looked, he added "Oh don't worry, they'll still call you doctor."

 

[Pony46]

My Anatomy Professor was crazy (in a funny kind of way). He prided himself in having the lowest pass rate at the school. Two moments in particular will always stay in my mind:

For our lab final, he walked around the room holding a dead, dissected cat by one of its hind legs and pointed to random parts for us to identify. He literally gave us 3 seconds to look before he hurried on to the next student. A lot of times the cat would be spinning or in an awkward position where we couldnt see what he was pointing to. When my classmates began complaining that they were going to fail the final because he didn't give enough time for them to see what he was pointing at, he got a big grin and said "See You Next Year!"

Another one of my classmates always bragged about her good grades and how she wanted to be a neurosurgeon. She pretty much bombed the first exam and when the professor handed back her test he said (with that same goofy grin) "Maybe you should just become a talking head (that's what he called psychologists)." When he saw how sad she looked, he added "Oh don't worry, they'll still call you doctor."

He sounds like a sadistic &^%$.

ewe, nauseating...

I have now officially posted enough for a couple of days.

 

[MossPoh]

I had a professor for logic and discrete mathematics that walked in the first day and sat down with the students. We had a lot of older students in my major and I never realized he was the prof. His first day he wore torn up jeans and a tshirt with bob marley on it, a pony tail, and his guitar case. Evidently he toured with a rock band for a while and just did the professor gig to make money to hold him offer since his gigs didn't pay for much. he had TWO phds. One from yale and one from mit. To demonstrate digital versus analog signalling he brought in about 4 different amps and just played guitars and compared various albums. Cool guy but also an interesting character.

 

[Signaq]

I went to massage therapy school many many years ago. My anatomy teacher was also some sort of movement/dancer expert. She had us all line up against the wall and one by one move across the room as if we were different parts of the body. The student assigned bones had to walk stiffly, the nerve cell student had "jazz hands", the lungs student moved arms like wings to duplicate respiratory movement.....If only all BCMP classes involved interpretive dance-offs...awesome!👍

 

[Jamers]

Had an organic chem teacher who was a bit odd/eccentric. I don't know if every school has this "rule" where you give professors 10 minutes to come to class if they don't have a PHD and 15 minutes if they have a PHD or not? Well, on the first day of a new class, this guy would sit in a room across from his assigned room and burst in on the class at exactly 14 minutes 59 seconds. Of course everyone was excited because they thought they were getting a day off until they saw his smiling face come strolling in the door. This same guy would also randomly freeze things in nitroglycerin and throw them against the wall and make bottle bombs.

 

[Bacchus]

We have the 10/15 rule. Its not a rule, but we adhere to it pretty well. Unless, of course, you get the idiots that say, I'm not leaving, period.

 

[Semicolon]

I wish we had such a "rule" in my school. We do, however, give 20 minutes for anyone; maybe that's too nice...

 

[JaggerPlate]

We have the 10/15 rule. Its not a rule, but we adhere to it pretty well. Unless, of course, you get the idiots that say, I'm not leaving, period.

We have the rule ... but there are always like 3-4 complete wankers who refuse to leave and will sit there for hours. This ruins it for the bulk of everyone who leaves after 15-20 minutes, which is perfectly fair.

 

[nevinleiby]

We have the rule ... but there are always like 3-4 complete wankers who refuse to leave and will sit there for hours. This ruins it for the bulk of everyone who leaves after 15-20 minutes, which is perfectly fair.

Apparently I am a wanker....

I'm payin for the darn course. I'll be d4mned if I'm gonna get cheated out of my $. And I'm a nerd, too...so...yeah...I stay

Also, some people inherit their parents eyes, nose, etc. I inherited my mother's lateness. I think it was slipped in on that X...so I try to give other ppl credit in case I need it =)

 

[JaggerPlate]

Apparently I am a wanker....

I'm payin for the darn course. I'll be d4mned if I'm gonna get cheated out of my $. And I'm a nerd, too...so...yeah...I stay

Also, some people inherit their parents eyes, nose, etc. I inherited my mother's lateness. I think it was slipped in on that X...so I try to give other ppl credit in case I need it =)

I mean ... I get what you are saying, but when 20 minutes go by, you've already missed so much/can assume the professor isn't coming for whatever reason. Every class where this has ever happened to me (very few times) I've gone home to find an urgent email from the professor about a car accident, trip to the hospital, sudden illness etc. So it's not like you staying there is going to make anything happen ... you know?? Just takes away time we have too little of anyway.

 

[MossPoh]

Punctuality is a valuable thing in my book. If a prof didn't show up, which was rare, then I could assume it was something serious. Ours often held an extra review class in case we needed it. Honestly, they aren't seeing much of that money you pay for a class. I went to a very large university but almost all of my classes were around 20-30 people and we all were on a first name basis with nearly every prof in the department, even the ones we didn't have class with. Heck, I had an interview at Touro-CA and one of them was in SF for a Google thing and met up with me and a few other grads to buy us drinks and dinner. Similar devotion to students isn't that common across the boards, but that was going above and beyond the call of duty. He missed a few classes when I had him...shiznit happens.

 

[EricH]