Some Kind of Professor

25 thoughts on “Some Kind of Professor”

1. Love it. Related: my favorite student evaluation ever was “She went and had a baby during the semester and her substitute sucked.” My husband just got one last semester that said it he was mean to people with disabilities.

   1. @rose-woodhouse Some of my fathers (retired geneticist) reviews are floating around online. It truns out that his labs were awesome when stoned!

      1. Your dad’s Walter Bishop? 😀

         (If you’re not a Fringe fan, ignore this.)

   2. Not being able to finish your homework on time is a disability, right?

2. Maybe passable means plausible?

3. I’m still pondering whether “passable professor” means my teaching is marginally acceptable or that students can pass my classes.

   But having tenure renders this a purely academic inquiry!

   1. Well, it may be relevant that I was denied promotion to full professor last year on the basis of supposedly not being a good enough teacher.

      1. Hm, I don’t know anything about your pedagogical style, in person or all, but having had plenty of conversations with you on the blog here I’d be hard pressed to imagine that you’re anything but more than a “good enough” teacher, James.

      2. @patrick,

         My best students mostly say good things about me, but there might be multiple ways to interpret that evidence.

4. I’m still pondering whether “passable professor” means my teaching is marginally acceptable or that students can pass my classes.

   Maybe they think the cost of taking one more class from you is worth the tuition they have to pay.

5. Do they no longer teach how to write legibly these days?

   1. To be fair, it is a waist high horizontal surface, and I’m not sure American education has ever emphasized practicing writing in that kind of hunched over position.

      1. Which is disrespectful to hunched over, waist-high writers, no?

   2. incoming freshmen have enough issues with typing essays that handwriting should be right down there with teaching them how to send telegrams or ride mastodons.

      1. @dhex
         I believe the latter is actually a course of study at Indiana-Purdue Fort Wayne.

      2. huh. you really do learn something new every day.

         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPFW_Mastodons#Mascot_and_Monikers

         “By using the name Mastodons, IPFW is the only NCAA college to use an extinct organism as its mascot.”

      3. The university of Illinois at Chicago uses a dragon, which while not extinct, hasn’t been seen in a while.

6. You’re a good, passable, above average blogger too.

7. @james-hanley

   Have you ever been called a potable professor?

   1. Since he’s not not a potted plan, I suppose he has to be potable

      1. Well, I’m often potted.

         More seriously, a student once saw me having a very small drink of bourbon in my office with a colleague, and later wrote on the evaluation that she went to my office once and I “was boozing it up!”

         I do find the very religious students a challenge at times.

      2. Thats like the time, Saul and I were on vacation as kids with our parents in Lancaster County. Our first night, we had dinner at this buffet place. My dad asked what beer they had. The waitress’ eyes grew wild and sharply told them they were a family restaurant and did not serve beer.

8. I wonder what that person thinks you are passing as? White? Straight? Nonlibertarian? 🙂

   1. @scott-the-mediocre

      As a professor. Professor Smith in English Literature comes off more like a loan officer at a bank than an expert on Romantic Poetry.

9. My favorite teaching evaluation, of all those that I received, said: “I think Dr. New is an excellent professor. I never fell asleep once in his class.”

   At least I entertained them.

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