Reply #16: My calculus professor last fall.

[deadparrot]

He was a nice guy, but couldn't teach worth a damn. Math is one of my least favorite subjects, but I've always been pretty good at it (got a 30 on the math portion of the ACT). We didn't have a textbook, just this booklet-type thing that he'd made himself, with about 80 pages. Mind you, this booklet thing had no examples. Only problems. 80 straight pages of them. No calculators were allowed-- instead, he'd use Microsoft Excel constantly without giving us any clue about how to use it (or any reasoning behind what he was doing). He taught us a lesson in class, gave us homework on a completely different lesson, then the next class he'd give us a quiz on yet another set of new material. It went like that every class, all semester.

How I escaped with an A, I have no idea. Probably because of my dad; he's a math teacher, and (sensing that the class was crap) he photocopied the entire booklet at the beginning of the semester, so I could e-mail him my homework every night. He'd do the work, scan it, and send it back to me. With all the stuff we were supposed to do on Excel, even he was lost. He kept telling me that I shouldn't be expected to know this stuff. After that, I admit, I just stopped trying and let him do the work for me. Our final wasn't a test, it was a project, so other than the quizzes, I wasn't on my own for much of the assigned work.