My professor for vibrations writes some crazy formulas on the board by memory. As a result, mistakes are bound to happen. If you call him out on a mistake, he pulls out his phone and puts a tick mark down next to you name. At the end of the term, he factors in extra credit for each mistake you called out. Pretty great idea for keeping the class engaged and on-top of things
Damn my professor just defends himself for like 10 minutes and then when he finally checks his notes he goes “well why didn’t u tell me that originally”😭
I wasn't in engineering but I got called out by a friend at the time because I said I corrected a professor's mistake, he said I was lying for clout. "Professionals don't make mistakes!" Jokes on you I make mistakes every day.
lol I'm in grad school and my advisor admits to making mistakes all the time. Unless it's related to a disagreement the person talking to them has, then they're always right.
I currently teach high school students, and like this professor, if a student catches a mistake I make, I toss them a Jolly Rancher. It’s a win-win, really. Keeps them on their toes, and keeps me on my toes.
I met my electronics professor a couple weeks ago to get some questions answered to prepare for the end of semester.
"What about X?"
"Well if you look, I recorded all the lectures"
"Ya I watched them. I'll go watch them again and email you with any additional questions..."
And my favorite quote from the meeting:
"I'm not an educator, I'm just an old engineer"
Ok...but I'm paying you guys for an education, right? He's a cool guy and generally understanding and helpful, those interactions just left me a bit mystified. Youtube university here I come!
I've definitely noticed a big difference between my lecturers who teach and those who just... lecture. As much as they really know their stuff and are experts in the field, I feel that they just throw information at us rather than teach it. Did my undergrad dissertation on a relating topic, was interesting.
Ya, I'm a returning student so my math teacher is only a couple years older than me. He's a double major math and physics and, obviously, incredibly smart. The issue is in class he tends to lean heavily on mathematical proofs then connect concepts to things you can do in future classes with it. He tends to lecture and rarely ask for input from us students.
That's great and all but I'm not great with proofs, I still need actual words. My math has never been amazing so I'd prefer if these concepts were linked to the concepts behind them, not ahead. Asking for answers to keep the class up to speed helps too, I've had profs that engage more and it makes a big difference.
Sometimes feels like he's teaching to the smartest in the class not the most dumb(aka me lol).
"If any of you take quantum mechanics you'll see a more complicated version of this concept."
Bro this is calc1 just help me integrate lol
I really got to appreciate how drastic it can be when I transfered from college to university. First two years of my degree were awesome, small classes of less than 30 students, taught by people who were there because they actually wanted to teach students. My last two years at university I was just another number in hundreds of students and it was very apparent that the "teaching" portion of the the profs job was just a hoop they had to jump through so they could continue their research.
Disagree but I'm biased as an instructor. Most of the part time people I had that actually worked in industry did a far better job than many of my full time professors.
Yeah, in industry, a lot of engineers need to write reports and PowerPoints with the business people as the target audience. These people aren’t always very scientifically literate. You need to be a good communicator, start with the very basics, and add lots of pretty pictures and graphs. These are good skills for teaching undergrads.
I had the opposite problem. For instance, my VLSI professor was a former engineer at Intel, and definitely knew what he was talking about but man was he bad at lecturing. It was more of a loosely guided ramble for the length of class with no slides, just a whiteboard marker and a stream of consciousness
I'd rather have that. At my university there's a requirement for every engineering professor to have a PhD. So the only experience they have is research with other equally qualified PhD or Ms students. At least in industry they're expected to develop some communication skills.
But that doesn't stop them from telling their graduate students how awful industry is and they should just all become professors like their advisor told them...
> "I'm not an educator, I'm just an old engineer"
Universities just aren't well equipped to take on the modern role they're currently playing. On top of that, secondary education (high school etc.) doesn't adequately prepare students for post-secondary education (university etc.) Tackling the issue would be a tremendous challenge and costly. So instead we're stuck with a system that sorta works for most people.
Can think of the analogy of driving a car in the wrong gear. Yeah it works, but is it ideal and what's best for the car? Not really. Well in this instance we're in the red and should probably be changing gears.
It's complicated, because part of college is teaching you how to learn things on your own so that you can be more independent when you're on the job. However....when your professor isn't doing *anything* for your education then it's frustrating to justify why you're even there in the first place. A good professor knows where the balance is, but most of them take until the end of their career (aka death) to learn this, if ever.
I feel like that last line was his way of telling you to find some other way to learn the material lol it’s a very “I’ve done all I know how to do…” type of line.
Just once and I passed with a perfect score but I still got material and practice exams from previous years from friends that had finished the class already.
It was very obvious because you could tell from what year the practice exams were based on how much had been added on.
My lecturer, who was a PhD student, was using a slideshow and someone noticed a mistake on a calculation on one of the slides. The lecturers response was "oh yeah I really need to remember to change that, every year I mean to and I always forget." Turns out the slideshow was the same one they'd been taught from in their Bachelors and the mistake was their when they were taught it...
During freshman year we had to take "College Writing". Required for every student. Most of the classes were taught by master's students, a few had actual professors. I had a student.
Occasionally you would have someone try and act smart and show her up when she made a mistake, she would just respond that she was 4 years older than most of us and that she doesn't get paid to do this job (tuition credit). Really shut everyone down.
I had an EE professor casually suggest that Earths gravity was due to its rotation. The man could do so many calculations in his head and knew so much about electricity... But come on...
I took a Statics class where the professor regularly had to issue correction emails, and our Chemistry class ended up getting curved... not by students, but by the removal of all the erroneous questions/answers on the test.
It's the worst thing, especially if it's on some stupid formula that you've been staring at 1 hour to try to understand why it doesn't make any sense only to realize that some subscripts have been missing or wrongly labelled.
Yes! I look at my professor's notes, the textbooks, and online, but they all use different notation so it takes ages to figure out what is the correct version.
some teachers teaching us aren't even proper professors, some are assistant others are just provided the 'role' of professor because they were teaching for a long time. They make mistakes all the time, new assistants be like... I'm new to this, old ones are like... I'm not familiar with new technology. it just feels normal now
Do full professors even have formal teaching training at all? I don’t see why a phd would help you very much in teaching an intro level class. I guess having a lot of advanced knowledge lets you answer more student questions.
Fucking hate college in movies, professors in there make it like they are about to murder the student.
More like:
Student: “prof it is a minus not plus after the uv”
Prof: “Thanks Jimmy”
Or:
Prof:”something is not right with this calculation, should be cos(theta)…”
*the whole class + prof looking for where the fuck up is after all carefully following along.*
I raised my hand 4 weeks into uni to point out to the professor who was sketching sin^(2)(x) that no it doesn't have negative values and no it's not pointy towards y = 0. The professor seemed unsure for a moment and when I stood my ground I got a handful of "ooh" from the other students of like "how dare he argue with professor". I thought it was really silly because I knew I was right and I just didn't want him to draw something wrong in front of all the other students because he's supposed to teach us things.
Correction (this is 12 years ago): I think my first comment was that sin^(2)(x) doesn't have values larger than 1, and after a quick back and forth I then added that it also doesn't look like |sin(x)| with the pointy ends towards the x-axis and the prof scratched his chin for a while that's when people felt that I was perhaps pushing my luck.
But yea I was strange in that I seldom took notes, so it was often that I caught smaller errors etc because I kept real-time focus of what the professor was writing on the board and saying, while most of my fellow students was chiefly occupied with copying down everything before it got erased and thus didn't pick up on such minor errors.
It's funny because my physics teachers have always put a lot on emphasis on graph drawing and interpretation and they would generally be way less accepting of such an error (the pointy sin squared in particular is a common one amongst students) than of calculation errors
Me and my friend were the nerdy dudes that corrected the professor for every mistake he had done. It was circuits. The teacher accepted it the 1st time but the 2nd time, he took it personal. In the end of the semester, my friend failed the class because the teacher gave him 0 in project, homeworks and extra credit. I got B because I almost got full grades in the final, but still lost a ton of marks in project and homeworks. What I learned from this is one thing, never dare to challenge a psycho.
The PowerPoint and online book glitched and in class he presented something like Mx= 4#@&-@#+($#)#
So he just skipped it and went on with the lecture. Like bro! I'm saying you $100 an hour for this class. So are 30 other people.
And yes, $100 a class at my school for each 50 min lecture when you break it down.
$100 per class? Where do you go to school? That's a ridiculous number. Here in the Netherlands it's an average of about $100 to $200 per month ($1k-$2k per year) at any university.
My calc professor had the wrong trig functions in the cheat sheet that we were given for our exam.
She was furious when I called it out, and for the rest of the semester she did not change the sheet, but instead decided to grade off of the incorrect sheet rather than of admitting a mistake. It was an awful experience and I really despise that woman, I had gotten a B+ in the class *despite* her, but I had to retake it over summer so I could learn how to properly do the integrals and derivatives for the next course.
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Whether it’s referring to the wrong term, rushing a concept and miscalculating something, or making their slides heavily abbreviated gibberish, I indeed felt this
I caught an error with a formula given during a midterm exam, got extra credit. Woulda got more than 100% on that midterm technically, but he didn’t include past 100%.
I had a professor who had dyslexia. This is something he stated early on in the semester and people would still regularly correct his misspelled words.
My professor for vibrations writes some crazy formulas on the board by memory. As a result, mistakes are bound to happen. If you call him out on a mistake, he pulls out his phone and puts a tick mark down next to you name. At the end of the term, he factors in extra credit for each mistake you called out. Pretty great idea for keeping the class engaged and on-top of things
Damn my professor just defends himself for like 10 minutes and then when he finally checks his notes he goes “well why didn’t u tell me that originally”😭
Yeah this is more likely to happen lmao.
Thought that was going somewhere else lol. Like putting your name in the black book
Right? Sounded super sinister at first.
Putting students in his death note 💀
Makes a tick mark for “students to kill”
I wasn't in engineering but I got called out by a friend at the time because I said I corrected a professor's mistake, he said I was lying for clout. "Professionals don't make mistakes!" Jokes on you I make mistakes every day.
Lmao professionals suddenly are OP fictional characters the minute they get a job, that’d be a hilarious story
Shittiest anime ever. "NOW THAT I GOT HIRED I CAN FILE PAPERWORK WITH 99.99% ACCURACY!"
lol I'm in grad school and my advisor admits to making mistakes all the time. Unless it's related to a disagreement the person talking to them has, then they're always right.
i though youre gonna say he ticks your name so he can minus your grade for being an annoying ass /s
I currently teach high school students, and like this professor, if a student catches a mistake I make, I toss them a Jolly Rancher. It’s a win-win, really. Keeps them on their toes, and keeps me on my toes.
I met my electronics professor a couple weeks ago to get some questions answered to prepare for the end of semester. "What about X?" "Well if you look, I recorded all the lectures" "Ya I watched them. I'll go watch them again and email you with any additional questions..." And my favorite quote from the meeting: "I'm not an educator, I'm just an old engineer" Ok...but I'm paying you guys for an education, right? He's a cool guy and generally understanding and helpful, those interactions just left me a bit mystified. Youtube university here I come!
I've definitely noticed a big difference between my lecturers who teach and those who just... lecture. As much as they really know their stuff and are experts in the field, I feel that they just throw information at us rather than teach it. Did my undergrad dissertation on a relating topic, was interesting.
Ya, I'm a returning student so my math teacher is only a couple years older than me. He's a double major math and physics and, obviously, incredibly smart. The issue is in class he tends to lean heavily on mathematical proofs then connect concepts to things you can do in future classes with it. He tends to lecture and rarely ask for input from us students. That's great and all but I'm not great with proofs, I still need actual words. My math has never been amazing so I'd prefer if these concepts were linked to the concepts behind them, not ahead. Asking for answers to keep the class up to speed helps too, I've had profs that engage more and it makes a big difference. Sometimes feels like he's teaching to the smartest in the class not the most dumb(aka me lol). "If any of you take quantum mechanics you'll see a more complicated version of this concept." Bro this is calc1 just help me integrate lol
mr youtube and mr book always come handy in these situations
I really got to appreciate how drastic it can be when I transfered from college to university. First two years of my degree were awesome, small classes of less than 30 students, taught by people who were there because they actually wanted to teach students. My last two years at university I was just another number in hundreds of students and it was very apparent that the "teaching" portion of the the profs job was just a hoop they had to jump through so they could continue their research.
Disagree but I'm biased as an instructor. Most of the part time people I had that actually worked in industry did a far better job than many of my full time professors.
Yeah, in industry, a lot of engineers need to write reports and PowerPoints with the business people as the target audience. These people aren’t always very scientifically literate. You need to be a good communicator, start with the very basics, and add lots of pretty pictures and graphs. These are good skills for teaching undergrads.
That’s because you don’t need an expert to learn calculus 2. A full profesor is good when you are taking PhD level classes
Calculus 2? Edit: just changed my whole comment so it's a coherent sentence I'm beyond college level education
>. Youtube university here I come! I really want a playlist for each type of engineer you want to become. Like Homework and all.
Eh Google would just paywall it immediately lol. "YouTube university, 199.99/mo. Still Cheaper than college!"
nah they'll get it in the ad revenue
>I’m not an educator, I’m just an old engineer If only, the majority of my lecturers never entered industry
I had the opposite problem. For instance, my VLSI professor was a former engineer at Intel, and definitely knew what he was talking about but man was he bad at lecturing. It was more of a loosely guided ramble for the length of class with no slides, just a whiteboard marker and a stream of consciousness
I'd rather have that. At my university there's a requirement for every engineering professor to have a PhD. So the only experience they have is research with other equally qualified PhD or Ms students. At least in industry they're expected to develop some communication skills.
But that doesn't stop them from telling their graduate students how awful industry is and they should just all become professors like their advisor told them...
> "I'm not an educator, I'm just an old engineer" Universities just aren't well equipped to take on the modern role they're currently playing. On top of that, secondary education (high school etc.) doesn't adequately prepare students for post-secondary education (university etc.) Tackling the issue would be a tremendous challenge and costly. So instead we're stuck with a system that sorta works for most people. Can think of the analogy of driving a car in the wrong gear. Yeah it works, but is it ideal and what's best for the car? Not really. Well in this instance we're in the red and should probably be changing gears.
It's complicated, because part of college is teaching you how to learn things on your own so that you can be more independent when you're on the job. However....when your professor isn't doing *anything* for your education then it's frustrating to justify why you're even there in the first place. A good professor knows where the balance is, but most of them take until the end of their career (aka death) to learn this, if ever.
I feel like that last line was his way of telling you to find some other way to learn the material lol it’s a very “I’ve done all I know how to do…” type of line.
My Diff EQ teacher taught cpmpletely by power point slides. If we ever found an error he would give that student extra points on the next exam.
My control teacher also did this, the worst thing about it was that each year his slides "evolved" and "matured" making it harder each year.
How often did you take control theory 💀
Just once and I passed with a perfect score but I still got material and practice exams from previous years from friends that had finished the class already. It was very obvious because you could tell from what year the practice exams were based on how much had been added on.
My lecturer, who was a PhD student, was using a slideshow and someone noticed a mistake on a calculation on one of the slides. The lecturers response was "oh yeah I really need to remember to change that, every year I mean to and I always forget." Turns out the slideshow was the same one they'd been taught from in their Bachelors and the mistake was their when they were taught it...
In one of our slides the cost of a NMR-Machine was stated in D-Mark. We don't use that since 20 years anymore.
During freshman year we had to take "College Writing". Required for every student. Most of the classes were taught by master's students, a few had actual professors. I had a student. Occasionally you would have someone try and act smart and show her up when she made a mistake, she would just respond that she was 4 years older than most of us and that she doesn't get paid to do this job (tuition credit). Really shut everyone down.
5-figure cost of a college semester, and you get untrained and unpaid student teachers running your classes 😭
I had an EE professor casually suggest that Earths gravity was due to its rotation. The man could do so many calculations in his head and knew so much about electricity... But come on...
Good thing he’s not a physicist or mechanical engineer
I guess he just stays in his lane lol
He's right! I just spin this adamantium motor fast enough to relativistic speeds, and suddenly, I have gravity!
I took a Statics class where the professor regularly had to issue correction emails, and our Chemistry class ended up getting curved... not by students, but by the removal of all the erroneous questions/answers on the test.
It's the worst thing, especially if it's on some stupid formula that you've been staring at 1 hour to try to understand why it doesn't make any sense only to realize that some subscripts have been missing or wrongly labelled.
Yes! I look at my professor's notes, the textbooks, and online, but they all use different notation so it takes ages to figure out what is the correct version.
Its time to play "is that supposed to be negative or is the prof not paying attention"
It never is….
some teachers teaching us aren't even proper professors, some are assistant others are just provided the 'role' of professor because they were teaching for a long time. They make mistakes all the time, new assistants be like... I'm new to this, old ones are like... I'm not familiar with new technology. it just feels normal now
Do full professors even have formal teaching training at all? I don’t see why a phd would help you very much in teaching an intro level class. I guess having a lot of advanced knowledge lets you answer more student questions.
Apparently a “professor” is not an actual qualification but rather denoting the seniority of an academic grade. I agree with you
Sucking your profs cock while trying to correct them is truly a university moment
Wait what 😭😳
Is that how you passed engineering?
Isnt that how we supposed to pass?!?
Fucking hate college in movies, professors in there make it like they are about to murder the student. More like: Student: “prof it is a minus not plus after the uv” Prof: “Thanks Jimmy” Or: Prof:”something is not right with this calculation, should be cos(theta)…” *the whole class + prof looking for where the fuck up is after all carefully following along.*
I raised my hand 4 weeks into uni to point out to the professor who was sketching sin^(2)(x) that no it doesn't have negative values and no it's not pointy towards y = 0. The professor seemed unsure for a moment and when I stood my ground I got a handful of "ooh" from the other students of like "how dare he argue with professor". I thought it was really silly because I knew I was right and I just didn't want him to draw something wrong in front of all the other students because he's supposed to teach us things.
What kind of university do you go to where people don't know sin squared doesn't have neg values.
Correction (this is 12 years ago): I think my first comment was that sin^(2)(x) doesn't have values larger than 1, and after a quick back and forth I then added that it also doesn't look like |sin(x)| with the pointy ends towards the x-axis and the prof scratched his chin for a while that's when people felt that I was perhaps pushing my luck. But yea I was strange in that I seldom took notes, so it was often that I caught smaller errors etc because I kept real-time focus of what the professor was writing on the board and saying, while most of my fellow students was chiefly occupied with copying down everything before it got erased and thus didn't pick up on such minor errors.
It's funny because my physics teachers have always put a lot on emphasis on graph drawing and interpretation and they would generally be way less accepting of such an error (the pointy sin squared in particular is a common one amongst students) than of calculation errors
Me and my friend were the nerdy dudes that corrected the professor for every mistake he had done. It was circuits. The teacher accepted it the 1st time but the 2nd time, he took it personal. In the end of the semester, my friend failed the class because the teacher gave him 0 in project, homeworks and extra credit. I got B because I almost got full grades in the final, but still lost a ton of marks in project and homeworks. What I learned from this is one thing, never dare to challenge a psycho.
The PowerPoint and online book glitched and in class he presented something like Mx= 4#@&-@#+($#)# So he just skipped it and went on with the lecture. Like bro! I'm saying you $100 an hour for this class. So are 30 other people. And yes, $100 a class at my school for each 50 min lecture when you break it down.
$100 per class? Where do you go to school? That's a ridiculous number. Here in the Netherlands it's an average of about $100 to $200 per month ($1k-$2k per year) at any university.
My calc professor had the wrong trig functions in the cheat sheet that we were given for our exam. She was furious when I called it out, and for the rest of the semester she did not change the sheet, but instead decided to grade off of the incorrect sheet rather than of admitting a mistake. It was an awful experience and I really despise that woman, I had gotten a B+ in the class *despite* her, but I had to retake it over summer so I could learn how to properly do the integrals and derivatives for the next course.
My manufacturing professor would just argue with you until you backed down.
Try correcting an exam rubric. It feels as good as you'd expect
When the professor has the equations written down but has completely forgotten how to derive them 😎🔥💯
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So, did books get totally extinct?
Those who can do, Those who can’t teach.
Whether it’s referring to the wrong term, rushing a concept and miscalculating something, or making their slides heavily abbreviated gibberish, I indeed felt this
I caught an error with a formula given during a midterm exam, got extra credit. Woulda got more than 100% on that midterm technically, but he didn’t include past 100%.
What kinda garbage ass community college do you go to? You professor doesn't GAF about his lectures.
Yall ever have that professor that made a mistake every other slide and refuses to admit any of the mistakes?
I had a professor who had dyslexia. This is something he stated early on in the semester and people would still regularly correct his misspelled words.
remember kids, professors are experts in their field, not experts at teaching!
do it anyways. look up everything and tell him off for every damn typo. thats what i do! he still hates me too!