#awesome professors

[lwh-writing]

Okay, so my college classes started again today and I ended the day with the first lecture of my military history class. Now, I don't usually like military history because it very much is the Dude Bro type of history that I don't jive with. However, I am taking this class because:

Even if it is Dude Bro History, I love history in all forms and want to learn more about it

I'm an engineering student with too many fucking calculus, physics, and electronic classes and my mind needs to think about something other than STEM before it breaks

I fucking LOVE my professor. I had him last semester for a European history class and he was the best. He was very much against what he calls "asshole history." Aka, the type of history that focuses on one, usually white, Christian man who "shaped the course of history" until it shuffled onto the next one. He never mentioned Henry VII or Shakespeare except in passing, but he was the first person to teach me about Alessandra Strozzi, Baruch Spinoza, and Olaudah Equiano. So once I saw he was teaching another class this semester, I was like "Okay, but only because it's you, Awesome Professor."

Anyway, today was the first lecture of Military History taught by Awesome Professor. As should have probably been expected, the class makeup was 80% Dude Bros who need to cover their liberal studies credit. We get in, go over the syllabus, do an icebreaker, and Awesome Professor pulls up a PowerPoint slide with the Battle of Thermopylae and the Battle of Gettysburg side by side.

Awesome Professor: "Can anyone tell me the connection between these two battles?"

Some answers are offered. One Dude Bro goes on a soliloquy about war tactics and drools over the 500 Spartans. Awesome Professor corrects him and says that there were way more Greek factions there than Sparta. More answers are offered. A different Dude Bro does a different soliloquy about Robert E. Lee and the Confederate Army. Awesome Professor shoots back about Meade having the superior defensive position. More answers come in. I offer that both the Greeks and the Union soldiers were vastly outnumbered. A few more answers.

Awesome Professor: "Those were all wonderful answers, but unfortunately, you're all wrong. The major connection between these two battles is.... they're the only battles we will ever discuss in this class."

This wonderful, wonderful man then goes on to say that we will NOT be getting into war tactics. We will NOT learn about weaponry. We will NOT be reading quotes from famous generals. We will instead be learning about the cultural impact of war, all sides of every conflict, how militaries and wars affect technology that isn't weapons (preserved foods, medical innovations, etc.), how to recognize war-time, pre-war, and post-war propaganda, and female and nonbinary individuals' experiences during war.

The hundreds of Dude Bros start gaping like fish and sputter about "How can you teach WAR if you don't talk about WAR?". I'm holding back cackles as they slowly realize that they will not be getting spoon-fed the classic Dude Broe history. I genuinely cannot wait to go to my next lecture and count how many people drop the class.

In conclusion: definitely give college history classes a try, even if they aren't your usual first pick. Especially if you know the professor is amazing and knows how to teach about the scope of history rather than shuffling from one asshole to the next.

[demi-queen]

Alright kids, sit down, buckle up, because I’ve got a story to tell!

So, I’m in college right? It’s this tiny private college in the middle of nowhere USA that you’ve probably never heard of. Anywho, so I have this class that is only on Tuesdays. The first “week” of the semester started on Wednesday, so I didn’t go to that class at all that week. The next week, Tuesday ended up being a snow day, so all our classes for that day were on zoom. The class I’m talking about is a creative writing class that really wouldn’t work over zoom, so we got an email saying that class was cancelled for that week as well. So the first two weeks of the semester and I still haven’t had this class, which is one I’ve really been looking forward to, both because I enjoy creative writing, and because of who the professor is. Needless to say, this third week comes around and it looks like nothing is going to get in the way of me going to this class, and I am super excited. The anticipation has been building up and I am ready to finally get to this class.

3:30 PM comes around and all of us are restless. The professor still isn’t hear, but it’s not unheard of for one to be a few minutes late. The clock keeps ticking by, and still no professor. Some of us check if we’ve missed an email saying it’s been cancelled. It hasn’t. We check that we have the right time. We do. Still, no professor. It’s been long enough that any other group of students probably would just up and leave, but we have all been looking forward to this class since we saw that we got it on our schedules, and we aren’t going to be leaving yet.

Still, there’s only so long you can wait before you start to get bored and restless. One of my classmates gets up and starts writing on the whiteboard. We all glance up from our various conversations to see what’s up, and he starts speaking.

“Alright, we need some controversy,” and we’re finally able to read what he wrote on the board:

Hogwarts is a bad school

Immediate agreement. I don’t think anyone disagreed, even us Harry Potter nerds, because lets face it, Hogwarts is a bad school. It breeds hatred and prejudice. The house system is bs, the year-long competition unnecessary and super stressful, there’s no unity. Anywho, no one disagreed, so he erased that and began writing something else.

“Okay, that didn’t get the response I expected so…” On the board it now said:

Himbos

Thus began the most bizarre class I have ever experienced in all my two semesters of college and schooling in general. Some people didn’t understand what a himbo was, so we wrote a list of basic characteristics:

1. Dumb

2. Beefy

3. Kind (which we elaborated as being someone who drinks their “respects women juice” or is a feminist)

This classmate then proceeded to go down a list of controversial himbos for us to decide whether they actually were one or not (we decided that anything that would take Kronk off the list was invalid)

Here’s a picture of our list:

This took at the very least a half hour of conversation. We only stopped because people had some places to be, mainly the guy who stood up and started the conversation in the first place.

Guys, I am now far more comfortable with these classmates and know them far better than some of the classmates that I have gone to school with since elementary.

Anywho, like I said, most people left after that first guy left. There was maybe about 10 minutes left of the class, technically (it ends at 4:45), and there were only four of us who opted to stay. I had another class at 7:30 and had nothing better to do until then, the other three had similar reasons. I made an off-handed comment about how it would be funny if the professor showed up the last 5 minutes of class; the others chuckled in that sort of way that meant they agreed that it would be funny if that did happen, but they didn’t really believe it would.

And you know what happened? You know what happened? He DID! Five minutes left and in walks Professor Orson Scott Card with a bag full of books and no care in the world.

It turns out that he had been told from our registrar office that the class started at 5 and he never bothered to double check, because why would they lie to him? He thought he was early. He was so proud of that until he thought the class was supposed to start and he was like, “there’s only four of you today? How odd…” and we were like, “Uh, no, technically class is over.” He was so embarrassed. We all felt so bad for him. We stayed for the next hour and a half listening to him ramble about poetry, the importance of research when writing historical fiction (He’s not a fan of The Scarlett Pimpernel), and basically whatever popped up in the conversation. Never give him a vampire book; he won’t read it. He’s not a huge fan of fantasy, because he feels like they’re all too British-lore centric and aren’t applying our modern experiences enough (he said it better but that was kind of the gist). He has a semi-morbid sense of humor.

It was fantastic. He’s funny, and he used words like “woke” and he used them correctly. Guys, he called Limericks the Dad Jokes of poetry (affectionate) when all of us said we’ve never written one before and he highly recommend we try to. He bashed critics. He talked about his kids and grandkids. He offered to read our poetry outside of class assignments and give peer feedback because he loves poetry and it’s his opinion that having a peer read your poetry is akin to giving them something to appreciate, not criticize. He thinks it makes much more sense to say “ain’t” instead of “aren’t” and calls “aren’t” old school-teacher propaganda. I’m so excited you guys, this is going to be fantastic. :)

[senadimell]

I love it when your professor tells you the textbook is free and that he wrote it.

[maelstromdeparture]

anyone wanna hear about twentieth century author drama? 

so we got hemingway and we got fitzgerald and they’re buddies who share their current projects.  

deal is they’ve got drastically different writing styles. so fitzgerald edits hemingway’s project and sends it back to him and has pretty much completely rewritten the thing instead of editing it like a good friend should. so hemingway as my english prof likes to say sends it back to him with a two word response. 

now hemingway and fitzgerald hate each other and show up at the same party, which everyone knows is a recipe for disaster. fitzgerald starts talking trash about hemingway’s writing. so hemingway grabs the friend fitzgerald came with and tells him that if he doesn’t get is (enter offensive name of your choice here) friend to shut up, hemingway’s going to walk over there and rip his balls off. fitzgerald and co leave the party and never speak to hemingway again. 

[morbidlylegal]

One of my Wills, Trusts, and Estates professors posted an article about “Six Times the Law Spoiled Valentine’s Day” on the school’s Facebook page and I adore this so much. 

[maelstromdeparture]

i love the classes that the chair of the english department teaches, because he allows so much discussion and we get way off topic super easy that i learn a bunch of utterly random information every class that has nothing to do with the lecture, but i still learn everything about what he’s actually lecturing on. 

for instance

today’s lecture was about the transition from late early modern english to enlightenment english

i learned about dialectualization

school boy proper english

that coca cola has mercenaries

that the current british monarchs are actually german

and that bootylicious is in the oxford english dictionary

[senadimell]

"If we were sitting in a classroom, I wouldn't have a pause button, which means you would all get to see me drink water, which would be pretty exciting, I guess."

--Awesome Professor.

Ah, how quarantine changes us.

[senadimell]

Awesome econ teacher says “I know you’d work it out if I gave you enough time” before showing the class the answer.