Profs

One of the big life lessons that people learn in college is that you are going to encounter people in life who might not exactly know how to handle the situation that they're placed into. Professors can be these kinds of people.

Don’t get me wrong – some professors are fabulous. Then there are some who make you question why in the hell you’re sitting in the lecture hall listening to begin with.

For instance take my Geology professor. The guy was from Argentina, a seemingly smart guy who probably would have bled iron ore and sediment had you cut him open. His passion clearly was rocks and minerals but choosing to communicate that passion through teaching was probably a poor life decision for him seeing as the only audible things out of him were grunts and slurs of what my friends and I assumed were supposed to be words. It was no good to look at his Powerpoint either because it made no sense! The most that I retained from that class was that it was a very bad fashion choice for Caveman to wear the same red sweater. Every day. Every class. With some other hideous shirt underneath. Fashion fail right there.

But on a serious note – there’s no avoiding them. These guys are everywhere so you need to be able to rely on yourself to study what you think could be relevant to the course at that time. Keep your head about you and don’t get wrapped in the “Ugh, this guy sucks” or else you’re gonna head down a slippery slope. Just sayin’.

There’s going to be more than one of these guys per campus too, ya know. Take Astronomy guy for one. Astronomy couldn’t have been any more of your stereotypical dorkwad. Pocket protector and all. He wore his pants too high, he was bowlegged, his glasses had annoying plastic frames, and his poof of light brown hair was always slightly more than frazzled. Oh! And how dare I forget the lisp! This dude was one of like 8 astronomers in the whole country selected by NASA to study the presence of dark matter in the universe…that’s intense. As genius as he was he struggled in the human interaction department – too much work with all those extraterrestrials if you ask me.

Anyhow, astronomy isn’t something that is common knowledge to a lot of people so it needs a lot of breaking down and baby talk. My guy just kind of assumed that we knew all about g forces and orbital circumferences. Wrong-O. He didn’t teach us anything other than that we were all stupid in the galactical department. Such is life I guess. It’s cases like this where you employ the help of that $800 paperback book that you were “required” to have but has never been referenced in class. Gotta love it.

The key with guys like this is to just adapt. If they’re still teaching it means they haven’t been fired yet which means that kids have been in the same seats that all of you sit in and by some severe stroke of luck, passed. It’s feasible so figure it out. I got B+s in both of those classes. Just for the record – it’s possible.