The seventy-eighthnd episode of our podcast, Paul and Storm Talk About Some Stuff for Five to Ten Minutes (On Average), is now online. And it’s a looooong one!
This week’s episode: revisiting “lost” technology; a scandal is (hopefully) defused; a discussion of teachers covers bobsleds, phallic symbols and Henry David Thoreau; Paul uses the word “ascetic” more or less correctly; doing things; a full recounting of our respective jobs; carpe-ing the diem in college; and a bit o’ Peeps.
AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION ALERT: Did you ever have any annoying or unusual teachers?
[audio:http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/www.nuggetman.com/podcasts/PS_5-10_078.mp3]Enjoy the podcast? Maybe donate, why don’tcha?
9 Comments
in college, I had a professor of US History who was Japanese and barely spoke english. How’s that for unusual?
I could riff a list, but it’d take alllll ddaaaayyyyyyyy.
i had one that’d let you listen to your Ipod aslong as it was something she liked, and she was pretty badass.
I had a gym teacher who ate salad with both hands. During our sex ed unit (heh-heh, unit) she told us that when a sperm cell meets with an egg cell, it creates a living orgasm.
Little bobsleds, in the art class,
Little bobsleds, made of cheesy clay.
Little bobsleds, in the art class,
And they all look just the same.
There’s a brown one, and a brown one,
And a brown one, and another brown one.
And they all look a bit like dicky-dongs,
And they all look just the same.
All the teachers in the classroom
All think that the boy’s a mental case,
But he just likes making bobsleds,
And he makes them all the same.
I had an algebra teacher in high school, that referred to her classroom as The Math Kingdom. On the first day of school she made us memorize these little sayings that she had possibly made up, one was the Math Tonic and the other was maybe The Math Pledge. I wish I could remember how they went. If a kid was ever talking too much or not paying attention in class, she would tell them to step into the hall and take their Math Tonic and of course kids would tell her all the time in the middle of class that they had forgotten to take their Math Tonic that day and she would happily let them leave class to do so. I guess she would qualify as “unusual”.
One of my best teachers was the guy we had for AP Calculus. Really fun and approachable and a little hyperactive. He started one class about halfway through the year with a ten-minute discussion on the evolution of large flightless birds across the continents of the southern hemisphere. When asked what that had to do with derivatives and integrals (an elaborate metaphor, perhaps?) he replied, “Nothing. I just saw it on TV last night and I think it’s really cool.” 😀 This is also the teacher who devised a post-AP-exam plan of tutoring kids at the middle school, playing frisbee on the baseball field, and constructing Rube-Goldberg machines in concert with the AP Physics kids during class time for the last month of the school year.
My worst / most unusual teacher was my college economics professor. He was Czech(oslovakain), and had been in the US for about thirty years, yet his command of the English language was… well, not so great. And he refused to assign a textbook for a 100-level class, insisting instead that we glean all of our basic econ knowledge from his midi-and-animated-gif-riddled hand-coded website, which was also written in his broken English. Needless to say, it was useless as a teaching tool. It hasn’t been confirmed, but a classmate and I are pretty sure that our complaints to his department head got him ousted. At any rate, he wasn’t listed in the course catalog the following semester.
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I thought I’d outgrown Peeps until last year when they introduced the cocoa dusted bunnies. I will now buy a package of those if I see them. My older brother is the real Peeps fiend of the family, but he only likes them when the package has been open for a few days and they’ve gone stale. (Weirdo.)
One of my favorite teachers was a Chemistry/Biology/Key Club chairman. She had an odd obsession with pirates, and every time we would have a test or quiz of some sort, she would always have one question that had a ridiculous, pirate related answer. Of course, I chose the answer that was most likely correct, however I usually found that I got the answer wrong; no, I did not chose the pirate answer, and I would draw a little pirate stick figure to the side of it.
After I learned about you guys, she showed up at an Poetry Reading Night, and I had performed The Captain’s Wife’s Lament. She recorded it and showed it to all of her students.
I had a French teacher who just come not be bothered. I mean he could really teach, but with out group he just let us do what we wanted, occasionally making token efforts so he would not get into trouble. I only mention him here because it was annoying when he made me fetch his sandwiches.
A lecturer at collage was annoying though. Not quite sure why but she rubbed everyone the wrong way. She took a lot of time off and just could not cope with the job. Also, she was a bitch.
The most bizarre teacher I ever had was the professor for my Asian American Lit class in college. Every piece of literature we read — no matter what the focus of the novel or story — was related to scatology. I have never heard so much talk of feces in my life. So strange.
Of course, I’m sure many of my students would list me as their bizarre teacher…
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