Japanese Literature Course. Dr John (what he liked to be called) was the professor and I had him for an English class already and liked him.
The class was not overly large, maybe 12 people and we met in a conference room rather than a typical classroom. This event was a couple of weeks into the class and Dr John was getting increasingly… Erratic… I guess is the way to describe him. The class was supposed to be more about open discussion than lecture. However, it was full of sophomores who for the most part were used to sitting for lectures. I think Dr John was getting more and more erratic during class in a hope to get the students participating. It had the opposite effect unfortunately, until he started saying some things that I thought were just wildly incorrect and I called him out on it.
I literally got a look on my face, which he noticed instantly and he asked what my opinion was… And 19 year old me replied to my doctorate level professor; “Dr John I think you’re full of shit.”
Everyone’s eyes went wide and people looked stunned, including me because it was an instinctive reaction on my part. I fully expected to get kicked out of the class, but Dr John actually smiled and asked; “Ok Mr Flyer, please explain to me just how I’m full of shit.”
And I did… At least I tried to as at the time I was just a 19 year old moron attempting to take on a middle aged man that had decades of study. What ensued for the rest of that period was he and I going back and forth. Of course he easily dismembered all of my arguments, but he was respectful and we had a real dialog going on. I felt I learned more in that one hour than the previous three semesters.
While that day helped break some of the other people out of their shells, I ended being the only person in the class that earned an “A”.
Required gen ed theatre class. We had to write and preform a 5 minute play with a randomly assigned partner.
The dude I got paired up with didn’t even introduce himself before going “have you ever seen the Rocky movies? We could do each one in a minute.”
We improvised the whole thing, got an A+ on the assignment, and then never spoke to each other again.
10/10, best group project I’ve ever been a part of.
Dudes rock
We were in a programming competition and I was in a team of 3. We had a solution that worked, but was slow so we got Time Limit Exceeded. I stared off into space for a few minutes…then EUREKA! I came up with an optimization. I implemented it and we got that question right pushing us up.
We ended up getting 3rd place.
Latin class… We were translating the Aeneid and hit the word “uxorious” which wasn’t in the dictionary.
The professor explained:
“It’s an insult, it means ‘your wife makes all your decisions for you’ but that doesn’t carry the full meaning of how insulting it is. There is no equivalent in English.”
So I raised my hand. “You mean ‘pussy whipped’, yeah, pretty sure every language has a variation on that.”
When I graduated and got to move on with my life
I do agree people romanticise school and university. I’m 32 now and in general my life has been better each year as I’ve created a home with my wife and grown into my career.
Agreed. Not to insinuate that I disliked university, quite the opposite really. But after almost 20 years of school I was ready to be done and start my life
Realizing I hated it and was just doing it to appease my parents. It just happened suddenly in one of my classes and it was like a weight lifted thinking about going to do something else. Left and started my career and love what I do every day. Been almost 30 years and I don’t regret it at all. Maybe I’ll go back to school someday, but with prices what they are now, probably not unless my employer pays for it.
It’s one of two for me, one’s personally satisfying, one’s just funny:
Personally satisfying: I took Intro to Unix and Linux for an easy A. By that point I’d been using Linux for 5 years, and I needed an elective, so why not. Teacher admitted to having 0 experience with Linux, with his closest being MacOS. Don’t remember the exact exchange, but it ended with him saying I’d be one of those Linux gurus. Been riding that high ever since
Funny: One of my teachers couldn’t understand when my friend said his name. It was Kent. He asked him like… Five times? On the sixth Kent says “Oh, fuck it, K-U-N-T” and the teacher responds “Oh! Kunt!” before realizing what he said, and laughing. Good times.
