My Statics/Dynamics teacher, Dr. Jong! Oh what a semester that was. Every single minor mistake was -.25 points. His favorite answer was, "Ahhh, ToddW, not quite right" Oh well at least I know how to use a truss!
My statics prof, Dr. Salinas, was the most amazing professor ever. My dad had him too, twenty years earlier than I did. He owes my dad a beer
Back then he had challenged his class that if anyone could get 100% on the final, he'd buy them a beer. Well, somehow my dad did.
Prof. Salinas was great. He knows his stuff backwards and forwards, and teaching our first-year engineering classes he threw in lots of "life skills" stuff about how to succeed in his class and other classes, the engineering program in general and in the industry as a professional engineer. He spoke with just enough of a Spanish accent to make him interesting without being hard to understand. And something about a short Spanish man yelling in excitement over statics just struck me as really funny. Very dry sense of humour, too. First (and last) day of class he said "Everything you need to know about statics can be summarized by two rules: F=ma, and you can't push on a rope."
One day early on he showed up to class with a camcorder, and without saying a word he turned it on and started panning the room. He then said "I just want the record of this full classroom, because I know by the end of the term a good chunk of you will have dropped the course and the rest of you will be skipping class.
" And, he was right... but I like to think a lot fewer of us were skipping his class than others. Great, great guy, I learned a lot from him.
Prof. Salinas, if you're out there, you know who I am (because of the story of my dad and his beer). Let's go for coffee sometime.
I think the best profs are those who know their stuff well, have an outgoing personality, slightly eccentric (and they know it!), and a dry sense of humour. Those that can dilute everything they're teaching in the entire class to one simple concept that you'll have drilled into your head forever, and keep referring to that concept.
Like Prof. Salinas, and his "F=ma, don't push on a rope."
Or my probability and statistics prof, a curmudgeony fellow from Brooklyn who gave us frequent "culture breaks" to share stats-related news articles and taught us that every probability problem can be reduced to coin tossing. "Think heads!"
Or my calculus prof, Prof. Angelo Mingarelli, who was always wired on caffeine (how many espressos does this guy take before coming to class?!), taught us not to be scared of multi-variables, told us great anecdotes, and always related everything to coffee. "So, how do you tackle a problem like this? Well, first, MORE COFFEE! Then..."
She accused me of plagiarism in an in-class essay (even though mine was nothing like anyone else's) because she said I was too stupid to come up with the idea on my own (yes, she called me stupid). She also, at the end of the year, refused to recommend me for honors English for the next year because, "You're too stupid to do well."
I had an interesting prof in 3rd year engineering who had similar policies. It was awkward for me because in the summer between 2nd and 3rd year, I worked for this prof as a summer student. He seemed like a nice guy then. Typical professor's arrogance, but he knew I was a smart guy and we respected each other. So it came as a shock to me when, first day of his 3rd year class, he announced how things were going to work...
Apparently he was going to keep tabs on our performance in his class, and correlate them with the faculty's records for our grades in other classes. Should he notice a discrepancy (if we were a "B" student and were getting "A"'s in his class), he would schedule an interview with that student to see why he/she was suddenly doing so much better, to determine whether he/she was getting outside help, and possibly administer a skill-testing quiz to confirm his "suspicions". And if he decided he was right, he would lower your mark accordingly. In other words, "you're too stupid to do well".
Of course since he knew me from my work with him last summer I was his darling who always got A+'s. Did I mention the people I hung out with were B students? Awkward. Didn't help that this class was supposed to be about teaching us an industry standard (UML), which he did, but then spent the majority of the class teaching us how to use his own invented notations which he felt were superior and was pushing the UML standards people to adopt. (No success so far as I can tell.)
He had a habit of using a little pointer on his overheads that was shaped like a hand with outstretched index finger pointing to whatever. Many of us wanted so badly to modify which finger was doing the pointing...
