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! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

Comments
  • 1
    Man fuck that discriminatory bullshit asshat.
    That being said, I read the word semaphore and got triggered lol. Gonna go find a safe space now.
  • 1
    What a fucking motherfucker! Bro, hold on. Karma has something in store for this asshole
  • 2
    @broseph lol people go crazy over safe space stuff all the time but I think it's less 'snowflake' and more people are just done being treated like 💩 by others for absolutely no good reason. Of course, there are people who are just entitled.

    But yeah semaphores have very limited use cases
  • 1
    @Techno-Wizard Exactly. It’s gonna bother me less to not be a dick then it would bother you to deal with me being a dick. So just don’t be a dick lol. Not you. I mean in general.
  • 1
    Ouch. John sounds like some of the profs I've had in college, easily the kind of thing that'd turn you off CS. Don't let assholes like him get to you (or your friends), there are plenty of genuine people in the field. Also, it's inevitable that you'll run into people like this in any field, not just CS, so it's important to develop thick skin and just do the minimum required to get it over with and go somewhere else.
  • 2
    @RememberMe of course. I've had the guy for 3 semesters now and while I make it clear to people I genuinely dislike him as a person I don't let it get to me personally around him. It's more empathy for those he pushes off the cliff.
  • 0
    @kenogo mainly what I wanted to duggest, too!

    That Dr. John should be removed. He's clearly the wrong person for the job!
  • 0
    Your mistake is how you went about dealing with this. You played into Perfexor John's hand perfectly. In this day and age, you DOCUMENT his bullshit with your handy dandy film camera! Go back to your hard drive after class, upload the bullshit, label it, and wait for the next day. Write down everything else he did that was fucked up. Get on with your day. In case I need remind you, you have hired him to do a job. If he's not doing his job, you have an obligation to call his bewildered and entitled ass down to human resources. The thing is, you must be persistent, and don't allow the crony uni system seize your info and try to make you go away. You'll find lots of support from fellow students, and a surprising amount of apathy. Welcome to the real world, buster.
  • 1
    @bols59 dude, I HAVE documented it. In a small department though, it's social suicide.
  • 0
    I know, I understand. I kind of left that out; you go public with this and you're a pariah. It's the worst... you have my best wishes.
  • 0
    Those who can't do, teach.

    Theres a reason that phrase was invented.

    It's not always true, thats a given.

    Test the rule-of-thumb for yourself, test it against futute teachers or memories of one and ask yourself if thats the case.
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