Monday, September 7, 2020

Professor Turns Into Total Nightmare, Dean Saves The Day


We're talking Professor Umbridge from Harry Potter levels of toxic from this teacher, folks. Yes, by the sound of it this teacher was a disaster from the start. Fortunately, one particular student ran the issue back to the dean of the school, who intervened after assuring the student that they wouldn't have to worry about passing the class. With that kind of free (and totally warranted) pass, the pressure completely dissipated. They actually managed to have some fun with the whole situation. The lesson that the teacher hopefully learned would be to teach the actual material that the students are paying thousands of dollars to learn. 

1.

Text - r/ProRevenge u/handcraftedcandy • 10h + Join Last minute professor turns into a nightmare, I make sure she never has a job there again. About 10 years ago I was attending a local community College for my Associates in Fine Arts. In retrospect it was dumb to do so after the economy had tanked from the 2008 recession but I digress. In my second year during the first semester one class I had to take to advance and be on track to graduate on time was Drawing II. In this class I was suppose to

2.

Text - The school did their best but she was woefully under qualified and was a recent college graduate with a Masters in fine art. She believed she was giving us the best education possible but to a fault. She thought she knew it all and because we were just students we knew nothing. She almost always smelled like a dirty litter box and was covered in cat hair as well. From day one I knew I wasn't going to get along with her. One of the first exercises she had us do was gesture drawing which fo

3.

Text - We walked in one day to all the desks arranged around a giant display of almost every single object the art rooms had in storage. I'm talking mannequins, chairs, ladders, plants, clothing, you name it all in the center of the room standing nearly 10 ft tall and 20 ft long. She told us all to pick a seat and pull out our 18"x24" vellum drawing pads. For those who don't know, they're high quality paper and very expensive.

4.

Text - At first I took it as a wonderful challenge since clutter has always been a struggle of mine. There was a lot of forshortening and other tricky things I could practice my skills on. That optimism was short lived however, after 10 minutes we were all rudely stopped by a whistle and told to stand up, leave our paper and move to the seat on the left and work on that drawing. I asked her why and to explain what the point of the exercise was and she said, "to practice different angles of the s

5.

Text - So that's what I did, the remainder of the class I spent most of my time correcting other people's mistakes, though I probably just had a different perspective since we all were different heights. It was a very frustrating day for me and my classmates. It was about 2 weeks into the semester and many students that didn't need the class dropped out at that point before they took a hit to their GPA. This was just the beginning of the issues I had with her and I was already formulating a way

6.

Text - Our midterm was next on the list of problems. She had decided to give us a challenge involving working in large scale. We were required to turn in a completed 10ftx6ft drawing and we had 2 weeks to do it. This enormous project had to be done on top of all my other midterm assignments, many of which were research papers that were also time consuming. I also had a part time job. I had very little sleep and rushed the last half of the drawing just so I wasn't given a failing grade for not me

7.

Text - At this point we still had not delved into color theory or made anything I would call worthy of my portfolio. Me and a friend in the class decided to voice our concerns to the Dean of Arts at this point. The dean was already slightly concerned because we had about 10 students remaining out of an original 30. All who were left were in the same boat as me, we had to finish the class in order to graduate on time. The dean said she would sit in on the next project's critique to see how she wa

8.

Text - The next project was a charcoal study, once again no color theory. It was simply an 18"x24" still life done on vellum. Halfway though we had a progress critique and the dean sat in to watch. I could tell the professor was a nervous wreck, she stumbled through the critiques and gave almost no useful help to some of the less talented students. Afterwards the dean told my friend and I that she would make sure we would at least get a passing grade for the class, but there was nothing she coul

9.

Text - Having this information made the last 4 weeks of the semester very sweet indeed. I used every opportunity to question the professor's lessons and frustrate her. She was quite literally like Professor Umbridge and I felt like Harry Potter, the difference being she couldn't harm me. My friend and I had been talking to the rest of our classmates and we all couldn't stand her. The final project was only the beginning of my revenge.

10.

Text - Once again we had no color but I was determined to make this piece usable for my portfolio. She set up a twisted, knotted fitted bed sheet on a piece of plywood and shined a light at an angle to give us a chance to do a detailed study of light values. I got super detailed, my drawing ended up being hyper realistic. I was so focused on a small portion of it that it ended up being smaller than her 18"x24" requirement. She said she would lower my grade for that reason unless I made it fill t

11.

Text - The dean assured me that would not happen and that she would be sitting in on the final critique. She also mentioned that she would be giving our class sheets for an evaluation of our professor's performance for the semester. She also informed me that the sheets would determine her future employment with the college. The dean watched and I ended up getting an A for the assignment, even after cropping it down so there wasn't a huge amount of white space. Did I mention throughout this whole

12.

Text - One of the requirements for our final was being given an evaluation by our professor in a one on one setting. She brought me into her office and we looked over my portfolio for the semester. She criticized everything I did and had no useful feedback then had the audacity to ask me to go easy on her evaluation. The dean had told me she wasn't suppose to do that so of course I wasn't going to let that go.

13.

Text - The final day of classes our professor handed out the evaluation sheets and gave a short speech about how "I hope you all had a wonderful semester and I hope you have nothing but good to say about my first teaching experience." We were not required to put our names on them since she would be seeing them at a later point. She also had to leave the room while we were filling them out and I knew the dean was going to come in and collect the sheets so I was brutally honest. I ended up writing

14.

Text - I know my classmates mostly did the same, it basically turned into a group project where we all reminded each other of some of the things she had done throughout the semester. The school made it easy too, one of the questions I remember it asking was "How likely would you be to recommend this professor teach here again?" "Not at all." After the dean collected them she glanced over some of them gave gave us a sincere apology and told the class that we would all be passing. She would have m

15.

Text - As far as I know that professor was never invited back to the school and was probably blacklisted from most schools in the area. She was told at the beginning of the semester what the requirements for the class were and she met none of them. When I had the dean as my painting instructor she ended up having to take a week to teach us all the color theory we were suppose to have already learned. Thankfully she is a wonderful teacher and we all caught on fast. 2.9k 110 1 Share

Submitted by:

Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)