As the title says, this is a bit of a rant. I'm really just hoping this will take my mind off this sh*t because I've been laying in bed for a few hours now, not being able to sleep just because I'm so irritated by this. Feel free to read it if you want. If you don't, don't.
Anyways - I have this guy for 7 of my 10 total classes per week. I can't really get away from him. And just about everyone, including other instructors, doesn't like him.
Basically, he believes his way is the only way. He's got a doctorate in engineering, and he's head of the engineering department, yet he can't see how alternatives other than the first things he thinks of would be suitable. I won't even start getting into examples because I would probably fill up 10 pages. Here's what happened today though.
He teaches my statics class. He gave us one of those homework problems that is difficult enough to where he doesn't expect anyone to be able to get it. No one even understood what the question was asking, the wording was that terrible, but that's beside the point. I made an attempt at it and did it wrongly. Turns out some object is supposed to rotate about some point rather than not move and deflect a force - Whatever, I wasn't expecting to have figured out what the heck that thing was saying.
For anyone who cares, it basically said to find the balance point of an object with an external force on it, when the balance point is along a given line.
At the beginning he basically yells at me for swinging my vectors from the 0 degree mark (which is what you're supposed to do with vectors) rather than having my degree label match the completely unrelated pictures I draw for reference of the trig functions. Then we move on to the question no one really got.
While everyone's talking about it I figure out what it actually meant. So I start solving it myself, Dr. Doofus starts scribbling stuff on the board. I find the torque when the object is supported from one end of the line, then the other. Then I put the two in a ratio with the distance of the line from the object's edge to edge to find out where the torque would be zero, meaning it wouldn't tip, meaning that's the blance point. I look back up to the board and there's this huge block of random text and numbers... I don't even really try to figure out what it says. For me to understand things, it has to have a meaning to me. If I follow some random long contrived process with no logical intermediate steps, I feel like I'm just throwing random numbers together for sh*ts and giggles and then betting my grade that I got the answer right. It just doesn't fly with me. And when you're supposed to be teaching people to build bridges and buildings like this... bad things will happen. Anyways, back on topic, I sat there and waited until he was done and let us 'try' to do it (basically, the whole class but me just copied what he had on the board)
So there's like 8 people in this class - it's not like I shouldn't be able to talk to him about the problem. I call him over, ask him if I got it right. The conversation basically goes like this:
"Yeah, you got it right, but how did you get the answer?"
[I start explaining how I got the answer and he interrupts me]
"You see, if you're on the job, and your boss asks you how you got the number, you have to be able to explain it to him."
"I can explain it to you if you'd like."
"No, that's not the point, people have to be able to understand your work or it's not credible."
(As a side note, I had a clearly laid out table for calculating torque from each point, as well as a line for calculating the point of zero torque on the line. His 'work', again, was a giant block of seemingly random text and numbers. Also, at this point, everyone in the class is basically staring at him.)
[I start trying to explain what I did again, he interrupts me again, and at this point I'm just about ready to take my hard cover text book and start hitting him in the head]
He basically says "I don't have time to argue about this"... when everyone else in the class was completely confused and he obviously had all the time in the world. Not to mention he was the only one starting to flip out. Then he said something along the lines of "You can't do it that way anyways because you need to find the resultant" -- For one, he told us to do the question in the book, which does not tell you to find any form of resultant. And he didn't give us any specific instructions for the question. Also, he didn't have a resultant in his answer. And finally, the only resultant that would have any practical purpose in the real world would be one easily calculated from the point I had already found (because we were essentially 'combining' 3 forces at 3 different locations, it's not possible to get a true 'resultant' that actually means something before you get the point of balance... the resultant was supposedly and intermediate step to that)
Other people in the class were 'getting the answer' (i.e. copying what was on the board -- seriously, I asked them how they did it an they said they had no idea and that they just copied what was on the board, including their personal choice of explicatives) Multiple people had asked Dr. Doofus to elaborate, to which he said so little so vaguely, he was basically wasting all of our times with trying to figure out what he even meant. The general consensus was that he had no idea what he was talking about and he copied how to get the answer out of the back of his teacher's book.
So yeah, I'm taking 21 credit hours this semester (full time college student is considered 12, just fyi... and yes, this guy, head of the department, is the person who decided it would be best if I took this many) and have to deal with this guy's crap for 7 of my 10 classes. Good times.
Anyways - I have this guy for 7 of my 10 total classes per week. I can't really get away from him. And just about everyone, including other instructors, doesn't like him.
Basically, he believes his way is the only way. He's got a doctorate in engineering, and he's head of the engineering department, yet he can't see how alternatives other than the first things he thinks of would be suitable. I won't even start getting into examples because I would probably fill up 10 pages. Here's what happened today though.
He teaches my statics class. He gave us one of those homework problems that is difficult enough to where he doesn't expect anyone to be able to get it. No one even understood what the question was asking, the wording was that terrible, but that's beside the point. I made an attempt at it and did it wrongly. Turns out some object is supposed to rotate about some point rather than not move and deflect a force - Whatever, I wasn't expecting to have figured out what the heck that thing was saying.
For anyone who cares, it basically said to find the balance point of an object with an external force on it, when the balance point is along a given line.
At the beginning he basically yells at me for swinging my vectors from the 0 degree mark (which is what you're supposed to do with vectors) rather than having my degree label match the completely unrelated pictures I draw for reference of the trig functions. Then we move on to the question no one really got.
While everyone's talking about it I figure out what it actually meant. So I start solving it myself, Dr. Doofus starts scribbling stuff on the board. I find the torque when the object is supported from one end of the line, then the other. Then I put the two in a ratio with the distance of the line from the object's edge to edge to find out where the torque would be zero, meaning it wouldn't tip, meaning that's the blance point. I look back up to the board and there's this huge block of random text and numbers... I don't even really try to figure out what it says. For me to understand things, it has to have a meaning to me. If I follow some random long contrived process with no logical intermediate steps, I feel like I'm just throwing random numbers together for sh*ts and giggles and then betting my grade that I got the answer right. It just doesn't fly with me. And when you're supposed to be teaching people to build bridges and buildings like this... bad things will happen. Anyways, back on topic, I sat there and waited until he was done and let us 'try' to do it (basically, the whole class but me just copied what he had on the board)
So there's like 8 people in this class - it's not like I shouldn't be able to talk to him about the problem. I call him over, ask him if I got it right. The conversation basically goes like this:
"Yeah, you got it right, but how did you get the answer?"
[I start explaining how I got the answer and he interrupts me]
"You see, if you're on the job, and your boss asks you how you got the number, you have to be able to explain it to him."
"I can explain it to you if you'd like."
"No, that's not the point, people have to be able to understand your work or it's not credible."
(As a side note, I had a clearly laid out table for calculating torque from each point, as well as a line for calculating the point of zero torque on the line. His 'work', again, was a giant block of seemingly random text and numbers. Also, at this point, everyone in the class is basically staring at him.)
[I start trying to explain what I did again, he interrupts me again, and at this point I'm just about ready to take my hard cover text book and start hitting him in the head]
He basically says "I don't have time to argue about this"... when everyone else in the class was completely confused and he obviously had all the time in the world. Not to mention he was the only one starting to flip out. Then he said something along the lines of "You can't do it that way anyways because you need to find the resultant" -- For one, he told us to do the question in the book, which does not tell you to find any form of resultant. And he didn't give us any specific instructions for the question. Also, he didn't have a resultant in his answer. And finally, the only resultant that would have any practical purpose in the real world would be one easily calculated from the point I had already found (because we were essentially 'combining' 3 forces at 3 different locations, it's not possible to get a true 'resultant' that actually means something before you get the point of balance... the resultant was supposedly and intermediate step to that)
Other people in the class were 'getting the answer' (i.e. copying what was on the board -- seriously, I asked them how they did it an they said they had no idea and that they just copied what was on the board, including their personal choice of explicatives) Multiple people had asked Dr. Doofus to elaborate, to which he said so little so vaguely, he was basically wasting all of our times with trying to figure out what he even meant. The general consensus was that he had no idea what he was talking about and he copied how to get the answer out of the back of his teacher's book.
So yeah, I'm taking 21 credit hours this semester (full time college student is considered 12, just fyi... and yes, this guy, head of the department, is the person who decided it would be best if I took this many) and have to deal with this guy's crap for 7 of my 10 classes. Good times.
