Poll: Stupidest thing a Computer Science teacher has said in class.

[Dru Lee Parsec]

It's been more than a few years since I got out of school, but here's the dumbest thing I heard:

Our teacher wouldn't listen to the students at all. It was a database class. He described it at "We're going to work on how to use a database, not how to build one. So we're not talking about classes and pointers and stuff. We're talking about SQL and data normalization"

So we went through the class which turned out to be a class on how to use M$ Access.

At the end of the class I asked this question: "If we were to find ourself at a job where we needed to write our own database could you give me some pointers on where I could learn how to write a database?"

His Answer: "I told you, we're not using pointers here. We're only learning how to communicate with a database!"

One of the other students had to pipe up with "You're not even listening to his question. He didn't ask about C pointers, he asked if you could tell him where to go to learn how to write a database."

The teacher still couldn't answer my question.

I'll wait to hear your comments before I tell you more. But there's been plenty of times where I've just had to shake my head and think WTF!?

[X_console]

Mine said "Netscape is an operating system"

[lazy_cod3R]

Mine was a classic.
It was an SQL database data modeling class also.

I said : what do you mean by there is a correlation between them, i dont get what you mean by correlation.

He Said: Sh!t im not sure either but thats what it says on the answer sheet !

basiclly i looked at him and thought, dam what a monkey !, he's tutoring and doesnt know jack !

[sans-hubris]

I don't have any direct experience with this teacher, but supposedly, while teaching a MIPS assembly class, she wrote on the chalk board, "RISK."

Anyway, it seems I have a lot to be thankful for.

My favorite teacher, who's from Australia, when I took his class, had these signs he would pass out to us with predetermined answers and he would ask us various questions and we would hold up the answer. Kinda stupid, but one time, once we were done, he tells us to, "pass those doobies up here" (with Aussie accent of course.) My friend had told him that "doobies" probably doesn't mean what he think it means, not here at least. I dunno, it was pretty funny at the time. The class had a good laugh.

Oh, you wanted stuff regarding CS? Sorry, don't really have anything except for the riscy misspelling.

[ 17 September 2001: Message edited by: Muad Dib --formerly ndogg ]

[element-x]

ok...this happened today

my instructor/professor was talking about Computer Ethics, branched off to pirated software, then to Linux and how it had NO licencing agreements, and how you could DOWNLOAD "C", then turns to me and says "You can download C, right." (not in an answer, but more of a statement.) My reply was "sure, whatever you say" and I went back to happily finishing my crossword.

I don't know, but I can't for the life of me, see why in hell I'm paying the amount of money that I am, to get taught by less than stellar professors/instructors. For gods sake, you'd think there would be some sort of requirements before they can actually teach a course!

[ 17 September 2001: Message edited by: JAdrock ]

[Dru Lee Parsec]

I don't know, but I can't for the life of me, see why in hell I'm paying the amount of money that I am, to get taught by less than stellar professors/instructors.

I had a reputation at school for being, shall we say, non-politically correct with teachers. One of my teachers was just being a complete idiot one day. I was in the front row and I had to do this: "I stopped him and said "Oh my gosh! Wait just a minute!" I pulled out my calculator and punched in a few numbers. WHen the teacher asked "what is it? Why do you want me to wait?" I answered:

"I just had to calculate it. Do you have any idea what I'm paying per hour to listen to your uninformed idiotic rant? It's amazing! I can't believe that I'm paying for this"

That didn't win me any points but since I've was a 4.0 student (Hell, I could have taught most of those classes better than any of the teachers).

OK, how about this: If you utterly failed on your test and projects you would get a "C". I worked my *** off and I got A's and I deserved the A's. But teachers were passing students that had no clue about anything having to do with writing code. When I graduated there were people graduating right next to me with a degree in Computer Science who could not write a Hello World program in C.

Now, years later I'm making a pretty good living (well, now that I'm no longer in the dot-com downward spiral I'm making good money again) and I havn't seen any of them at any company I've worked for. So I guess skills still account for something.

[Gnu/Vince]

"It is normal that Windows 2000 takes 5 to 10 minutes to boot: it's a server operating system"

I just pointed out that my server at home (running Debian and it had ran FreeBSD) took no more than 1 minute to boot. He got mad


Cool thing I heard:

"VB sucks and most Programmist-Analer (yes he said that) don't like it very much" This was said by my VBA teacher

[X_console]

I know a computer prof who doesn't even know how to FTP, or what FTP is. I feel sorry for the students.

[Niminator]

"MOD and integer division have a lower precedence than plus or minus."

No wonder the other professors make him teach vb.

[minus18]

Mine said "Linux is up to version 8.0 now."

I pointed out that you should talk about kernal numbers which shut him up and I became the class Linux guru

[EscapeCharacter]

"linux is an operating system like windows..."
this came from the same teacher that taught our vb class.
i started busting up

[ 18 September 2001: Message edited by: EscapeCharacter ]

[sans-hubris]

My teacher had us do the following when we submit our programs until I told him that we should do otherwise (keep in mind he used to use Solaris):

$ tar -czvf pgm1.tz pgm1
$ compress pgm1.tz

I told him that the compress step was redundant. He's open enough to acknowledge when he's wrong.

He also spelled implementation wrong: implemtation.

Ok, so those are pretty petty, but I haven't really come across anything worth mentioning beyond that. I think I'm getting my money's worth here.

However, one stupid thing the CS department does do is have us buy these excessively expensive books and we hardly ever use them. I guess that would apply to other colleges too, huh? Of course, I keep all my CS and math books.

[Qubit]

I don't have any experiences with stupid CS teachers (since I don't have that many CS courses), but what strikes me is how these people who are among the world's authorities on a particular field fail to do the most trivial things with their computer. Eg: my theoretical mechanics professor had written a fairly big simulation in Maple, not something you do every day, and yet it took him some 15 minutes to get into Maple, turn on the projector and download his files. No kidding!

One of my friends took a class in formal logics where the professor managed to project on screen his password (in front of 200 ppl.)

[RTFM]

Some random quips:

<prof> "HTML is not a programming language because it does not compute."

<me> I thought the reason it isn't a programming lanuage is just because its a markup language?

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"Now as we look at the innards of this thing, we see here the power supply. *points at the harddrive, which is on the other side of the computer* The power supply gives power to things like the mouse, keyboard, and lights on the front for us."

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The reason I like VisualBasic more than I do Java or J++ here, the reason is because Java doesn't have any kind pointers, and thats why I like VisualBasic so much.

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From a student in the java class, commenting on how people on the hijacked 747's used cell phones to call. Mind you, he is black and uses heavy slang/ebonics.

Now, see, wid java here, all dees peep could call home, and say to zeyz wife and kids, I wuv you, ya know? Cuz like, like, you know, like, wizout java, dem dere zellphones, they no work wizout zey Java.

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And yes, yes, Visual C++ works well as an operating system, and is much much more powerful then assembly. Assembly really is very limited in what it can do, because its so low level. But Visual C++ is not low level, and thus it can work well with any kind of hardware, and all other operating systems.

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I'm sure I could think of some more. But thats enough for now.

[nanode]

If you think those CS classes were ridiculous, try attending some upper division management courses. dr00l =P~~

I will say that stupid college courses did prepare me for the real world. There are idiots everywhere. They may be your customers, employers and even co-workers.

Stupid people are everywhere and to be successful in this world, that needs to be understood.