Will you tell me about that one amazing college professor that you remember to this day?

I had a professor who taught how to examine a culture through texts. He, of course, taught a lot of classes with heavy religious themes.

He was brilliant, but what I remember him for, was his ability to support those of his students who were religious. They would get upset on occasion over some of the lessons, but I don’t remember anyone actually dropping out.

I also secretly admired the way he assigned students work. The brightest students seemed to get the most challenging topics assigned to them. He would have everyone report out regularly.

I took every class I could with him as an undergrad.

My international relations professor during sophomore year was AMAZING. The man knew all of our names and faces before we even walked into the classroom. It was ridiculous. But what made him even better was that he related each lesson to our personal lives, engaging our interests, and encouraging us to become active within society. Instead of just lecturing, he would let us debate, discuss, and basically create our own lesson plan. Everything was extremely interactive and we all loved going to that class. I don’t know what the hell the man would do if he didn’t have students to teach. Since then, I have tried to take every single class that he teaches.

Never having the opportunity to go to college I did get to know my wife’s art professor. I helped out with fabbing sculptures and he was pretty cool .He understood what was passable, (shit), and what was exceptional work. Average people will never know this. He didn’t have his nose up in the air like some, pompous, self absorbed educators. He had an old ragged truck like mine at the time and had crazy professor hair.

Believe it or not my Religion and Philosophy teacher… He was one of the smartest men. And my Logics professor too, just amazing people. My Psych teacher was a stuck up D*ck. and I REALLY wanted to enjoy that class. He sucked the fun out.

My Spanish teacher in college was quite memorable. I suppose it was because he put so much into the class. He played the accordion while we sang “De Colores”, walked us around the campus pointing things out using Spanish, and sometimes used the class period just chatting with us. It was such a low stress environment that it made me actually want to learn . At the end of the semester we met him in the campus square and were to converse with him as if we were just meeting for the first time in a Spanish speaking country. That was our final. He placed little emphasis on my actual grade, actually asking after the final “What grade do you think you deserve?”. When I said “C”, he gave me a B+.

Many professors get caught up in the numbers. You need this GPA, or you need exactly 20/20 for a perfect score (which means students spit out information onto the test paper and then immediately dispose of it after class). It’s rigid and isn’t conducive to actually learning the material. Achieving a grade might mean you learned something, but this particular professor taught me that college can be much more than just earning a degree. It can actually be quite fun and educational!

I had several college professors who were memorable. The big things that made them memorable included:

They knew every student by name (as mentioned above).
They were clearly delighted by their subject matter and made it interesting to us.
They were fair in their grading of student work.
They made the classroom an opportunity for dialogue.
It was evident that they were lifelong learners.

I have two that stand out in memory.
The first was my PR teacher. I had him for four semesters. Everybody loved Al I realized later that it was probably because he – a former partner at Fleishman-Hillard – knew how to present himself. Nice guy, very insightful, flexible about the syllabus. He actually brought in a real company for us to do work for, for practice.

Stephen Rowan taught me about Europe in the High and Late Middle Ages. A fascinating character, full of anecdotes and factoids (he’ll tell you about the time that he was almost lynched in Prague during the Cold War! Though he tended to repeat his stories), and he had an uncanny ability to keep all of the enumerated kings in order.

Disclaimer: I’m still in college. So, it may be easier for me.

She really gave a damn about the subject, and about knowledge in general. She didn’t think the students couldn’t contribute, and saw classes as more collaborative than authoritative, so a lot of the classes had students piping in with stuff, and she’d reference… I guess you could say “fringe”?? stuff. You know, that one line where, in a lecture on scholasticism in the 12th century, she’d mention how Abelard has this one theory that helps to create the rise of the gender binary in the 17th century, which then becomes fodder for a lot of Foucault’s work. Or mentioning off-handedly how we know someone was gay because his contemporaries kept mentioning the length of his hair and top. So, for those of us that were interested (which, luckily, was pretty much everyone who came to that class), there was a lot of ideas for research (either for fun or for a paper), and you got to expand your knowledge outside of the textbook.

She also really gave a damn about the students as students; she might not know everyone’s name and spent no class time having everyone write down 3 things about them (which I hate – how is my favorite sports team relevant to understanding the Protestant Reformation? Answer: it isn’t.) but she would totally spend as much time as you needed (often after class) helping you understand a particularly tricky concept (even if it wasn’t for her class) and would clearly explain the various critiques she gave in grading so that you could actually improve upon those points in the future instead of just knowing that you did something wrong but aren’t sure of what.

Also, combined both macro and micro explanations to help everyone get a full idea of what’s going on and why something’s important.

Dr. K is a handsome devil who knows everything you could ever possibly want to know about the Indian subcontinent. He adds a quirky sex appeal and a naive sense of humor to everything he does, and the fact that he will go out of his way to help you with any issue you may have really helps. I hope I become like him one day.