godix wrote:Try this one: irony. I'm willing to bet 100% of the teachers will think they know what it means but I suspect most will be wrong.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/03/09
I had a pretty crappy prof for a 4th year university graphics course. This guy was a
Smalltalk whore, and taught the course in that, but since our implementation of Smalltalk couldn't render very fast, he wrote his own C library to speed things up.
It was his first year teaching the course, and he admitted that he had spent the summer reading the book to prepare the course. He would spend class after class staring at and pecking away at his graphics-related Smalltalk code. One quote I recall: "I don't remember what this does any more."
It literally took us a month to draw a line. He spent weeks talking about parsing VRML, which was stupid. The first assignment was to write a VRML parser, and everyone worked overtime on it. When people turned it in, he said, "oh, gee, I just wanted a syntactic parser, not a semantic one." Meaning, we just had to be able to read "word, bracket, stuff, bracket", and not, "oh this is a Shape node so it may contain a geometry node and blah blah blah." (What I did was write a program to generate code based on a simple text description of the VRML spec)
I never bothered handing in the third assignment because he said it "wasn't important". (Everyone had problems with the way it was written) I never got my second assignment back.
For the final project, he gave us a sheet of twenty possible things to do, to improve his crappy Smalltalk rendering engine. What I wanted to do was improve the C support library he'd written, but I couldn't get it to compile and he didn't reply to my email about it.
So in a weekend I did a bunch of those twenty things, handed it in with some old
BSP-related code I'd done before, said I had partnered with a friend of mine, and ended up with an A-. One of those twenty things was literally one line of code.
Unfortunately, this prof had somehow become pretty high ranking in the department. Our OS professor was retiring, and this guy insisted that any new hire be required to know Smalltalk. In a department meeting, another prof told him this wasn't a reasonable requirement and Mr. Smalltalk Whore stood up and told him he was an idiot.
On another note, one teacher in high school took off marks because I supposedly spelled someone's name wrong. It was an uncommon spelling, and I had to show her the book
that day in order to get the marks back. Otherwise, she was a decent teacher.