fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3455 ]

[ SECRET POST #3455 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3455 ⌋

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Notes:

Early because places to go!

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Because I found a treasure trove of notebooks today, among them the ones from my three semesters with the funniest/smartest professor I had in undergrad.

Some gems:

"Marvelous thing about Italy is that as you go towards it tends to stay put."

"Virtue is the middle position between two vices."

"He thinks he's getting a crown, but he gets a hat, and not a very useful hat. it's made of metal, very heavy."

"Hotspur.............eroticizes death..."

"Well, the letter P is always funny, that's true."

"And here he's tongue-tied, if tongue-tied people talked like Shakespeare."

"English liberalism is dramatically inadequate for the problems of history..."

"He's on the wrong side of history in addition to being on the wrong side of a hilarious why do we only get one?

"Algebra is not a sexually exhilarating subject."

"Things that freak Spaniards out: mass cannibalism and rear-entry sexual intercourse."

"You are not required to carry your syllabus everywhere with you as you would your papers in a European dictatorship."

And finally: "If you adhere to an extremely strict code of behavior in the face of unbelievable violence, you will be immortal in human memory. And that's true. We still read the Illiad."

"If I meet Bill Gates, I'm gonna kick his ass."

"Virtue is the middle position between two vices."

I mean, this is more or less the standard view, at least in classical philosophy, isn't it?

"If you adhere to an extremely strict code of behavior in the face of unbelievable violence, you will be immortal in human memory. And that's true. We still read the Illiad."

This is true. Did you guys do The Iliad or The Poem Of Force?

anyway my favorite thing from my fav professor was his endless rants anytime someone tried to use "culture" as the explanation for some kind of historical outcome in a given nation without going into any more detail. It was very entertaining.

Not amazing in the same way as yours... less inspiring and more oh holy shit did he really say that. My professor was from Eatern Europe (the Ukraine, I think) and an internationally famous scientist in his field.

"And here we can see that the poles have been wandering around all over the place. Much like the Poles have been wandering around in our stolen cars all over Europe."

"At this level you need very high end technology to observe the land changes. The kind of technology that only the British and US militaries have. And the Taliban of course, after the US sold it to them."

wtf
well, at lest he's relevant.
huh, maybe he hates Polish because they invaded Ukraine one time.

I don't even try and understand the interplay between Eastern European countries. So much complicated history there.

Re: What's the best thing your favorite professor/teacher/etc ever said?

(Anonymous) - 2016-06-19 20:55 (UTC) - Expand

Re: What's the best thing your favorite professor/teacher/etc ever said?

(Anonymous) - 2016-06-19 21:02 (UTC) - Expand

My school had a tumblr full of 'em. Here's one from one of my Japanese classes:

Student: "How do you say 'shank' in Japanese?"
Sensei: "What does 'shank' mean?"
Student: "It means to stab someone."
Sensei: "Oh, we don't shank in Japan. We are a polite people."

One of my favourite professors refused to allow anyone to personify/anthropomorphize nations in historical/cultural/political discussions. You were never allowed to say something like "Japan wanted to expand its territory," or even "Japan attacked America." You were also never allowed to utter the words "the West" or "Western." It was a fascinating intellectual exercise; I've never forgotten it - you actually had to say what you meant. Who was interested in expanding what territory? Why? Which actual forces attacked what part of the US? Who led them? Why? He forced you to name actual human actors, not Hetalia-esque stand-ins for a nation (which may or may not have even existed at the time if we're talking pre-Meiji "Japan"). Whose interests may or may not have been the same as other people in the same nation-state.

That sounds absolutely fascinating.

That sounds very frustrating and belittling. As if saying the country name as shorthand, because using the name of a person/several people or faction could get tedious in a long discussion, actually means you believe the country itself was alive and doing the action. Okay.

Re: What's the best thing your favorite professor/teacher/etc ever said?

(Anonymous) - 2016-06-19 20:32 (UTC) - Expand

Re: What's the best thing your favorite professor/teacher/etc ever said?

(Anonymous) - 2016-06-19 20:33 (UTC) - Expand

Re: What's the best thing your favorite professor/teacher/etc ever said?

(Anonymous) - 2016-06-19 21:01 (UTC) - Expand

Re: What's the best thing your favorite professor/teacher/etc ever said?

ariakas - 2016-06-19 21:08 (UTC) - Expand

Re: What's the best thing your favorite professor/teacher/etc ever said?

(Anonymous) - 2016-06-19 21:09 (UTC) - Expand

Re: What's the best thing your favorite professor/teacher/etc ever said?

ariakas - 2016-06-19 21:22 (UTC) - Expand

That's so cool!

Re: What's the best thing your favorite professor/teacher/etc ever said?

ariakas - 2016-06-19 21:17 (UTC) - Expand

He sounds like a good professor. He's right about that, too.

"There's no swearing allowed in my classroom. There's a time and place for those words, but this isn't it. And if you don't agree that there's a time and place for them at all, try this: Next time you hit your hand with a hammer, try saying 'Oh my, that does sting a bit!' and see if you feel any better."

My 12th grade english teacher in a discussion about The Great Gatsby: (out of the blue and stressing every syllable) "But did he go through all this trouble just in order to fuck Myrtle??"

"Goats are very sexual creatures."

"Have any of you be involved with a male goat?"

Was your class taught by Aberforth Dumbledore?

Re: What's the best thing your favorite professor/teacher/etc ever said?

(Anonymous) - 2016-06-19 21:38 (UTC) - Expand

Not exactly a quote but... my honours supervisor made his classes almost entirely based on scientific papers rather than a textbook (which frustrated the lazy among the class). Anyway, at one point he took it upon himself to poke fun at a paper that claimed the entirety of human language capability arose from a mutation on the Y chromosome (yes, it was an actual study, presumably done by the world's worst psychologist).

He pulled up a slide and said, "Now, here is my artistic interpretation of the author's thesis."

It was a little clipart of a lightning bolt hitting a caveman's groin area, followed by a little clipart of a guy with musical notes coming out of his mouth.

I have never laughed harder during a lecture.

When my best accounting teacher was explaining to us about how subsidiaries work, she told us about an accounting conference she went to once. Some folks from Arthur Andersen were explaining their new "accounting hack." Create a new subsidiary, transfer the employees you don't want to the subsidiary, and then dissolve the subsidiary and lay off all its employees. Since they're employed by an organization that no longer exists, you're off the hook for a lot of the legal requirements meant to take care of laid-off employees. At the time, this was all perfectly legal!

My teacher told them straight-up that she thought what they were doing was unethical and she would never recommend that her students apply to work at Arthur Andersen. Shortly thereafter, their company imploded in spectacular fashion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen#Enron_scandal

"Do you all fart?"

The physics teacher at my highschool was known for being a delightful eccentric, with many amusing anecdotes attached to his name (that he wore bow ties and played the organ probably didn't hurt, either).
Then he got arrested for having sex with a student, which rather tainted those memories, I found. :(

My World History prof came striding into class one day and said "Remember how I told you this class wouldn't have a lot of text-heavy powerpoint slides? Sometimes I lie to you because that's funny."

"Now remember, if your degree in law or politics or international relations doesn't get you a job they're always hiring in the drug cartels. They need people like you. ... Don't tell your parents I said that." - My favourite law lecturer

My graduate school professor told me, after I asked about the 'crossing the Alps' part of The Prelude by William Wordsworth, "You're not old enough to completely understand it."
I thought he was being an asshole (which he could be at times), but he said, "Read it again in ten years and tell me what you think." I reread it fifteen years later, and he was right. It made sense. And I wrote to him and told him how much that meant to me. He couldn't believe that I remembered his advice (he didn't remember), but it's something that's stuck with me. I will still go back and reread the classics, and now that I'm pushing fifty, I do love them so much more than I did then.

"The universe is DOING IT with itself and it's fucking glorious."

"Here's the thing about Freud--he was such a dick that he could only think about his dick and with his dick. And Jung saw that and was like 'I'mma dig deeper than this filth and find some better shit' and Jung did because Jung is a fucking badass who wasn't afraid to dig below the dirty shit that Freud covered psychology in. God knows how much bodily fluid Jung had to dig through."

"...you mean to fucking say that someone put Jung and Freud's feud into a comic book about giant robots? What the fuck."

That rant about Freud and Jung is cracking me up. That teacher sounds kickass :D.

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