Then, a good way through the class, he told us that he had a massive brain tumor, which hadn't been caught by university health services until it got really bad. (!!) Wow, this explained SO MUCH and we felt super sorry for him.
Oh no! I feel for him too! I'm glad you found he recovered. I had a philosophy professor with a brain tumor, but it didn't affect his teaching, thankfully! (He was a very good teacher and was my first introduction to cognitive science, including some stuff he taught me that makes E's behavior not seem weird to me. ;) Staying well off that topic, though!)
what wasn't common was that in my nightmares it would always be specifically a topology class.
I can imagine, omg!
Also, it occurred to me recently that--okay, there are a few reasons junior high was the most stressful period of my life and my single least favorite to date, but a major one was that there was a running theme among the teachers of "teach X; test Y." Like, stuff totally unrelated to the class, that they didn't teach us the skills for, and that we didn't have the tools to even acquire the skills for. Almost all of these examples are from seventh and eighth grade. And those are just a subset!
I remember one particularly bad one was: my eighth grade American history teacher got it into his head that we were all dropout risks, and decided to make it his Holy Mission to scare us into staying in school.
Note: I was in the honors class. My best friend in that class went on to get a masters in engineering and work at Boeing. One of the other kids is now at Google. I'm me. When he first announced this, I thought he was overreacting and maybe he should stick to making his non-honors classes doing it.
Then he described the project, which was to find a source of income and come up with a budget that would cover things like car payments and car insurance payments. He told us this would be impossible. That was the point of the assignment.
We had to make phone calls (this was before internet!) to, like, car insurance companies to see what kind of a deal we could get. Not very good ones, given that we were like 13-14!
I handed in my best attempt and got, I believe, a B, with angry notes that things I'd proposed would never work in the real world. I knew that, this was my best floundering effort to do something he said was impossible!
He was giving off angry vibes the entire time he announced, discussed, and gave us feedback on this assignment. It was like, *personal*, like we'd all personally threatened to drop out of his class and become bums.
Me, in eighth grade: "I'm going to get a PhD in physics! Why are you punishing me for not knowing how car insurance works at age 13?? What does this have to do with American history? Why are you bringing my grade average in this class down?"
Of course, my two worst classes were:
7th grade biology: home of dissections, at the precise age when my gross animal squick peaked. Added to the random igloo and magazine assignments described in the post linked above, I was one stressed child in that class. That was the class I dreaded the most in my entire life.
8th grade math: teacher who didn't want to be there and was phoning it in. You never saw your graded homework until the day before the exam, at which point you got a whole pile back. Learning from wrong answers? What even was that? The homework was graded and sat piling up in her outbox, visible, for weeks until the exam. It wasn't taking her that long to grade it. We just weren't to touch it. This was 100% clearly because she didn't want to answer questions, and if we had our homework in hand, we might ask questions. That was the objectively worst teacher I had before college. (The all-time worst teacher I had was in grad school, but it was fun rather than stressful because first I could publicly humiliate him to general applause, then I could drop the class, to our mutual relief.)
Ugh, junior high was the *most* stressful. Even freshman year of college, living away from home and being sleep-deprived because of MY ROOMMATE, and my physics profs expecting us to intuit and apply math they hadn't taught us, and my various English class stresses that weren't the fault of the teacher so much as the system and my particular brain...didn't come close. (Besides, I'd escaped my parents! That was worth any amount of fears of losing my scholarships to physics and English grades.)
Ugh, I just want to say THIS, so much to everything I wrote in that comment.
Re: Another book rec
Oh no! I feel for him too! I'm glad you found he recovered. I had a philosophy professor with a brain tumor, but it didn't affect his teaching, thankfully! (He was a very good teacher and was my first introduction to cognitive science, including some stuff he taught me that makes E's behavior not seem weird to me. ;) Staying well off that topic, though!)
what wasn't common was that in my nightmares it would always be specifically a topology class.
I can imagine, omg!
Also, it occurred to me recently that--okay, there are a few reasons junior high was the most stressful period of my life and my single least favorite to date, but a major one was that there was a running theme among the teachers of "teach X; test Y." Like, stuff totally unrelated to the class, that they didn't teach us the skills for, and that we didn't have the tools to even acquire the skills for. Almost all of these examples are from seventh and eighth grade. And those are just a subset!
I remember one particularly bad one was: my eighth grade American history teacher got it into his head that we were all dropout risks, and decided to make it his Holy Mission to scare us into staying in school.
Note: I was in the honors class. My best friend in that class went on to get a masters in engineering and work at Boeing. One of the other kids is now at Google. I'm me. When he first announced this, I thought he was overreacting and maybe he should stick to making his non-honors classes doing it.
Then he described the project, which was to find a source of income and come up with a budget that would cover things like car payments and car insurance payments. He told us this would be impossible. That was the point of the assignment.
We had to make phone calls (this was before internet!) to, like, car insurance companies to see what kind of a deal we could get. Not very good ones, given that we were like 13-14!
I handed in my best attempt and got, I believe, a B, with angry notes that things I'd proposed would never work in the real world. I knew that, this was my best floundering effort to do something he said was impossible!
He was giving off angry vibes the entire time he announced, discussed, and gave us feedback on this assignment. It was like, *personal*, like we'd all personally threatened to drop out of his class and become bums.
Me, in eighth grade: "I'm going to get a PhD in physics! Why are you punishing me for not knowing how car insurance works at age 13?? What does this have to do with American history? Why are you bringing my grade average in this class down?"
Of course, my two worst classes were:
7th grade biology: home of dissections, at the precise age when my gross animal squick peaked. Added to the random igloo and magazine assignments described in the post linked above, I was one stressed child in that class. That was the class I dreaded the most in my entire life.
8th grade math: teacher who didn't want to be there and was phoning it in. You never saw your graded homework until the day before the exam, at which point you got a whole pile back. Learning from wrong answers? What even was that? The homework was graded and sat piling up in her outbox, visible, for weeks until the exam. It wasn't taking her that long to grade it. We just weren't to touch it. This was 100% clearly because she didn't want to answer questions, and if we had our homework in hand, we might ask questions. That was the objectively worst teacher I had before college. (The all-time worst teacher I had was in grad school, but it was fun rather than stressful because first I could publicly humiliate him to general applause, then I could drop the class, to our mutual relief.)
Ugh, junior high was the *most* stressful. Even freshman year of college, living away from home and being sleep-deprived because of MY ROOMMATE, and my physics profs expecting us to intuit and apply math they hadn't taught us, and my various English class stresses that weren't the fault of the teacher so much as the system and my particular brain...didn't come close. (Besides, I'd escaped my parents! That was worth any amount of fears of losing my scholarships to physics and English grades.)
Ugh, I just want to say THIS, so much to everything I wrote in that comment.