I think the key is he was happy to help those who gave a damn, i.e., grad students and those who came to the help room.
Professors Who Suck
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I think the key is he was happy to help those who gave a damn, i.e., grad students and those who came to the help room.
I was one of the few who actually liked Abendroth. Say what you will about him, but that guy knew the AISC LRFD code like the back of his hand.
No doubt. His class was tough but I learned a lot. I definitely knew more about that code than any of my coworkers when I graduated.
Wow, that Bloom piece...Him walking his dog. When you start a sentence with "I can't tell you how many times..." it pretty much gives you carte blanche to say whatever you want. I'll bet I can tell you how many times he's been asked about his "hunting" dog -- maybe once, maybe never. He appears to be an elitist ******* of major proportions.
He went to Berkeley. In my experience Berkeley grads are as pompous as they come haha, right up there with a Northwestern Journalism School grad, or anyone who's taken a class at Harvard.
And, yeah, that walking the Dog bit. Yeeesh.
Son had Sturges for a couple of classes and while tough, felt he learned more. Wound up working for him a couple of terms.
Nice blast from the past of posters who aren't here, posting infrequently, or under different alts.
I also went back and read the original Bloom article in the Atlantic. I'd heard about it (vaguely recall) before, but didn't actually read it until just now.
I agree with others, the most pompous piece of "I'm better than you" puffery I've ever read.
Example: "Almost every Iowa house has a mudroom, so you don't track mud or pig **** into the kitchen or living room, even though the aroma of pig **** is absolutely venerated in Iowa: It's known to one and all here as "the smell of money."
Baloney.
1. The vast, vast majority of Iowans have nothing to do with hog farming
2. Those who do hunt (still a minority) do it 2-3 times per year, tops, and don't need to design their house around it.
3. "Almost" every house has a mud room? I doubt that. And those that do, have it for the exact same reason as houses in every state -- they don't like it when their kids get dirty feet on the carpet. Regular old dirt, like, playing in the yard dirt, leaves, etc.
4. Hog feces known as the "smell of money" and venerated? 'Cmon, that's stupid. 95% of Iowans hate pig smell.
I'm not sure if this guy has really been in as many small towns as he claims or not, but even if he has been, I imagine he sits in a cafe, sees 1-2 people, doesn't interact with them, and then just projects what he thinks they do/say/believe onto everyone.
The master of taking something that happens occasionally or rarely (like "everyone goes to tractor pulls on Friday") and projecting it as though it's the norm.
I'm glad he took a ton of flack for it.
Dang, I forgot about Sturgis. He was my Dynamics teacher, which wasn't too bad, but I was on a catalog that was then changed to make Statics/Dynamics a 5 credit combined class that he taught. I had a couple friends in it that were just snowed under, because I think he was teaching it with 6 credits worth of material and it was just too much.
Quirmbach, the Econ guy everyone hated, was rough. I can remember dreading his lectures because he would embarrass someone every day. I ended up getting an A, which shocked me because I didn't think I was doing that well. I think his tests were notorouisly hard, which I was too stupid to know my scores were actually good compared to the rest of the class.
Max Porter, Reinforced Concrete Design, spent the first class telling us how rich/awesome he was. I tuned out the rest of the semester and I think I got a B on easy material, because I didn't want to hear a word he said after day 1.
Abendroth, I slept every lecture, but my buddy was all over it and we did the homework together, so he carried me to an A-. Seriously, I liked the material, but something about him starting to talk just put me to sleep.
Quirmbach, the Econ guy everyone hated, was rough. I can remember dreading his lectures because he would embarrass someone every day. I ended up getting an A, which shocked me because I didn't think I was doing that well. I think his tests were notorouisly hard, which I was too stupid to know my scores were actually good compared to the rest of the class.
Max Porter, Reinforced Concrete Design, spent the first class telling us how rich/awesome he was. I tuned out the rest of the semester and I think I got a B on easy material, because I didn't want to hear a word he said after day 1.
Abendroth, I slept every lecture, but my buddy was all over it and we did the homework together, so he carried me to an A-. Seriously, I liked the material, but something about him starting to talk just put me to sleep.
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Who was the guy that taught Business Law in the early 2000's? I think he was missing a finger. That was an absolute **** class and he sucked.
Favorites:
Bruce Munson, Fluid Mechanics, My all time favorite class, and I thought about changing my major just to take all his classes. He brought in a different real world shown and tell item every day to introduce the lesson and wrote the text book we used. To say he knew the material was an extreme understatement.
Frank Hammer, Differential Equations, This ******* awesome manchild walks into our first class and says, "The department doesn't like how many A's and B's I give out, so I'll probably get fired, but I think I'm a good teacher. So, 80% of you will get A's, 15% will get B's and the other 5% are going to stop coming next week." I hated all of my other math classes, but his class was the bomb.
Favorites:
Bruce Munson, Fluid Mechanics, My all time favorite class, and I thought about changing my major just to take all his classes. He brought in a different real world shown and tell item every day to introduce the lesson and wrote the text book we used. To say he knew the material was an extreme understatement.
Frank Hammer, Differential Equations, This ******* awesome manchild walks into our first class and says, "The department doesn't like how many A's and B's I give out, so I'll probably get fired, but I think I'm a good teacher. So, 80% of you will get A's, 15% will get B's and the other 5% are going to stop coming next week." I hated all of my other math classes, but his class was the bomb.
RIP Larry Curtis. Couldn't beat the "Sue the Bastard" story; best story in any class. Period.
The thing that drove me nuts about Roy is how inconsistent his grading of papers was. I wasn't the only one in my class who felt that way either, seemed like just about everyone in the class never knew what crazy comments he'd put on the paper and assign some random grade. Looking back I wish I had kept my papers from his class just as a reminder of how crazy he was. Writing papers was one of my stronger things in college as I was not a great test taker but if you give me a project or paper that is where I excelled. We had a college prep English class in HS that probably was tougher than English 105 and was probably why I tested out of English 104 with ease. Writing papers for any class other than Roy's was no problem because once you got a feel for what the prof was looking for after writing the 1st paper you could basically use that feedback to make a template for every paper after that. Not with Roy though, you could give him an A paper 1 time and write an A quality paper the next time and he'd rip it to shreds with a bunch of nonsense he couldn't explain if you challenged him on it if you went to his office to talk to him.
At the time I wondered if he had some dirt on someone and like you said he was tenured and his wife apparently had a job with perks that gave him good job security. If I was that terrible at my job I would have been fired a long time ago. I was just amazed how if he was that way over multiple semesters how he was allowed to stay on staff because I know just my semester alone there were multiple complaints filed against him and surely his student evaluations reflected his poor performance as well. I get it, you don't want a pushover prof who doesn't challenge you but he was neither. His class was not hard, it was more trying to figure out where his mind was at on a given day. I had profs I absolutely hated for 1 reason or another but none of them came close to the bizarre behavior and random antics that Roy Johnson had.
One of my best profs at ISU started the semester by telling us we would not have any exams, our grade was entirely based off case studies that we would do with randomly assigned groups in the class because in the real world you don't get to pick your co-workers and your boss is not going to hand you a paper and ask you to answer a bunch of questions that you spent countless hours trying to memorize the answers to. That class prepped me for my job better than any class I took as most people will find out that you gain the majority of your knowledge in your profession by just getting on the job experience. Having randomly assigned teams you had to deal with different personalities and work ethics, if you wanted to get a good grade on your case study you had to deal with those differences in a short time and there were some papers you had to do more than your fair share to overcome someone who was not contributing and anyone in the work force right now can probably relate to that you sometimes have to gut it out when you have a co-worker not doing their fair share of the work but you don't want your work to suffer because of them because it will affect how your work is viewed as well.
Loved that guy. He'd make my top 5 list of favorites. His story about losing a finger the same time Fred was playing was great too. The emergency room was freaked out when they heard the "mayor of Ames" was coming in and were relieved when it was him and not Fred.
One of the other law professors at isu Dirk deam used to tell stories about this cat.
One other one that couldn't be truer was when he told us that the ISU Foundation will ALWAYS find you. It went something along the lines of graduating undergrad, getting married and getting sent to Vietnam. While there before receiving anything from his wife or parents he got a letter from ISU asking for money.
I've been outta school for 4 years and I don't think I can name one professor I had.
Must be the CTE.
Must be the CTE.
