Hell

Longer post from

Old Tenure
There are two ways the old professor can go. If you’re lucky, you’ll get the older professor whose rickety, liver-spotted hands have been grading papers since before perforated edges were invented and who is just waiting another year or two to retire. His assignments are brief and he’s convinced that the class is 25 minutes shorter than it really is. You would love him if he weren’t so repulsive. Sadly, the odds are greater that you’ll be stuck with the other type of old professor, the one who intends to keep teaching in spite of his age. The only time-wasting tangents he’ll ever get into is how everything has gone to sh*t in this modern age, and how students don’t care at all. He will give you a 30 minute lecture on how dangerous Spell Check is and how type writers are much more efficient. But no matter what type of old professor you end up with, there’s always the super high chance he’ll die mid semester and then you get an automatic A, right? Right?

The New Professor

Your advisor said The New Professor had excellent credentials, which is true. But he got those credentials by treating college as nine years in a monastic cloister, and won’t have much sympathy for your “social life” and “meals” and “minimum of six hours of sleep a night in order to function normally the next day.” He wants his undergrads “to really commit to the material,” and wants to earn the respect of the older faculty, so his first semester of teaching will be your worst semester of learning. The New Professor has a notion that every undergraduate will be exactly like he was: a future The New Professor. He’s shocked that even though he set up office hours, no one comes by and uses them. And no one does the optional extra reading but dammit The New Professor is going to refer to it in lectures anyway. Also, shut that laptop right now. The New Professor was in college too and knows you’re on Facebook, or AIM, or one of those awful humor websites.

The Self-Obsessed Scholar

It’s not that she’s an egotistical bitch, it’s just that she wants you to know that she is most definitely the best source of knowledge in her particular field and many adjacent fields. Just ask the many books she’s written, all of which she has assigned to you even though she’s just going to repeat their contents in class, right down to that hilarious anecdote about going to a dinner party at Gore Vidal’s house. You can find your school’s primary crop of douchey overachieving kiss-asses in the seats of her classroom, entranced by the majesty of the Self-Obsessed Scholar’s reputation. The worthless name dropping and the drooling adoration of the front row aren’t even the worst part though. No, the worst part is that so many people are in the class that the wireless connection never works. Now how are you supposed to figure out who Gore Vidal is?

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