please describe the strangest college professor you ever had

my zoology teacher was also a part time clown at childrens parties.

interesting college teachers wrote:

my astronomy professor was 4ft tall, and he was born with all of his organs on the opposite side of his body. his heart was on the right side of his chest. he yelled very loudly while lecturing, probably to compensate for his size or something. i was quick to judge him and didnt like him at first. but he ended up being my favorite professor in all of my college years. he taught me so much about the universe and about life and how to interpret it. 2 years after i had him as a teacher, he was arrested for sectual relations with an 11 year old at a local elementary school. he had bought her a wedding ring and told her he wanted to flee away to mexico with her to get married.

please describe the strangest professor you ever had.

You simultaneously began and ended the thread. Tough to top this one.

Well, that's pretty hard to top, but here goes.

Years ago I had a 'Philosophy' professor. He was very methodical and always went line-by-line in his lesson plan.

He had the noticeable habit of always ending a statement or sement with "OK". It got to a point that heads would turn each time he said it; some would burst into muffled laughter because it was the 'talk of the class'.

We heard so many OK's that we decided to keep track of them. We would track them like a box score. We would calculate his Average Daily OK's; Weekly OK's ... we even laid out some graphs and tried to rationalize why some periods had more OK's than others.

OK, better run ......

Had a professor who often taught through a stuffed puffin. This was a 300- or 400-level math class. Saw him on awkwardfamilyphotos.com in a family portrait which included the stuffed animal. Wish I could find that picture...

It was a course on the European Middle Ages. We were discussing the life of a serf. A girl commented what a lousy life they had.

He asked, "Have you ever been a serf?"

She answered (perplexed), "No."

He said, "Well I have, in a former life, and it wasn't that bad."

I got up, walked out, went and dropped the course.

This took place 35 years ago: I had a professor at Cal who insisted on teaching class in his office. While it was a good sized room, the class had about twenty students nestled around his office. He chain smoked through class, waving his unfiltered Camel with an ever growing ash as he spoke. We would be transfixed by the ash waiting for it to fall. After an agonizing long time, he would deftly flick the ash, take a drag and go on.

runn wrote:

It was a course on the European Middle Ages. We were discussing the life of a serf. A girl commented what a lousy life they had.

He asked, "Have you ever been a serf?"

She answered (perplexed), "No."

He said, "Well I have, in a former life, and it wasn't that bad."

I got up, walked out, went and dropped the course.

So you had a prof with 1st hand experience in this and you dropped? Idiot.

My biological physics professor had a shaved head with a pony tail, goatee, and a waxed twisted handlebar moustache. He had tattoos on his hands and always wore a black vest. Every class was started with him talking about the cat on the cat calendar he had. He also holds a Guinness record for the longest pull of a truck using shark hooks in the flesh of ones back and is part of a 2 man extreme circus show, he once put a fork fully into his nose during class.

Video on him:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I1umRjAtG8&feature=related

after hurricaine andrew in 92' we started classes without power. In class we had fans hooked up to a generator. Hot as balls! A bird flew into the classroom. I was nearly passed out when my buddy woke me, and we watched the bird fly around very confused. Dr. so /so kept on lecturing until the bird slammed into the fan and said " suicide "the crarazy thing was that he just kept keepin' on

CanRunner wrote:

My biological physics professor had a shaved head with a pony tail, goatee, and a waxed twisted handlebar moustache. He had tattoos on his hands and always wore a black vest. Every class was started with him talking about the cat on the cat calendar he had. He also holds a Guinness record for the longest pull of a truck using shark hooks in the flesh of ones back and is part of a 2 man extreme circus show, he once put a fork fully into his nose during class.

Video on him:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7I1umRjAtG8&feature=related

OP still in the lead but can not imaging many others topping this one.

Best I have is a very loud multiorgasmatic English Prof who's completion cry was "Merde" & that's not even in the race for strangest.

I can't top the first guy either, but here is mine: Very gay dude taught art history/ancient Greek stuff. Everyone was a guaranteed B as long as they showed up, but he would give extra credit (guaranteed A for the course) if you helped him clean these old plaster casts he had. So one every other week, we would meet at his house, sit in a circle, clean the casts with basic cleaning products, drink beer, and smoke pot. I wasn't gay, but several other guys there were gay, and the prof would try to hook up with them right there while we were cleaning these damn heavy casts. I stuck around for the easy A.

forgot to add 1 more thing about my astronomy teacher. when he would yell (give lecture) a bunch of saliva came out of his mouth and got on the students in the front row. every single day, the front row brought tissues because they got his spit on their face from his lisp and yelling.

This is one of the funniest things I've read on lrc, well done sir.

I had a computer science professor at Rutgers in the mid 90's who seemed a bit odd. He went by the name "Jt" - that was how it was spelled and that is what we were supposed to call him. He taught barefoot. I once saw him walking on campus and he was barefoot, but holding a pair of shoes. He had a bunch of bandanas that he had wrapped around his jeans also. He seemed quite normal to talk to and taught fine, but the name and the style was a bit odd.

There was a husband and wife up at Cornell also who were an odd team. They each picked out a pair of different socks every day and then wore one of each - so each always had mismatched socks. The husband was in physics and apparently rode his bike to work in shorts every day no matter how cold it was (in Ithaca, NY, mind you). The wife would just burst out into song randomly.

Great stories.

I can't top any of these but I did have an odd professor in med school. He was a middle aged guy with wild Einstein like hair, and was a world famous hematologist. He had done a lot of work in the early days of figuring out the blood clotting cascade and had a bunch of deadly snakes in his lab (Russell vipers) whose venom he used in his research. (Look them up - nasty venom).

Anyway, he would often go on rounds with us on our internal medicine rotations. While the students and residents and attending gathered around the patient's bed, he would work his way over to the patient's breakfast tray, sneak a little glance around, dart out his hand, and pocket some left over food item from the tray. He was quick - dart of the hand, and into the white coat pocket. Did it in every room where there was a tray. Apple. Piece of toast. Before long, every student and resident was watching out of the corner of our eyes. It was pretty funny but distracting and I'm sure I missed a few teaching points that month. We never did figure out if he was eating the stuff or stealing it for his snakes or whatever. The other weird thing is that he never took anything off the big carts where they stack the trays after the nurses remove them from the room - only from the patients' rooms.

waiting for dinner wrote:

Best I have is a very loud multiorgasmatic English Prof who's completion cry was "Merde" & that's not even in the race for strangest.

Thank you for brightening my day.

Dr.S wrote:

He taught barefoot.

Post of the year so far.

Things like this are the only reason I visit this website.

The class was relatively dry and boring except for the final exam. He said to us that we may or may not have noticed, but the number of bandanas he wore on the day of the exam was proportional to the difficulty of the exam. He went on to say that for the first exam he wore 4 bandanas around his legs, and for the second exam he wore 6. He then said in getting the final exam ready, he didn't have a chance to put on his bandanas, but to wait a minute. He then ducked under the desk and started throwing out dozens of bandanas across the room. After a very boring semester, this humor caught everybody by surprise - I guess that is why I still remember it.But the barefoot thing - unforgettable.

fan of 430miler wrote:

Dr.S wrote:

He taught barefoot.

Post of the year so far.

Things like this are the only reason I visit this website.

I had a sociology professor who the first class comes out wearing a sweat (or food) stained t-shirt. Long ZZ-top beard and fat belly. Immediately starts talking about infanticide in ancient Greece where it was common for mothers of newborn daughters to take them up outside and leave them to die on their own. I have to say it was much more interesting to me then calculus or economics.

Actually if you take non-practical classes like I did most of my professors were strange and unusual.

A couple of years later I was watching "Oprah" and heard the head of the Sociology School at UW-Madison claim its impossible for blacks to be racist. Franklin was his first name. This was the head of the top ranked Sociolgy department in the nation. I had a lot of interesting characters for professors. Most were Leftists with Harvard degrees.