Getting to Know You: Sept 2018

[Doug Sundseth]

7 hours ago, redambrosia said:

Friday, September 7: Who was your craziest/most interesting teacher?

 

Hmm, there was the Jr. High music teacher who would get really irritated when somebody would get distracted. He used to direct with a drumstick, and when he got irritated, he would throw the drumstick. Usually he would hit the music stand of that person, which would make a horrific bang. Sometimes he would miss and hit the person. This is considered pedagogically sound in music education. 

 

There were the Earth Science and Chemistry teachers whose classrooms had a connecting door (same school). They used to prank each other pretty regularly. I understand that after a particularly ... energetic prank, they were both fired. And the classrooms were repaired.

 

And there was the Electricity and Magnetism professor who used to wear a red track suit for teaching every day. He had a habit of leaning against the chalkboard after writing on it, which left chalk lines on the track suit. Everybody called him "Spiderman". The class was for Physics juniors (and Engineering seniors, they needed a bit more time to be ready ), and the subject was challenging. When students would ask questions in class, he would open the book and start reading out loud from the assigned textbook for the class. Now, most people would think that by that point in college juniors and seniors could read (it was math and science, not literature, so the assumption was reasonable even for physicists and engineers ), but he didn't seem to have any other way to "explain".

 

44 minutes ago, WhiteWulfe said:

Probably my old high school chemistry teacher.  He catered to the pyros in our class, where he'd show us something awesome, and he'd do it in a way that wasn't necessarily the safest... And then he'd walk the whole class through how to do it safely.. 

 

He was a favourite, and the "light stuff on fire" (especially the class clown's $20 bill) sure kept everyone's attention.  Only had two rules: no nitroglycerin (even if you could show you knew how to make the stable stuff) and no dynamite.  Something about how school boards and the nearby firefighters discouraged such things.  That and stable nitroglycerin is boring. 

 

"Stable nitroglycerin" is like a stable unicycle. It can be true for certain conditions but it's unlikely to stay that way. And dynamite is just nitro plus something to absorb it and an antacid to keep it from decaying too rapidly and self detonating (so I suppose you could describe it as "stable nitroglycerin".)

 

I think the chem classes I took would have needed more rules. For instance, NI₃ isn't nitroglycerin, it's really easy to make, and it's even more unstable. Plus it's really messy when you detonate it.

[Inarah]

I had a few good teachers, a lot of mediocre ones, but only a couple bad ones stand out.  I had a logic prof in college who needed a stress management therapist. Warning signal #1 was that there was no textbook, only her in-progress book manuscript.  She was verbally rude and insulting to students, to the point that would get her fired with a pending lawsuit today.  One day early in the semester a guy came in a few minutes late and ducked into a seat. She picked up the nearest object she could find (we were in a biology classroom with lots of little plastic models of body organs and whatnot) and forcefully threw it at the guy while screaming about lateness.  I got up and walked out, and dropped the class the next day. 

[malefactus]

On 9/6/2018 at 2:32 AM, redambrosia said:

Thursday, September 6: 

What is the funniest actual name you've heard of someone having?

 

There are SO many with a few notable ones.

In baseball: a pitcher Boof Bonser. Boof wasn't his actual name, but he liked it well enough to legally change it to his name.

Another pitcher: Tim Spoonybarger. That was his actual name; no one could make up a name quite that good. It rolls off the tongue & crashes to the floor.

 

Then there was/is a race car driver named Richard "Dick" Trickle. I thought that would be a great name for a medical researcher in venereal disease.

 

Erstwhile friend Bob Gaulrapp. Gaulrapp was a popular form of teenage music in ancient France.

 

For those of us who depend on closed captioning, the folks that provide it have a gift for name mutilation. One example is the former Red Sox announcers Don

Orsillo & Jerry Remy who became Donna Silly O & Germy. 

 

7 hours ago, redambrosia said:

Friday, September 7: Who was your craziest/most interesting teacher?

 

I have had two or three good, but not crazy or interesting teachers. The rest were more ore less forgettable.

[etherial]

On 9/6/2018 at 3:32 AM, redambrosia said:

Thursday, September 6: 

What is the funniest actual name you've heard of someone having?

Dick Butkus.

 

Honorable mention: I have a friend named Chris Smith (say "Chrismith" and you'll know why it's awful). You might think his parents didn't think this through, since Chris is short for Christopher. His middle name is Noel.

[etherial]

8 hours ago, redambrosia said:

Friday, September 7: Who was your craziest/most interesting teacher?

I was one of those kids who found it easier to make friends with the teachers than the other students, so though I have a long list of teachers I found interesting, none stand out as being particularly "crazy".

[kristof65]

8 hours ago, redambrosia said:

Friday, September 7: Who was your craziest/most interesting teacher?

No really crazy ones, but the most interesting and unorthodox were generally my best/most effective teachers. 

- one of our HS history teachers liked to use unorthodox methods to teach his subjects.  For example, he started off the unit on WW1 by having the class play a big game of Diplomacy.  Unfortunately, his methods were ultimately quashed by the people in charge when he started off our unit on the Vietnam War by showing us The Deer Hunter.  His classes were never the same after that, and I think he left teaching a few years after I graduated. 

- in 6th grade, our school launched a G&T program with four of us, and we spent half a day with the librarian. For the most part, she merely directed our energies towards exploring positive learning experiences on our own. It was almost more like a book club that did occasional field trips. 

 

30 minutes ago, Inarah said:

 One day early in the semester a guy came in a few minutes late and ducked into a seat. She picked up the nearest object she could find (we were in a biology classroom with lots of little plastic models of body organs and whatnot) and forcefully threw it at the guy while screaming about lateness.  I got up and walked out, and dropped the class the next day. 

uggh...I had a community college class instructor like that (I won't call him a professor).    I was taking classes at the community college, and was in my late 20s.  I normally took classes at night, with other older adults, but I needed this core course, and made arrangements with my employer to take it during the day.   So I was the oldest one in the class - everyone else in the class was fresh out of high school. 

Got stuck in traffic one day, and was 2-3 minutes late for class. Slipped in quietly and sat down.  Guy stops talking and goes on a 10 minute Mr Hand style rant about tardiness and respect for the class time, all the while pointedly looking at me. At the end of the class I told him I wanted a drop slip because he obviously wasn't used to teaching adults, and pointed out that his rant did more to disrupt "his learning environment" than me quietly slipping into class did.    You should have seen how angrily he signed that drop slip for me.  Heard from another student that the next class session he went on a 30 minute rant about that. 

 

6 minutes ago, etherial said:

Honorable mention: I have a friend named Chris Smith (say "Chrismith" and you'll know why it's awful). You might think his parents didn't think this through, since Chris is short for Christopher. His middle name is Noel.

Over the years, I've met several people named Chris Smith. 

[Zink]

8 hours ago, redambrosia said:

Friday, September 7: Who was your craziest/most interesting teacher?

 

Most of mine were mediocre with a couple good ones and a couple awful ones. The closest to crazy (not in a bad way) was Mr Thine my grade 12 chemistry teacher. He was an older east indian man a strong accent who had taught chemistry at a tech institute most of his life. Very nice person but a bit excitable and clumsy. Not the best combo for playing with volatile chemicals. He regularly had small fires and one incident kind of stood out. He was doing an experiment with silver nitrate IIRC. It was too expensive for all the students to get to try out so he was demoing. Managed to boil things over, spill a bunch of chemicals and run around in an amusing to us way trying to clean up. Wasted more silver than if he had let all of us do our own experiments. 

[Dilvish the Deliverer]

9 hours ago, redambrosia said:

Friday, September 7: Who was your craziest/most interesting teacher?

That would be my HS physics teacher Phil Lorenz.  His parents emigrated from India to Montreal.  He went to college in the US and stayed.  So he spoke English with this strange Indian/French-Canadian accent.  It took people about 2 weeks to be able to follow him.  An he would get really excited about some topics and not realise what he was doing.

When teaching electromagnitism he was demponstrating the right hand rule for current flow through a coil.  He made the coil with his hand with his thumb up for represent the. Current flown then slowly moved the hand up and down while saying "its a beautiful thing" over and over.

[Crowley]

4 hours ago, WhiteWulfe said:

Probably my old high school chemistry teacher.  He catered to the pyros in our class, where he'd show us something awesome, and he'd do it in a way that wasn't necessarily the safest... And then he'd walk the whole class through how to do it safely.. 

 

He was a favourite, and the "light stuff on fire" (especially the class clown's $20 bill) sure kept everyone's attention.  Only had two rules: no nitroglycerin (even if you could show you knew how to make the stable stuff) and no dynamite.  Something about how school boards and the nearby firefighters discouraged such things.  That and stable nitroglycerin is boring. 

What is it about high school chem teachers?

 

Mine was Mr B. And the only thing you needed to do to detail the entire class period was to ask "what happens if you light xxxx on fire?"

 

With xxxx being whatever my classmate brought into school to burn that day. 

[Kheprera]

11 hours ago, redambrosia said:

Friday, September 7: Who was your craziest/most interesting teacher?

Mr. Thomas Vannatta. English teacher, but for me Creative Writing.

 

Well over 6' tall, and around 300 lbs, he was half Inuit, half Japanese, lightning quick sense of humor, and told crazy stories about growing up in Japan...

 

At a baseball game: "... and so I took a giant bite of the hot dog and thought 'this doesn't taste right'... because they put a herring in the middle of the hot dog!"

 

Not sure how true his stories were, but he really taught us how to write.

 

Miss him.

[ttuckerman]

Mr Geller, our Physics teacher.  His moto was fisics is Phun.  He also was interested in Thomas Alva Edison.  I met him years latter in Milan, OH Edison's birthplace.  Told him I got a BS in Physics.  

[Doug's Workshop]

I've had some great teachers, so it's kinda hard to pick one.

I'll go with:

Mike Hall, history, 8th grade.  He was a Viet Nam veteran, who was willing to talk about his experiences.  It turns out he was also a wargamer.

 

 

[Mad Jack]

19 hours ago, redambrosia said:

Friday, September 7: Who was your craziest/most interesting teacher?

 

 Hrmm...

 

Probably, like most folks, it was my sophomore year chemistry teacher, Mr. Spano...

 

He was a straight-up mad-scientist-looking guy, balding with a long grey beard that was usually stained several different colors in places, just like his lab coat.

He'd always start the first class of the year by having a balloon to the chalkboard,  and just sit there for the first couple minutes without taking attendance or anything, just writing something in a book. And when the kids had waited long enough to get distracted and start talking and not paying attention, he'd apply a match to the balloon.

The balloon full of Hydrogen.

Inevitably, he'd set the blackboard on fire, and have a small can of pressurized CO2 waiting to put it out with.

He burned a hole in a lab table with Thermite, let us play with dry ice, and built a still in the classroom to demonstrate fermentation.

 

   I can think of a couple of others as well.

 

The first would be my English Literature teacher, Mr. Bud Smith. I had him both freshman and senior year.

He was just a likeable guy. He was funny, entertaining, and made everything he taught seem interesting. He had a plant in class he called George T. Bush.

He showed us the old film version of Romeo and Juliet, the one that contained brief nudity, in class. And made us promise not to tell out parents about it, because apparently nobody on the committee that had approved his teaching plan for the year had actually seen the damn thing or it probably wouldn't have been approved by a Catholic school, lol.

I showed him one of the poems I'd written, and the next day he interrupted his lesson to have me get up in front of the class and read it.

 

Then there was my Anatomy and Physiology teacher junior year, Mr. Strohm, who had a pair of turtles named Sam and Ella. His hobby was carving wooden duck decoys, so one of his hands was noticeably larger than the other. One day announced he'd decided he didn't feel like teaching that day, and asked did anyone want to teach the class for him...

Several people jokingly volunteered, but when I said I'd do it, he actually handed me his lesson plan and the stacks of that day's quiz, and went down to the cafeteria to go get coffee - and didn't come back for almost half the class period, then sat at a table and graded papers.

 

Edited September 8, 2018 by Mad Jack

[Lord of the Dish Pit]

20 hours ago, redambrosia said:

Friday, September 7: Who was your craziest/most interesting teacher?

It's kind of hard to guage. I don't know the reasons that could explain it, but just about every single teacher in District 115 was slightly mad to some degree. The real question would be if they were addled before or after entering the school system...

But the one who stands out was my 6th grade history teacher Mr. Seidlitz. He'd constructed a giant plywood "Wheel of History" that was based off the Wheel of Fortune, (no Vanna White stand in though), and it was this that was our form of "pop quiz". He'd randomly spin the wheel and point to a random student, demanding an answer to whatever question was taped to the wheel. 

But what he's most remembered for by myself and others is his telling the tale of Hector and Achellies. It wasn't so much that he told it, it was more like a one man play. For an entire week's worth of class time, he would bellow out the story, and the high point was was the fourth day where he'd perfectly timed the line "Hector You Are Mine!" to the moment right before the bell rang. Network executives could learn a thing or two about cliffhangers from him. But while a fine display of method acting, it doesn't quite qualify as crazy...until we get to the following Monday when one of the kids asked how he knew so many small details about what had happened and Mr. Seidlitz's response was instant and classic.

"I WAS THERE!" 

This was followed by either the most convincing display of ancestral memory coming forth from the depths of the mind, or the best off the cuff bsing I've ever been privileged to witness as he then spent half the period regaling us with the glories of ancient Greece, spoken as if he'd been there a couple weeks ago. 

Looking back I'm inclined to think that it also had something to do with his getting really into method acting and maybe having a hard time getting his way back out again. But regardless it was this that first convinced me that history can be something other than toothless and boring as it was in most classes before this one, and while ancient Greece isn't my thing I have ever since had a fondness for delving into different eras on a whim and studying the elf out of them.

I also can see where his habit of not letting anyone know if he was serious or not concerning his statement "I was there" was something I've retained. When getting into my Brunch Inquisitor character, or my Prophet of the Coffee God character in various workplaces, I also find myself reaching the point where I don't know if I'm joking or, and of course I keep going regardless just as he did. 

[paintybeard]

On 9/3/2018 at 8:09 AM, redambrosia said:

Monday, September 3: If you were cooking the last BBQ you could ever have, what would you have?

 

Sucking pig.

 

On 9/5/2018 at 8:32 AM, redambrosia said:

Wednesday, September 5: Tell us about a time something started out badly for you, but ended well.

 

My recent house move, went to the point of it all falling apart three times, but finally it all worked out and I'm in an absolutely beautiful location and the removal men didn't break any of my Toys! 

On 9/6/2018 at 8:32 AM, redambrosia said:

Thursday, September 6: 

What is the funniest actual name you've heard of someone having?

 I have a friend at my old wargaming club called Will Power.

The Turkish ambassador to Great Britain back in the 1990's was called Mustapha Kunt.