My Teacher is an Idiot

So I'm taking Linguistics this semester. It's a 4000 level (senior) class, big stuff...right? Me and my friend Paul are taking it together. So far we aren't too impressed with the class (it's becoming one of those where I regret buying the book because I'm not going to be reading it because, though she assigns readings...everything we need to know we're told in class). That kinda pisses me off, because at this stage of the game we should HAVE to read the textbook...but whatever.

No, this rant isn't about that. Nor is it about how boring the class is. Or about how my teacher uses the classroom smartboard to show us Wikipedia pages (on Linguistic topics). I think that's pretty unprofessional, especially for someone with a doctorate. Whatever. No, this rant is about how stupid my teacher is. Why is she stupid? Does she not know her subject? Possibly.

Let me first say that for the past year or so I've adopted a pretty smart policy: If I don't know something, I admit it. Rather than bullshit people, I just say "Hey, you know what? I don't know." I think that's a pretty intelligent thing to do/say. A really smart person is able to admit that they don't know EVERYTHING, because...hey! You don't!!! So I admire it when someone says that, really...I do.

My teacher, God bless her, admits this to us. A lot. I mean, a lot. In fact, she says "I don't know" or some variation of that so much that me and Paul decided to start keeping score. Today was our first day of keeping track. In an hour and fifteen minutes she said "I don't know" over 23 times. Now, some of those were understandable. We have a mixed class, some of us are undergrads and some are graduate students. There are three tweed jacket types. You know what I mean. The "Hey look at me, I so fucking smart...you're a dumb ass compared to me" types. These people are in all college classes, I've discovered. They usually have either two agendas:

A) They want to impress the teacher with their brilliance by agreeing with everything they say. Or they want to add a CRAP load of details to whatever the teacher has just said.

or

B) They want to embarrass the teacher by showing off, basically that they know more/better than the teacher. These people either have:

1. Mental Problems

2. Balls the size of the moon.


Now in our class we have a shit load of both types. As you can imagine our class discussions are a mixture of these people basically taking over and giving their own damn lecture (which infuriates me to no end) AND these people asking really vague or complicated questions (the kind of which that would require decades of careful research and truckloads of money to answer). I'm laying all this out for you because, honestly...there are some instances in which she NEEDS to simply say "I don't know." I'm not giving her a pass per say--I'm just sympathizing with the plight of teachers (after all even doctors can't know EVERYTHING about their fields).

That said, in the middle of her lecture/presentations...without any interruption from the class--she says "I don't know" too many times. Example: Today we were talking about different writing systems. We were talking about Chinese characters. All the sudden, out of the blue..."I don't know." What the hell? Lady, last night you could have read a book or gone online (shit, you love Wiki so much...go look it up there!). It's embarrassing. Not that she doesn't look shit up in class...oh, she does that!!! Today, with the smartboard still on she had to look something up...so she went to Google and we watched her randomly click on links. As she vainly searched for whatever she was looking for, I sat in my seat and prayed for porn. You see, I could tell she wasn't really looking at the links too closely...she was just randomly hitting the links on the first page of results. She was looking for a Coca-Cola ad in Japanese. First off lady, you should have searched for images (because that's what you wanted). Secondly, you should have powered down the smartboard because the Internet is a big, steaming pile of porn. She gave up after five minutes. I was, needless to say, disappointed.

I'm not saying she's a bad teacher. Or that she's a complete moron (she has a PHD people). I guess--she's just one of those people who are so smart they come off as mildly retarded. In short, she's a fucking idiot. A smart one, but an idiot nonetheless. I know that's an oxymoron (ha-ha) but it's true and I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. If not, just come with me to class...you'll see.

NOTE: For those of you who don't know, a smartboard is a big projector that allows an entire class to view what's on the teacher's computer screen.