INSTRUCTIONAL QUIPS.

Teachers, instructors and professors, as much as they're entrusted with molding impressionable young minds, can sometimes be incorrigible. I've had a bunch of teachers whose antics, to this day, are still quite vivid, many years later.

But first, a little diversion:

After several months of being stuck with Windows Vista, I daresay it's actually quite smart, despite my earlier reservations. Or maybe I'm just now getting used to it, either or. It's still rough around the edges though, no doubt.
I like its multimedia capabilities, which to me make or break an OS. Also pretty tight are the Windows Aero graphics, especially Flip 3D. Sweetness. Like, check out its exhibition on my monster PC at the workplace.




But, getting back to the teacher thing: My earliest memory of institutional rebuke was when I was in Std. 3, in Maragua. It was mandatory to take Homescience then and I sucked at it, particularly in stitching. One assignment was to practice the back-stitch on a piece of cloth and to show it to the teacher the following day. My Moms was away then and my Dad was dozing off on the couch, so I had to do it by myself. I worked really hard at it, only to show my blood, sweat and tears to the teacher who was like:

>d®, you are the laziest pupil I've ever known. What is this? This is garbage! Go kneel outside the classroom! Now!!

Talk about scarring a kid for life.

Then, our genius of a headmaster had insisted that students be seated in the order of their grades. Let me explain:
Each classroom had desks arranged in 3 columns, with as many rows as needed. [Each desk seated 3. Yes, those.] Say the students had just taken their mid-term exams. Soon as the results were out, the student who got the best grades would sit on the left side of the front desk, in the left column. The student that got the next best grades would sit to the first student's right, and so on. It follows that the smartest students would be at the left front, and the hindiots back right.

That's just cold. Way to rub it in to the cats that didn't do well in class. It's one thing for people to know someone wasn't smart, but to actually show it? Meanness galore.

A couple of years later, Mother-dear sent yours truly to boarding school, claiming that the local school was too easy for me. [Damn] My Std. 6 Math teacher was infamous for 2 things: his prowess with the cane, and an abundance of spittle. It didn't help much that I sat front and center in the classroom, right in his line of fire. Dude, I involuntarily squinted every time he spoke any word with a 't,' 'r,' 'sh' or 'ch' in it, in anticipation of the volley of droplets of spittle that would accompany those words. Nasty.
Then, I was never great in Math, so I was often the object of his wrath. Most interesting was his style of beating our little asses up: the cane swung down from above his head, rather than laterally. He'd insist we grab the wall and not let go till the infamous six of the best was over with, or we'd get another six. More than all this tho, was the stuff he said while swinging. Like, when it was my turn, he'd say stuff like: [The cane would make contact where the words are in uppercase]

>d®, you used to be a very good BOY, getting good GRADES. You are getting LAZY, and that is not an OPTION. I do not WANT to see you here aGAIN.

Gotta admire his technique.

I will not even try to talk about High School teachers. They were even more ridiculous. Scratch that - they were demented. Sometimes brilliant, but definitely insane.

Much later, in college, I was here in my first semester, fresh off the boat. I was taking an English Composition class, the only black - and foreign - student and truth be told, I smoked the rest of them in composition. One day the teacher went off, after several tests with yours truly consistently smoking the competition, and I still remember what she said verbatim:

You should be disappointed in yourselves, really, that you've been speaking in English all your lives and are not even half as proficient as some of the foreign students, whose first languages aren't English.

Some of the foreign students, she said? Dude, I was THE only foreign student! Very subtle, lady, very subtle.

In that same school, my Biology teacher was a real closet freak. One time while discussing hormones and, specifically, pheromones, he said, and I'm paraphrasing, that:

It's not just men that like staring at women's butts. Women check out men's butts too. You know why they do? Coz a man with a nice, firm butt suggests [and he acted this out] good thrusting power.

For like 5 seconds you could've heard a pin drop, then some dude broke down & snickered, then we all did, with the ladies looking all sheepish. Too funny.

Most recently, in my Automotive Electronics class, we were messing around with DMMs, [digital multimeters] measuring various currents and stuff.


DMMs have only two leads: one for Ground and the other to fit in the other slots, one at a time, typically labeled V, A, R or whatever, depending on what is being measured. [See Photo]
For some reason it's sometimes rather difficult for many to remember to plug the lead in the right aperture. Like, while trying to measure resistances, some would have their leads plugged into V instead of R. Since we were measuring currents, the prof., who is ever serious and never cracks jokes, said:

....and remember, for this session, to always put it in the A-hole.

We all laughed so hard. Even he was cracking up at his inadvertent insinuation. Goes to show what goes on in some of our minds - A.D.I.D.A.S. I trust you're familiar with this acronym.

Alright - back to work.