D: That monster, putting you through that!

By which I mean making you watch Biodome.

The class I got such a bad mark on was a single, course-long project: Make a game using flash. The main reason I got such a bad mark(Aside from that it required heavy scripting which I'm not so grand at) was the the teacher expected a full, polished game out of us and graded as such... despite admitting at the beginning of the course that he didn't expect anybody to make anything anywhere close to polished because he knew we would all be working on portfolio projects and it would be a stretch to get it done in three months even if we weren't.

Not many people were pleased with that class.

On the other end of the spectrum in high school I had a geography teacher who's course formula was: Watch 30 minutes of a movie, write a small test on that 30 minutes, assign them a section of the textbook to read and answer basic questions on. I was usually done the assignments inside of the class.

@ Pykrete

That is a horrible, horrible TA. That sort of thing is seriously not acceptable.

I had an RE teacher who was an atheist.

It's like a vegan butcher.

edited 1st Mar '13 1:43:09 PM by PurpleDalek

I remember my Freshman year in high school I was in a video game programming class that eventually went down the tube because 1 our software stopped working, 2 I was awful at it to the point where I think I was the one that called him over most (though my stuff did work most of the time). I was good at the stuff on paper because I got As on both semester exams, though not so much in the practical applications XD

edited 1st Mar '13 1:46:42 PM by theLibrarian

Oooh pretty.

Also pretty sort of.

Yeah I'm pretty sure that guy got fired not long after that term, but alas the C remains. Woe is me.

I'm old enough that I had a computer course in which I was to program a video game in Basic (not even Visual Basic... Basic Basic :P). I'm pretty sure the computers we were using were on Apple II's. They had these "brand new" Macintosh computers we got to play with. The screens weren't even in color but they were cutting edge for graphical design at the time!

That's the class that made me prettymuch decide I wasn't going into computer programming... I don't have the attention span required to write lines and lines of code.

edited 1st Mar '13 1:47:41 PM by Turtlebutter

My 9th grade biology teacher had us watch tons of cheesy biology related movies, mostly when he needed time to do grading. There were so many I don't even remember them all, but we watched at least 7 movies in the class. And a few X Files episodes too.

I decided not to go into game programming because I sucked at it

Though now that I try to remember them all, I can only remember six of them off the top of my head. And they weren't all cheesy. One movie we watched was Gattaca.

@Purple: I wouldn't say that necessarily. Atheism is, in a way, a religion in and of itself(That is to say it is something that you believe in). I've never had an RE course but I would presume that it's the same as any other - their job comes down to transferring facts. Unless he paused the class every twelve seconds to say "This is all tripe by the way", then I don't think his religion matters.

That is pretty much what he did. Well, not every 12 seconds exactly but he did it quite a lot.

Hey, I'm not complaining. It was pretty funny.

Yeah, I've met plenty of atheists who studied religion well enough to be qualified to teach about it in an academic and historical sense. Better than most people in my congregation and more than a few preachers.

That sort of thing is obnoxious though.

edited 1st Mar '13 2:01:48 PM by Pykrete

@Kegisak: In theory, it's possible, but in practice it's one of those subjects where 90% of the time there's a bias. As somebody who's had his fair share of religion related classes, I can safely say that it's a subject that's near-impossible to teach from a purely objective perspective. Granted, most teachers I've had make a valiant effort to be as fair as possible, but their own views still bleed through a lot of the time. It's not usually as bad as "BTW, everything but X is bollocks", but yeah.

edited 1st Mar '13 2:03:47 PM by JapaneseTeeth

Well sure, but the same could then be said for any teacher of any religion.

I still learned a lot from him. He was a good teacher, he just wasn't above mocking the subject material to get a few laughs from the class.

Speaking of movies in class, I had an ethics prof who had us watch Gattaca and The Truman Show. Quite interesting.

That's the thing though, injecting an opinion like that is academically dishonest, especially for a subject that sensitive and that certain people in your audience may well be kind of obligated to take seriously.

Rarity, begin the harvest!

edited 1st Mar '13 2:11:53 PM by Pykrete

...they'll sweep her up and put her back together...

For an inverse, imagine perhaps a young-earth creationist teaching biology, and chiming in occasionally on how evolution was garbage. It wouldn't go over so well.

@Pykrete: Yeah, politics tends to be like that as well. Although there is a difference between attempting to be non-partisan and just going "screw it, I'm just going to propagandize".

Also, I was going to post a picture of a ponified Four Horsemen, but I can't find a decent picture that actually has the names and colors right. It's Conquest (white horse) Conflict/War (Red Horse) Famine (Black horse) and Death (pale/zombie horse). PESTILENCE IS NOT ONE OF THEM.

@Kegisak: Ugh, those guys are just as aggravating. But I'd rather not get started on that discussion.

edited 1st Mar '13 2:14:59 PM by JapaneseTeeth

That's why 'militant atheists' annoy me. Believe has been a fundamental part of humanity since the beginning, yet they say anyone with an once of it is a moron worthy of only scorn....

...ahem...

...wait you mean that actually happens?

well... I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised, when it comes down to it. If it can it will, I guess.

@Pykrete No one in the entire class was religious in any way so he knew he wouldn't offend anyone. But yeah, he could have been more professional.