There are more than a few perks to being a college professor, and I’ve got to think that being able to troll your students (anonymously, of course!) is one of them. I mean, these are supposed to be adults, so there’s no reason to put on your kid gloves, right?
These 14 college profs encountered some students who, all things considered, probably shouldn’t have been allowed to graduate from high school, and their stories are pretty dang funny!
14. It’s called reading comprehension, folks.
I have taught numerous students who are unable to read for meaning. They can read the words on a page out loud to you, but ask them to explain what they just read, they will repeat the words on the page. Our country’s education system is very broken.
Even worse than that is a group of students who had already graduated from university, doing their teaching requirements to become school teachers. Had more than one ask me what a variable in an experiment is (how have you got a science degree and you have never performed an experiment in your life??). My lowest point definitely was the day when a class discussion on the difference between science and superstition dissolved into chaos.
The majority of the class of science graduates agreed that science is rubbish and superstition makes more sense. When asked how they would teach science when they don’t believe in it, one student said she is just there to tell the class facts to memorize. I was a student in that course and I honestly felt sick during that class. I want to teach, I’m a fantastic teacher, but knowing that people like this are my peers makes me really sad and angry.
13. Maybe it’s not the right fit.
I worked at my university writing center and saw a lot of really terrible writing. SO MANY poorly written essays. I really don’t know how you can graduate from high school without at least being able to perform simple tasks like “Point to your thesis statement.”
The whole point of a writing center was to teach students to correct their own work, but there was a direct correlation between how awful a paper was and how likely the student was to throw it at you and say “I’m going to go have lunch. Will you have it fixed in an hour?” then try to leave.
The tutors all got really good at an authoritative, “Stop right there! Sit down. Now let’s talk about how YOU are going to improve YOUR paper.”
The most frustrating papers were the science majors. I could never tell if the paper was terrible or I just wasn’t following the details of their experiment on chlorinated aliphatic hydrocarbons or whatever.
The absolute worst was the ENGLISH MASTERS DEGREE STUDENT who came in several times with absolute gibberish. To be fair, English was his second language but… are you absolutely sure you do not want to consider a career change, my good sir?
12. Definitely bizarre.
I used to TA physics. I had a student who had gone to a decent private high school tell me the value of pi was 2.28. I can kind of understand the .28, because that’s 2pi, but I don’t know where the 2 came from.
11. Some things you just can’t forget.
Not a professor, but we were doing peer editing in English 102. I got an essay on why suicide being illegal was stupid. I still remember the opening line 15 years later:
“There are plenty of ret*rded of laws.”
I stared at that sentence wondering what to do and realizing how low my school’s standards of admission were
10. These are advanced students (supposedly).
First story: masters student didn’t know how to convert from seconds to minutes.
Second story: no one from a class of 4 phd students in an engineering field knew how to add two 2D vectors.
9. How did she get into college?
Not a professor, but as a college freshman I took Advanced English with a student who didn’t know how to write a research paper or even possibly read (I don’t know). When I realized she didn’t know how to research, I gave her my sources and showed her how to navigate them.
The next class when we were supposed to edit each other’s rough drafts. I handed her my paper to edit, she gave it back to me after 10 seconds without reading it and said it was good. She then handed me her “paper” and it was just a list of random dates.
8. An epic cringe.
One time we had an indigenous guest speaker give a lecture about misrepresentation of First Nations culture in media at my art university. During the Q&A a student MEANT to ask the question “how do you feel about cultural appropriation of imagery from your culture by corporations?”
Instead she asked “how do you feel when like H&M sells like… underwear and stuff that has like feathers on it” I have never cringed so hard in my life. The guest speaker had no idea what she was even asking him.
7. A muffin indeed.
Student handed in a 1-page essay of complete gibberish. Like, utter stream-of-consciousness of a gerbil on LSD kind of garbage.
After receiving an F on this assignment, this muffin had the audacity to come to my office hour and demand that I explain this grade to them. After I walked them through their river of word-garbage, they tried to tell me that I just didn’t understand their writing because I am not an English native speaker.
First time I almost kicked somebody out of my office.
6. Not so much, no.
Had a… challenging student once who was not great at reading directions or thinking critically. We were setting up an experiment that required GENTLE heating of a volatile solvent. I explicitly told the class, multiple times, “only turn your hot plates up to 2 when heating, these things get very hot.”
Maybe 30 minutes later I’m making my rounds through the lab and I pass said guy’s fume hood and notice his reaction is smoking. I look closer and see that all of the liquid in his flask is gone and its just a charred, black smoking mess (which is still heating).
I ask, “Student! What’s going on with your reaction??? What’s the temperature set at?!” The guy goes, “oh, I wasn’t sure how hot to heat it, so I just turned the plate all the way up to 10. Is my reaction going to be ok?” No, no man, it’s not going to be ok… he literally boiled the thing dry 🙄
5. I’m not really surprised.
I taught English as a Second Language at a community college for a decade. My colleagues and I were pretty tough on the academics, but it paid off when our students started regular classes. Often I ran into my former students around campus & asked them how things were going.
I lost count of the number of times they expressed disbelief at how badly their native-speaking American classmates were at writing sentences, doing math, and giving presentations in front of a group.
4. Just yikes.
In grad school we had to do weekly presentations on individual scientific studies within the focus of our thesis and this one girl was completely bombing on a study about biomechanics. The professor gently tried to guide her to a different conclusion and she began to argue with him.
That’s when the professor asked her to read out loud the authors of the study and, of course, he was the lead author. She unknowingly chose to butcher a study that her own professor authored…
3. Oh, Nana.
Was teaching a first year religion class and we were talking about the two creation stories in Genesis but this happened specifically when we were reading the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. I told my class that a colleague of mine joked Adam had a c-section because he wasn’t conscious when God took his rib and made Eve. The class had a giggle but one student raised their hand and seriously asked why everyone was laughing because men have the ability to regrow their ribs once in their life thanks to this original moment.
I. Felt. Horrible.
The entire class started laughing and I immediately shut that shit down because this student was wanting to melt away into nothingness. Was a great teaching moment because you never, ever laugh if someone has a question and is serious about it. Turns out, their Nana was a JW and while my student generally took everything that came out of Nanas mouth with a grain of salt, somehow this fact never got examined.
2. The absolute gall.
I had a suite mate who should have never left home. A week before the semester starts new students are required to attend preliminary courses to learn about the college and their major. It’s essentially a College 101 course and transfer students are exempt, so I was in my room. My suite mate was not however, so I asked why she wasn’t at her course and she told me “I’m just not going to go because I don’t want to and it’s not like they can make me”. She got an email from the dean of her college after the first day. She then exclaimed how she wasn’t required to respond and if she got another email she’d have her “mommy call and deal with them”. It did not go well.
Then about halfway through the semester another incident occurred. She poked her head in my room to warn me her mommy was coming and I needed to hide my alcohol, she did this frequently even though we didn’t share a room and I was 22 at the time. She had called her mom down to the university to talk to the dean. The issue at hand was she felt target by a professor because he would call on her in class. She admitted he was doing it because she wasn’t paying attention and was texting, but that it was no excuse to make her feel ashamed in front of people.
She failed out her first semester.
1. That’s just how college works.
I had a student who told me, being 100% serious, that he wouldn’t be presenting on his assigned day because he “didn’t do the assignment and he’d go the next day.” The presentation had been given with due dates over two weeks earlier. When I told him that wasn’t how college worked he claimed discrimination and told me he had accommodations for his disability that allowed him more time. Once he pulled that card I got the department head involved and she laughed.
The guy failed.
To clarify, he got double time on exams to allow for a learning disability. It doesn’t excuse him for deciding not to do the work necessary for the class.
I’m hoping none of my college professors would have put me on a list like this!
What’s your funniest story from college? Share it with us in the comments!
