I’m a senior in college and I’m in Philosophy 101 with a bunch of freshmen. The class is fine on the surface – but the combination of our clueless professor and the classes’ weird compliance with learning about the history of philosophy instead of actually discussing philosophical issues baffles me. All I can do is sit back and watch.

 

Example 1: In the middle of a sentence, our bumbling and lovable professor who has to be in his mid  ‘60s stopped and said “How do you spell Socrates?”

Someone answered. He wrote it down. He then turned reproachfully to the class and asked, “Are you sure? Are you really sure?”

Yes, sir, we are. You, on the other hand, have 15 misspelled words on the board behind you so I would suggest you stop second-guessing us and pick up a dictionary.

 

Example 2: In the middle of a rant about Plato (spelt ‘Platoe’ on the board a couple of times), our professor will stop abruptly and begin talking about how he tends to confuse his wife and cats’ names. And to make it even funnier, that cat’s name is something like “Fluffy” or “Scratchy” and his wife’s is “Eugenia” or “Meredith.”

It goes something like this:

“Yeah, Socrates and Aristotle (spelt ‘Aristotles’ on the board) are easy to confuse. Kind of like my cat *Giggles and my wife *Angie.”

The entire class immediately perks up.

“Yeah, my wife Angie and….mumble mumble….Giggles gets on the table… mumble mumble…and then I’ll say ‘Angie! Get off the table!’ and you can imagine how mad that makes my wife!”

Crickets chirp while our professor pauses for a laugh that will never come.

 

Example 3: While going over potential quiz questions, our professor began to write a sentence with an em dash in it – (<that is an em dash.) I know it is an em dash because we use them in the newspaper frequently and when you insert them, you have to go up to the menu, click insert, and scroll down to ‘em dash,’ which is right next to ‘en dash.’ I also know that there are shortcuts on both Microsoft and Mac computers to just insert them using keystrokes instead of selecting it with your mouse.

I acknowledge that I am one of the few people in the universe who have this knowledge stored away and will ever need to use it. Our professor didn’t seem to think that way.

“Oh, this!” he said, rambunctiously pointing to his em dash, “this is an em dash. You know how you get one of these to pop up when you’re typing up a paper or something?”
No one answered.

“Well, first you have to type the word, and then a space and then two of those dashes in the upper right hand of your keyboard…and then you…”

And the entire time he explained this, he was writing out a visual explanation on the board as well that was complete with ‘word^space – – space^word.’ Then, to top it all off, he writes it on the board as an ‘M Dash.’ My inner editor went insane.

And no, he wasn’t done yet. He went on to explain the difference between what he wrote down as an ‘M Dash’ and an ‘N Dash.’ Who honestly cares? And what does this have to do with Greek philosophers?

 

So, all I’ve learned in this class, which costs nearly $1,000 at my college, is patience. Lots and lots of patience.