Posted July 30, 2001 06:15 | Category: Story | #
What lecturers REALLY think of their students...
A friend of mine who happens to be British, and has a delightful accent, teaches chemical engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. A few years back he was complaining about how deadly dull the undergraduates were. He said that they were so lacking in curiousity and sense of humor, that he would bet that he could show up for his morning lecture wearing a "redcoat" uniform like those worn during the revolutionary war, and nobody would ask anything about it. So he did just that, complete with pointed hat,boots, and sword. There was a very tense moment at the end of the lecture, when he asked "Are there any questions?" One hand went up. The student asked "Will the material on blah-blah-blah be on the exam?"...
A friend of his had been lecturing on the doppler effect to a really, really dead class. Finally, in sheer exasperation, he pointed to the equations on the board, to be more precise, at the (speed.of.sound - speed.of.object) in the denominator and said: "This particular portion of the equation shows where the sonic boom comes from. As the speed of the object approaches the speed of sound in air, is part slowly goes to zero. Finally, when the object hits the speed of sound, a division by zero error occurs, reality rips, and all of the air in the surrounding area pours out into the 4th dimension."
The class took notes....
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Last updated: 09/19/2007 William R. Ward, bill@wards.net