Imagine this, you’re a first year student and you’re thinking: I got some decent professors right now, but who are the really good ones? You can always ask around your fellow students or spend an hour on ratemyprofessor.com, but no one’s gonna be as comprehensive as this list, so don’t even try. Just read below.
5. Professor Cone
I took an intro film production course with Professor Cone, and on the first day of class, she handed everybody a camera and said, “Make your movie!” and everybody ended up breaking their camera by week three. No one completed their movie.
I was trying to remake “The Godfather” but with a slightly different ending where Michael’s like, “Eh, this isn’t for me. I’m gonna become a dentist,” but I unfortunately got my lens a little too close to a dental drill on one of the shoot days.
My friend Marcus, who was in the class, told me he actually filmed “a really epic film about like, redemption and stuff,” but his dog ate his movie, so he couldn’t finish it! Professor Cone was so disappointed in all of us that she just ended up showing movies for the remaining ten weeks of class. I got to watch “The Lego Movie” three times!
4. Professor Ranspreebus
I took “Intro to American Politics” with him, and we did a mock government where I was elected as class president. Which would have been great if Professor Ranspreebus hadn’t unanimously elected himself Puppetmaster Dictator.
Politics is really hard. I attempted to repeal the electoral college, passing the amendment in both houses with supermajorities, but then the Puppet Master Dictator Professor Ranspreebus struck it down, yelling to no one in particular, “I AM THE SUPREME RULER APPOINTED BY GOD HIMSELF AND I WILL SMITE ANYONE WHO ATTEMPTS TO REPEAL THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE AGAIN.”
Welp. Sometimes all you can do in politics is throw your hands up and sigh. While he was an excellent Puppet Master Dictator, Professor Ranspreebus was also a great teacher.
He taught me a lot about politics, like that you can only filibuster in the Senate and that if you use ZYN, it means you’re a conservative.
3. Professor Moolah
I took Professor Moolah’s Intro econ class my first year and it was unforgettable.
On the first day of class, he said to us, “You see this paperclip, here? I traded it, and then traded some more stuff, and then I bought a superyacht at age 12. That’s economics.” Everybody started weeping as we all collectively realized that that was economics.
One time, I went to Professor Moolah’s office hours because I was really confused about the nature of supplies and command, and as I was explaining my question, he interrupted and said, “Sell me this pen,” pointing down at a standard blue bic cristal Xtra Smooth Ballpoint pen on his desk.
For ninety minutes, I attempted to sell him the pen in a complex game of pen-selling chess, but he wouldn’t budge. Eventually I just had to keep the blue bic cristal Xtra Smooth Ballpoint pen. Professor Moolah then attempted to trade me a paperclip for the pen, but I decided to cut my losses there and keep it. I learned a lot from that meeting: Nothing about surprise and demands (or how to sell a pen, really) but it didn’t matter. That’s just economics.
2. Professor Frizzler
I took anatomy with her and Professor Frizzler is a legend. In week 3, she seemed to think she wasn’t getting through to us about the nervous system, so one day out of nowhere she was like, “We’re gonna take a field trip, gang!” So, we went into the parking lot to a shuttle bus that she had procured somehow.
We all piled in, and on that particular day, one of the students in the class, Arnaldo, was absent because he was sick and Professor Frizzler was like, “You know Arnaldo? We’re gonna go up his nose.” Suddenly, the bus shrank down to the size of an ant and deployed wings. Over the river and through an open Noyes window, into Arnaldo’s nose we went. From there it was upwards to the Hippocampus. Boy, was that pineal gland baller!
Anyways, we all agreed to tell Arnaldo that we went to the box factory that day and not up his nose in the case that he’d ask, but Arnaldo was out for most of the rest of the semester with headaches so it didn’t matter. You might think we were kinda mean to Arnaldo, going up his nose and whatever, but I heard Professor Frizzler had an astronomy class with Arnaldo, and when they were visiting the planet Pluto, he foolishly took off his helmet and almost died. She’s resented him ever since.
1. Professor Axoleff
I took “Intro to Music Theory” with Professor Axoleff and I was really excited because I wanted to learn how to play the piano but he wanted us all to learn music theory on a plastic recorder instead, explaining that he didn’t know what a piano was.
Learning the recorder was fine. One time during a group recorder session though, Professor Axoleff was getting really frustrated with my playing, so he threw a tambourine at me. I ducked to avoid it, and then we had this exchange:
“Do you know why I threw that tambourine at your head?”
“‘Cause I suck at recorder.”
“Yes.”
That was a much-needed wake-up call for me. Later in the semester, when we started to get better at recorder, he softened up and kept asking people to join his free jazz ensemble, an offer no one ever took him up on. It was like the film, “School of Rock” but instead of forming a rock band, he wanted us to perform loosely 20-minute improvisations on the recorder with him.
One night, a couple guys from the class and I drove to Rhinebeck to see his free jazz ensemble. He was really bad, but it taught me that part of music is just putting yourself out there, and that some people are better teachers than doers. I’m not saying this was a great class, but Professor Axoleff helped me pretty much master the recorder, which gave me something to put in the Skills section of my LinkedIn.
CONCLUSIONATORY SECTION
While this is a pretty damn good list, you have to figure out for yourself what kind of professors you like, which means taking a lot of different classes with a lot of different professors. Whether you’re learning recorder, getting overruled by the puppet master dictator or breaking expensive camera equipment, you never know what kind of class you’re really taking until you take it.