Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Dante's inferno has nothing on this

Worst college teacher, easy. Brother Parry (or Perry, I don't even care to know which is right). He was my comparative literature teacher my freshmen year. I had an amazing English teacher in high school who urged me to pursue a major in an English field. I didn't want to; I wanted to do geology. But nonetheless, I figured I could at least take a few classes in English. Brother P killed books. He was incredibly dry and refused to allow opinions. If we didn't agree with his interpretation of Dante, we were definitively wrong. Although I am no feminist by any stretch of the imagination, my high school teacher was, so my analytical eye had been trained to catch those undertones. Bro P. was the opposite, and saw nothing of the sort. Because of our drastic clash of interpretations of literature, I lost my desire to try to impress him with his own regurgitated opinions. The best part of the class was that it was in the basement of the newly-constructed JFSB in one of the spinny rooms, so the chairs were really comfortable and the room could rotate. The soft chairs and dim mood lighting created a fantastic nap atmosphere. And I drew some great pictures. I had two of my best friends in the class with me, as well as some very choice characters from my ward (the topper and the scapegoat) so... although I learned nothing about Bro P's interpretations of The Book of the City of Ladies, Machiavelli's The Prince, Sophocles, etc., it served its purpose as an opportunity for hilarity and catching up on much-needed sleep. Bleh, just thinking about that class leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I also had a really bad TA once, in my Political Science 110 class. She was nuts. But that's another story.

2 comments:

Ann Albertson said...

What about Mr. Valdez. He was a winner too.

Tyler said...

Middle School actually doesn't exist. Like Canada. Which is just really North Dakota, all along. But if it did, yeah, he would win. No teacher at BYU has actually TOLD me they don't like me and would do anything to get me out of his class if he could. Hehe, what a crazy crazy man.