One of the worst professors ever

As you may know, I received a C- in my calculus class over the summer, which means I have to retake the class.

My professor now is a guy named Dieudonne Phanord. If you stumbled through that last sentence, don’t feel bad: I don’t know how to say his name either.

Now, this guy has an accent. That wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t go off on seemingly non-sensical tangents. Or if he didn’t try to teach things from chapters 2 and 4 when we haven’t even gone over chapter 1. Luckily, I know the course (having taken it already), so when he starts talking about derivatives and integrals, I have an idea of what he’s saying.

Today, he started telling us what the definition of a derivative is, using limits, even though he hasn’t taught us what limits are.

I was glancing around the class, and all but a few of us (other retakers, I’m assuming) had very puzzled expressions.

He also went off on a tangent about concavity and inflection points (we were doing a review of common functions) even though that discussion doesn’t come up in the book until chapter 4.

Wow.

His tangents are not confined to strictly mathematics, either. He tells us all the time “Since you’re all engineers, blah blah blah” and goes off about something in engineering. Sorry, I’m not an engineer. And I told you that before. He also does the same thing with other fields of science (eg. “Since many of you are physicists…” etc. He hasn’t said “Many of you are economists…” and I don’t expect he will, either)

Did I mention it is a calculus class, and he is expecting us to write a ten page research paper? Yeah. That too.

End rant.