To be fair, many math professors have the didactic abilities of a monkey.
I remember a professor and made no sense whatsoever. You felt that he was bored teaching Analysis and decided that he'd do everything but.
At one point he was talking about his theoretical work on the Riemann-Zeta function, on another point he talked about his childhood memories. He did this every lecture, hopping back and forth to what he was actually supposed to be "teaching". The equations were splattered across three blackboards in an absolutely illegible handwriting. No one could read that handwriting. On top of that, he switched from English to French to German every other minute. He was not able to maintain a consistent train of thought for longer than 30 seconds. Then, regularly, one minute before the lecture ends, he realizes that there is an error on the blackboard and starts to erase half of all the variables (which we couldn't read to begin with) and starts to doctor around.
In short, we had no clue what that guy was talking about. Not a single fucking clue. And at first, you just think that you are that dumb. That you are going to fail miserably. After all, this was the beginners course! There was one for advanced students! Because I had worked as a web dev after high school for a year and after that, I had to do one year of mandatory army service, I naturally enrolled in the beginners course.
After a month I changed to the advanced course. Of course now I had also no idea what was going on. Good times. Just reciting this story makes me angry.
I've had an absent-minded professor or two, but that's far worse than anything I experienced in 4 years of college.
High school on the other hand is another story. They hired a chemistry "teacher" off the street who turned out to be drunk every day in class (mind you, this is first period, 7:15am!), it took several weeks to figure it out because her personal hygiene was so bad you couldn't get close enough to smell the liquor.
On the other hand that was public school, so I didn't pay anything. Still a better deal than most people pay for college these days.
We had another prof (statistics / stochastics) who had no official course material and recommended ten books worth 1'500 bucks. We quickly realized that you could either write down 12 pages per hour until your arms were sore. Or that you could forgo taking notes and try to understand his lecture. But not both. After a couple of weeks we tried to split duties. After a month we started to photograph the blackboards. Then we wrote a small OCR program for fun and ended up with some form of script for the course.
Anyways, our efforts were pointless because the professor decided that he'd include advanced topics in the exam. Topics which were not included in his course and outside what his defined boundaries for the exam. I think most if not everyone of the class failed to get a passing grade. His laconic remarks were about how at such an "elite" college, you need to learn stuff beyond what is required of you.
I don't know, the first two years at college just left a sour taste in my mouth.
I remember a professor and made no sense whatsoever. You felt that he was bored teaching Analysis and decided that he'd do everything but.
At one point he was talking about his theoretical work on the Riemann-Zeta function, on another point he talked about his childhood memories. He did this every lecture, hopping back and forth to what he was actually supposed to be "teaching". The equations were splattered across three blackboards in an absolutely illegible handwriting. No one could read that handwriting. On top of that, he switched from English to French to German every other minute. He was not able to maintain a consistent train of thought for longer than 30 seconds. Then, regularly, one minute before the lecture ends, he realizes that there is an error on the blackboard and starts to erase half of all the variables (which we couldn't read to begin with) and starts to doctor around.
In short, we had no clue what that guy was talking about. Not a single fucking clue. And at first, you just think that you are that dumb. That you are going to fail miserably. After all, this was the beginners course! There was one for advanced students! Because I had worked as a web dev after high school for a year and after that, I had to do one year of mandatory army service, I naturally enrolled in the beginners course.
After a month I changed to the advanced course. Of course now I had also no idea what was going on. Good times. Just reciting this story makes me angry.