Originally Posted by
T. A. Gardner
I can and have. I think the funniest stories come out of a single class I took, freshman astronomy. I took it in my junior year because I needed a filler course for my GI Bill benefits. If you take less than 12 credit hours they severely reduce the cash you get and I'd have had to pay some for courses if I let that happen.
Anyway, I took it because I'd already had courses in chemistry (both inorganic and organic), geology, physics, etc. For me I saw it as an easy 'A' and that it might be fun to take. The prof PDQ figured out I was an outlier / ringer and pulled me aside after one of the first sessions to tell me that I'd get an A but only if I helped the rest of the class...
So, the class was filled with liberal arts majors, mostly women. There were like 60 to 80 students in the section. I can remember having to show them how to do precession using basic arithmetic and simple algebra rather than the way the prof had shown them after class on the whiteboard. Or, the time that the prof had us calculate the age of the Earth using the half life of uranium... That was hilarious! I came to class having done this simple problem not even thinking about it.
The class was in an tither over it. Seems nobody except me had been able to do it because the half-life of uranium wasn't in the class textbook and nobody else (I used my hand dandy chart of the nuclides) had the brains to look anywhere else for it... So the prof had me hand him my little chart (it's the part necessary for fission and fusion calculations) and put the number on the board. He let them have to the next class to do it. I had to show many how you would do it...
Or the lady that refused to believe that the defense budget (this was before class) wasn't the biggest part of the federal budget. No amount of sources and graphs would convince her otherwise.
Or another I got held after class--I'd related this story to the prof earlier--to tell another female student that planes could easily disappear in the Bermuda Triangle without a trace. This was about an A-7 on the Enterprise that had gone down about 40 miles from the carrier off San Diego during training ops. We searched for four days and didn't find anything, long story short.
That class was such a hoot. The bulk of the liberal arts majors were vapid idiots. They couldn't do simple algebra. They had no real skills at researching or documenting anything. They were like high school students going through high school a second time.
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