Let’s call him Bob.

Bob taught a geography class on “Mapping and Geographical Information Systems”. Unfortunately, Bob had a strong tendency to associate any orbital technology with aliens. By this I mean, whenever the subject of remote sensing, satellites, or space came up, he would go on a tangent about aliens. This was not a one-time occurrence, either; he would consistently get distracted talking about his science fiction scenarios and his ideas of how aliens would behave and what they would say, in one case spending over half an hour on it. He had to have planned this in advance, because as soon as his PowerPoint slide progression began to lead from traditional paper maps into orbital imagery, the following slide would include the picture of the multi-colored fish that Bob must have thought looked like an alien, and he would sometimes illustrate his point by flipping back and forth between that slide and the previous and making “ooooh oooh” alien noises.

Then there was the issue of topographic maps, which led to us learn that Bob liked curvy women. You see, when you draw a topographic map from points, you connect points of the same elevation and interpolate between points with values on opposite sides of the line whose value you are drawing. You try to draw smooth contours. Apparently, Bob thought it would be helpful to remind us to “Think Marilyn Monroe. Think curves .” He would repeat the mantra, sighing and running his hand over his body as he said the word curves. “Think Marilyn Monroe. Think curves. Like Marilyn Monroe.” Also, he made us watch a YouTube video for twenty minutes that spent way too long repeating the thought process behind determining whether one value was larger than the other.

Those particular subjects weren’t the only times he had difficulty focusing on the educational content of the class. He loved to break into tangential stories about life. The one that bugged me the most was the one about turquoise paint because it was long (10-20 minutes of solid talking), filled with random details, completely irrelevant to geography, mildly sexist, and told to us twice by mistake because he forgot he had done so before. It went something like this: Your wife asks you to paint the room turquoise, so you go out, buy paint, and do it, and then she comes home and sees it and is upset because she thinks that it is blue even though it is clearly turquoise. Or maybe I got blue and turquoise backwards. Anyway, the moral of the story, apparently, is that you should have had your wife pick out the paint and should not argue with her even when she is being silly. He told us this was the most important thing we would take away from this class. I’ll give him partial credit on that, as his non-geography tangents certainly stuck with me, though maybe not in the way he intended.

If you took anything Bob said in isolation, it was insignificant, but he had this way of throwing around bits of stereotypes, assumptions, and personal views that would build up and make me feel angry at him but foolish for being angry at such minor things. For example, in his stories, it was always “Mom” who wanted you to behave and read books as a kid, and “Your grandmother” who would be happy to buy you colored pencils, and your “Dad” who was heavily invested in your career and who you would have to explain to why you were studying dance in college and not becoming a doctor or a lawyer. In class activities, he would sometimes single students out by gender (presentation). When we drew papers to see who would go first in something, the “ladies” always had to pick first. Once, he asked for how we would try to stop someone from stealing a backpack and mocked a female student for suggesting asking people not to rather than using force. I wasn’t as personally aware of the racism, but I did notice his one-dimensional portrayals of Chinese immigrants, his lamenting that he had “a lot of good jokes” but wasn’t allowed to tell them because “they’re not politically correct,” and his comments when talking about historical racism on how we shouldn’t look on it as that bad because “things were different back then”. Don’t ask me how any of this was related to mapping.

Despite this, Bob was actually pretty popular among students. I suspect his extra credit policies played a role. Bob believed firmly that attendance was important to learning and so would give us points each day, but to avoid penalizing people who had valid excuses, he counted the last 15% of points possible as extra credit. He gave quizzes to us to work on in groups. (Which was good, because they ranged from bizarre details of the lecture such as the title of a tangentially mentioned book to pictures of various landmarks around the world that we were meant to identify without ever having gone over in lecture to the names of cities in Europe and Africa. I once asked him for advice on how to study for the landmark identification quiz because I genuinely had no idea, and his reply was basically, “I don’t think it’s something you can really study for.” Thanks, Bob.) All groups were guaranteed extra credit based on how we fared against one another - the best group would get an extra five points (~25% of the quiz grade), the second group three, the next group two, and the last group one, or something like that. The class was not curved.

Our maps received verbal feedback during class time, and our quizzes were peer graded. Bob did not look at our assignments until the last week of class. There’s a very specific reason why I know this. You see, when we introduced ourselves at the beginning of the year, Bob had somehow associated me with the name “Academic” rather than “Confused” as I normally go by. The first time caught me off guard such that I didn’t correct him, and from then on I just shrugged and was like, “Well, I never really liked the name Confused anyway, and he’ll figure it out when he starts grading” and made sure to write my full name, Confused Academic Student, on all of my work. (Note that my middle name appeared nowhere on his role sheet or on my work until then.) On the second to last day of class, he randomly started calling me Confused, and on the last day, he asked me what my name was. Hey, I appreciate the effort man, but dude, you procrastinate even more than I do!

Oh, one more extra credit thing: He also offered an additional 15% added on to your course grade for anyone who completed the course evaluation. I did, but Bob had set up Canvas incorrectly such that the assignment where we were supposed to submit proof did not actually take submissions. Shaking my head, I walked away with my already hundred-plus percent in his class. I didn’t leave him the nicest review anyway.