For those of you who are students, this is about the time school starts again. What are your teachers/professors like? My first day at college was monday (I'm enrolled at U of maryland, college park) and after going again today (only have classes on MWF), I have a good idea of what mine are like:
microeconomics: grad student, very friendly and a good teacher. Only problem is that he asks the students questions a bit too often for my liking, although he does just wait for an answer instead of asking individual students. Only gives homework once a week and it doesn't require any more work than the two-day assignments of some other classes.
advanced calculus II: Not sure what to make of this guy. Apparently they changed the lecturer for this class at the last minute and I think he will be taking over for the entire course. Although he is a full professor and is quite friendly, he either has no idea how to teach or is not really familiar with the subject (his area is somewhat different, closer to my stuff actually). Lectures are littered with "uh"s, long pauses and minor mistakes, refers to the textbook constantly while talking and today wasn't able to answer a very simple question from one of the students about a proof he did. Hard to understand what he is talking about and he seems confused about it himself. Also tends to stand directly in front of what he is writing on the blackboard, which can get annoying when trying to take notes. On the plus side, he indicated that he is not quite as picky about details in proofs as most math professors are, so the tests will be easier.
PDE (applied): postdoc, very friendly; talks very softly and has a thick accent so it can be hard to tell what he is saying, but fortunately writes almost every single word he says on the blackboard, so it doesn't matter. As in the econ class, homework is only one assignment a week.
number theory: full professor, friendly and very good at teaching. Very passionate and enthusiastic about the subject, although has a tendency to run over the class closure time due to this. For some reason, although this is supposed to be a third year undergrad class, he still takes roll call every day, although I don't know whether not showing up counts against you or not.
I dropped the physics/mechanics class for various reasons after one lecture, but that guy was quite good too (full professor, old but lively) and had a pretty sophisticated homework system. It's all done through java applets on his website.
I'm happy with them overall, but I need to think about what to do with the AC2 class, as I can change any of the classes in the first two weeks and there happens to be another interesting class at the same time. Maybe I should ask another professor who I know personally about what he thinks of this guy.
On a side note, I had a dentist appointment today and was rather surprised to see the old newspaper article on me posted there; although it would be useful to show to the math professors, it is creating a bit of needless publicity even now.
Anyway, what kind of teachers have you gotten?
