Fictional Faculty? Real? You make the call ;)

The following is the college experience described by the main character in Tim Gautreaux's short story, "Welding with Children."

I think sometimes about how I even went to college once. I went a whole semester to LSU. Worked overtime at a sawmill for a year to afford the tuition and showed up in my work boots to be taught English 101 by a black guy from Pakistan who couldn't understand one word we said, much less us him. He didn't teach me a damn thing and would sit on the desk with his legs crossed and tell us to write nonstop in what he called our portfolios, which he never read. For all I know, he sent our papers back to Pakistan for his relatives to use as stove fuel.

The algebra teacher talked to us with his eyes rolled up like his lecture was printed out on the ceiling. Most of the time he didn't even know we were in the room, and for a month I thought the poor bastard was stone blind. I never once solved for X.

The chemistry professor was a fat drunk who heated Campbell's soup on one of those little burners and ate it out of the can while he talked. There was about a thousand of us in that classroom, and I couldn't figure out what he wanted us to do with the numbers and names. I sat way in the back, next to some fraternity boys who called me Uncle Jed. Time or two, when I could see the blackboard off on the horizon, I almost got the hang of something, and I was glad of that.

I kind of liked the history professor, and learned to write down a lot of what he said, but he dropped dead one hot afternoon in the middle of the pyramids and was replaced by a little porch lizard that looked down his nose at me where I sat in the front row. He bit on me pretty good, I guess because I didn't look like nobody else in that class, with my short red hair and blue jeans that were blue. I flunked out that semester, but I got my money's worth learning about people that don't have hearts no bigger than bird shot.

Hilarious, yes, but doesn't feel fictionalized at all :(

I have always favored short stories over full-length fiction, though I have done my fair share of reading the longer ones too.  I read this Gautreaux story in a collection--The Best American Short Stories 1998.  I picked it up from the nearby Goodwill for a mere 99 cents.  If only I got such a value out of every dollar I shell out.

I wonder how much of the dollar students get back as value when they are in my classes.  A penny for a dollar?  Is that an overestimate?

Speaking of faculty and their strange ways of teaching, check this syllabus ... ahem, yes, it is a fake syllabus, but the points he brings up are not far from the truth!