ARG! I need to rant. I have issues with incompetents in positions of power. And I'm not talking about President Bush either.

1) My professor for thermo this quarter is seriously mindnumbingly stupid. I'm sure he's actually really not ... but he just can't teach worth beans. Firstly he makes us take a quiz at the beginning of every class, which has GOT to violate some kind of honor code. Then he proceeds to lecture the material in an order that hardly makes sense.
He uses a model on a system that OBVIOUSLY does not fit it. So I sit there for 10 minutes trying to work out what he's trying to achieve... and then at the end of this long and lengthy process tells us that it doesn't work and that all we did was wrong. Why couldn't he tell us this in the first place, then proceed to work in the hypothetical case of "if it did work" instead of lying to us.

2) Why can't people proofread? Or at least sort things out in their head before they say it. When you write an equation, please make sure it is correct. I'm spending most of my mental capacity correcting errors in the textbook (excusable) written by the TAs (less excusable but still ok) and points made by the prof (very not excusable when you proceed to defend yourself.)

3) The next time I hear someone pronounce French names and phrases the way he does... I might just kill them. "Voilà" is pronounced "Wahller" and Antoine as "An-TOE-in". And the names of the other famous chemists are horribly mangled as well. And even his normal speech sends chills down my back. I'm sure it's an accent thing, and that I'm particularly aware since I still prefer English English, thank you very much... but still. (Side note, I wonder if there is an inherent speech bias, where Austrailian is considered vulgar and English (and not American) is considered upper class.) Anyway I find myself in a pissy mood when I'm in the class... I'm pretty sure it's also a factor of how much he actually cares about us and the material. It's a subtle thing but it's actually really easy for a student to tell when the really doesn't like the class, and if the prof doesn't want to be there, why should the students bother?

4) I think I have a need to learn something in my classes. Otherwise I don't go or sleep through them. I do a subconsious cost-benefit analysis and if there is no cost to sleeping, I just go ahead and do it. This is also why I tend to get low grades in lower-level classes while I'm doing really well in my graduate level classes.

--C.