I’ve talked before about a past teacher of mine who gave heaps of fucks about learning. This is another one: Dr. Howard Good.
Professor Good’s another one of my top 5 favourite teachers of all time. I took his ‘Press in America’ class at SUNY New Paltz in New York State, back in ’07 (almost 10 years to the day, actually). And on RatemyProfessors, it’s no coincidence he gets the best rating and ‘awesome’ after ‘awesome’ from ex-students over and over and over and over. He gave massive fucks about learning, and really gave massive fucks about people who didn’t want to.
One afternoon in the fall semester of ’07, most students were either more hungover than usual or just couldn’t be assed being in class. Professor Good constantly put good questions to his students. Questions that made you think, challenged what you think and made you think differently about what you already thought. But on this day, after getting nothing back, question after question, he lost it (in a good way). He basically told the class to wake the fuck up (my words, not his) and shouted: ‘You people are like Fucking Gandhi – You’re passive aggressive, all of you!’ (his words)
Awesome. So damn freaking good.
That’s someone who gave massive fucks about learning. And not only’s an inspirational teacher someone who gives massive fucks about learning, it’s also someone who can inspire curiosity.
Sidenote: Professor Good also played this movie for us one day in class:
Idiocracy tanked in America (I think it even went straight to DVD). And I know exactly why. The reactions of the class during that screening are why.
They were unimpressed, unmoved and almost bored by it. Why? Because for them, growing up in America, that world in Idiocracy –one where the president’s a gun-wielding nutter who says shit like ‘Now I know shit’s all fucked up right now‘ in the State of the Union address– wasn’t actually that far-fetched. As President Camacho would say, those students just kinda thought ‘Shit ain’t that different up in here right now’:
But the real reason Idiocracy bombed’s because of its genius. It’s set in 2505, but in reality, it wasn’t 500 years ahead of its time; it was only about 10.