As an undergraduate, I majored in biology with minors in communication and history. I was ecstatic when I found an interdisciplinary class that combined my interests in science and humanities. I signed up for the elective expecting to work hard. The disappointment started almost immediately. I think he cancelled the first class because he was out of town (and the class only met once a week). The next week, he told us in the first few minutes that we all bought the wrong textbook, even though it had been listed on the syllabus he wrote. He spent a few minutes talking about the main themes of the course, and we were instructed to come up with a topic for our class project.
I started to feel excitement again at the prospect of learning a different side of science. Although a new to our university, this professor had an impressive research background and had traveled to interesting places for work, so I was sure I could move past a few little problems at the start of class. I spent the next week developing my class research project.
I met with him in the third week of classes and started to describe what I was interested in pursuing. I barely had a sentence out of my mouth before he was telling me that the things I was saying were narrow-minded and wrong. I tried to continue the conversation, and he kept interjecting that there were more nuanced issues to the topic I needed to consider. I left the conversation in tears and dropped the class (and later found out that more than half the class did as well).
Looking back, especially after teaching my own classes, I can understand the approach he was trying to take. In a class largely composed of science students, he was trying to challenge us to think in a dramatically different way. Unfortunately, he didn’t take the steps necessary to 1) find out anything about our educational backgrounds, and 2) gain the rapport with us that is necessary to engage in that type of discourse. The second issue was compounded by his seeming lack of interest in teaching the course and respecting us as people (like telling us which book to buy). I’m sure I could’ve made it through the rest of the semester, especially if I had let the initial shock of his rebuttal wear off. It simply wasn’t worth my time, though, especially given his apparent disinterest in helping me succeed.