10/10/03’s illustrious band:

Michelle Michelle Musally

Brought to you by WhoSEZ and one of her college professors.

When WhoSEZ was in school, she had a professor who always called his students by their full names and always said the first name twice. "John, John Doe? Jane, Jane Smith?" Some names, when repeated according to this formula, rolled off the tongue more mellifluously than others did. Michelle, Michelle Musally was one of them.

This story, repeated over dinner at the incomparable Sahib's, which is where God would go for Indian food if He were in town, reminded me of a few more teacher tales from my undergraduate days. There was, for instance, an instructor whom I heard some friends of mine, normally considerate young women, refer to as Harelip. After hearing them say this a couple times, I scolded them for making fun of someone's physical deformity. They looked at each other blankly, then burst out laughing. They were talking about their German teacher, Herr Lipp.

Oh.

Then there was Dr. H, an English professor known best for relating every work of literature and topic of conversation to the Vietnam War. Students wryly appended "and the Vietnam Experience" to the names of all the courses he taught.

Well, one semester I was taking Victorian Poetry and the Vietnam Experience. The class convened at the ungodly hour of 8 a.m., and it's already been established here that I am not a morning Media Sensation. It was a winter course, held in the basement of an old stone building on the east edge of campus in a classroom next to the boiler room. As Dr. H explicated in the front of the room and heater radiated through it, I began to doze.

Are you familiar with the phenomenon of napjerk? That's when you're nodding off, head drooping forward, then suddenly yank your head upright. I was sitting in the very back row of the class, and I napjerked so hard that I whacked my head against the cinder block wall behind me. I was more surprised than injured by the impact -- until Dr. H interrupted his lecture to ask if I was OK. Then I was mortified.

And then there was Dr. B. Dr. B was renowned in the academic community for his expertise on the Salem witch trials, but he was infamous on campus for casting a spell of a different sort. He apparently washed neither his body nor his clothes, resulting in B.O. of epic proportions.

Dr. B's students always hoped his classes would be held in long, narrow lecture halls so they could crowd to the back, at a safe distance from the deadly funk. Inevitably, however, he always seemed to end up teaching in wide, shallow rooms. People would sit at one edge of the room or another, hoping he would deliver his wisdom from front and center. Unfortunately, Dr. B liked to pace back and forth in an effort to address all parts of the room, wafting his personal cologne across the entire space. It was a little easier to take during warm weather, when we could open the windows, but during the winter, when the buildings were all closed up . . . well, you saw a lot of students sitting in class with scarves over their noses. And we would all rather have failed the course than enter his office for a meeting.

My favorite, however, might have been a sociology professor whose name escapes me. This kind and earnest man taught a summer school class called Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice and was bewildered that no one signed up for the end-of-term barbeque at his house.

Ah, school days. Bring back any favorite/least favorite teacher memories? Share them with the class.

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