As you all know, I tend to have a lot of oddball ideas. Or, to be more charitable, I'm often to be found out on what the statisticians call the "tails of the distribution." There's in the box, there's outside the box, and there's Wade who is somewhere on the edges of the solar system where there may or may not be a Pluto called a planet.

I don't apologize for that. It's what I am. It's what I value.

But I'm not thinking about myself so much as about the other occasional "oddball" teachers I have seen, like the psych professor we once had here who invented his own language and tried to get people to adopt it. Or the wacko conspiracy theorist. Or the radical creationist on a philosophy faculty. Or the Marxist teacher of accounting. Or the knee jerk nonconformists. Oddballs that might be ideologically rude, or interested in weird questions that no one else seems remotely interested in, or who weighes evidence in some outrageously different way, or who just can be guaranteed to go off on a tangent from the received view.

Should we:
1. Encourage teachers to be such oddballs? Discourage them?
2. Tolerate the occasional one who slips through, but strive not to hire any more than one can avoid?
3. Hire more of them as teachers?

What?

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For better or worse, the teachers I remember are the oddball ones.

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My gut reaction is yes, they serve a very valuable purpose by challenging the status quo. I do think the age of students they teach is important. If it's college level or beyond, those students should have enough of a belief system already that these teachers will merely challenge their beliefs or get them to think outside the box. On the other extreme, if it were elementary school teachers we're talking about, it could do some damage...

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I always liked the "thinking outside the box" types of teachers. Like Zombie said, they are the ones you remember.
I had one in college. I had to take a psychology course in order to get my degree. I didn't want to take one, but had to. My psyche professor was a REAL oddball. And he questioned Frued's turning everything into "sex". He was SO much fun to listen too, that he made learning fun.
I ended up taking his abnormal psychology course the next semester. He was THAT good!I got straight A's through both courses. Each day it was an adventure when you went into his room.
Yet he wasn't so far out that he didn't teach you anything.

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So you guys are calling this old, retired teacher an "oddball" huh?? I'll show you whose odd. ShaZam! May your computers die a slow ugly death...except for Cheesey's. His seems to die on its own without much help.

Anyway, what's odd to some might be normal to others, so I don't think we're going to go far with that point. What is "normal"?
I think most oddball teachers Wade and others are thinking of are college professors whose purpose in their educational life is to "publish or perish." Publish here also means the verbal mode, as in lectures that are so far out, the Hubble telescope couldn't pick them up on a clear night. Those of you that went to college for any length of time, (more than 5 days) know what I mean.

However, I have had some seemingly, by my standards, oddball profs who were brilliant in the classroom in bringing out the best in average students like me. Two that I had come to mind.

One was Dorothy Johnson. She was a literature/writing professor who scared the living crap out of all of us jocks just by showing up in the lecture hall. She was a real character who paraded around the lecture hall with an umbrella in one hand and a long pointer in the other that she would usually use to wake up either me or Tom Huffer, our quarterback on the football team at the time. She'd get off on week long tangents about her latest writings and be so far out we didn't know what the hell she was talking about.

Little did we realize at the time that she wrote the novels that the movies
"The Man who Shot Liberty Valance", "The Hanging Tree", "A Man Called Horse", and several others were based on.

The other professor was a gentleman who taught political science classes on a part time basis. He would come into class, drop his briefcase on the floor, take out his pipe, stoke up, light up, and one day announced to us all, "politics is the one place an ordinary guy like me can bullshit his way around and seem very important, when actually we're not. It's you people out there that make us important because you elected us to serve you." His oddities....he was so involved in politics that we used to dread his lectures on the Senate happenings. He'd get worked to a fever pitch, which for him was maybe a rise in his blood pressure of about 5 points, and look out the window and talk for the full hour.

The man.........Senator Mike Mansfield. I'll never forget him........or get that pipe tobacco smell off me.

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My "oddball" teacher was my high school history teacher, Mr. Greener. Well, he wasn't a crazy oddball or anything, just very, very, very, VERY anti-authority. He was a total hippie protester in the 60s. He'd always tell us stories about protests and he'd always refer to himself and his friends as "Commie Pinko Faggots", because he said that's what everyone called them back in the day. Anyways, I learned a lot from that guy. There's the American history you learn from textbooks, and then there's the American history that happened between the lines of those books. The dirty stuff they didn't really want people to know. Not conspiracy theory stuff, just the real versions of the stories we've been taught since grade school.

Anyways, he would constantly butt heads with the principal, who was a real...well, the best way to describe him would be if Agent Smith from the Matrix ran a high school. So, these two would be on each other's case at all times. It made for some really great times in class when the principal would sit in. His teaching style was all over the place, so we never knew what to expect.

He wasn't scary weird or anything. He had a bottle of scotch in his desk, but what teacher didn't? Haha! I guess the thing that made him the oddball was that he actually treated us like adults. He was the one teacher who stuck up for us when we knew our class elections had been rigged. (That's a whole can of worms that still pissed me off to this day. We proved it, but the principal told us that his vote, and I quote, "was the only vote that mattered".)

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As usual Wade, you pose some interesting questions. And as much as I dreaded any course on Economics, I believe that attending one of your lectures / discussions might be most interesting.....if that is possible with economics. ::wink:

I have been on both sides of the fence so to speak, student and teacher.
As to being the student, you want to talk some odd professors, try taking courses from guys with PhD's in Engineering!

As to the teaching part, some of my methods were considered "oddball" by some of my colleagues, but they seem to garner the students attention and peak their interest. And to me that is want it is all about.
I am not saying that is for everyone however.
But then many of you already know that I am somewhat of a "strange duck".

For example, when I was teaching Turbine engine theory, I would roll into the class on a skate board and intentionally fall forward and the skate board would "fly" backward.
This to demonstrate the basic theory of jet engine propulsion....Newtons third law of motion.

Same class I would begin by summarizing how a jet engine works by stating that it all boils down to Intake, Compression, Combustion and Exhaust. Or as I like to refer to is as..... S.S.B.B.
Suck, Squeeze, Bang, Blow.
Probably would not get away with that one these days.

I would also on occasion teach a course at the local high school on aerodynamics (boring to most teenagers). So I had them design and construct a paper airplane that would carry an egg and land it safely.
The "regular" teachers were not impressed, but it did peak the students interest and hopefully foster their desire to learn more...and in my opinion that is what it is all about.
My greatest pleasure when teaching was when a student would tell me that I had made learning interesting and fun.

The ability to teach takes many forms and everyone that does teach must develop their own techniques and methods.
And just because someone is very knowledgeable in a given subject does not mean that they can teach it.

<ramble off....y'all have a great day!>

Had to respond to this bit with an aside: Being found with said bottle in one's desk now is probably nearly as bad for one's career as being found with one's hand under a coed's sweater.

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Re:
1. SSBB: I love it!
2. "regular" teachers: Back when I was a student I was a suck-up to all the teachers. I'm a slow learner: only after I was one for awhile did I realize that, for me, the only teachers that mattered much were the irregular ones -- that I was already getting the stuff the regular teachers provide just by buying and reading books.
2A. And a big ol' pile of books is a lot cheaper than a semester's tuition and fees. (Students sometimes can be heard complaining about the price of textbooks; what they ought to be complaining about is that they're paying 10 and 100 times as much for teachers who are giving nothing more than what their $100/200 textbooks can give them.

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At first I was going to say, oddball teachers are great.

But now I'm thinking back to my schooling days, what do I remember?

I don't remember much of anything specific that I was taught. I remember more about who taught me. I barely remember any of my macroeconomics, but I do remember our Sierra Leone teacher who threw blackboard dusters at sleeping students and watching The Gods Must Be Crazy during class.

Or our 70 year old, fit-as-hell Geology teacher, who we nicknamed Ray Gorgeous (he could outpace a thoroughbred). I still remember his frustration whilst out on a field trip, pointing at a 60 m high dolerite dike, and not a single student knowing what the hell he was on about. But that doesn't make it any easier for me to remember what composition dolerite is (although admittedly I still remember the colour, after Ray Gorgeous had to go up to the cliff face and almost touch the damn thing to identify it for us).

I was going to say, oddball teachers are great. But I have to qualify my statement that the teacher him/herself need not overshadow his/her syllabus. The process of learning itself should be fun and oddball teachers are a means to that end, but not an end themselves.

I suppose, in my opinion, it doesn't really matter so much what personality the teachers are, so long as they can effectively teach the curriculum. They are characters, yes, and we love them for that. But purely from a learning standpoint from a student's perspective, it matters more that the message is delivered, rather than the fancifulness of the messenger.

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