So, I have this horrible lecturer for two of my modules and he’s relentless when it comes to dishing out the workload. Luckily, I have this jerk for one more week. 

It’s been a difficult road for me this semester… 

Where to start? I’ve been knocked down with a disasterous flu bug since I began college in October and it has continued to plague me in November. I finally recovered in December – touch wood it stays that way. I think my weakened immune system was down to the lecturer from hell.

I’d heard of this hellspawn last year because of his less than complimentary reputation but I only understood why he got that reputation this year.

As I said before, I have this bastarf for 2 boring modules. One of them is a history one where basically we look at crappy yellowed pieces of paper and analyse these old-ish primary sources. The full title of the module is Archival Research and Oral History – it’s as dull and pointless as it sounds, rest assured you’re not missing out on much. Once you’ve seen one source you’ve seen them all. Hardly anyone comes to his class regularly, bar me and a few Chinese girls. Oh and two other wannabe geeks  (who are too slow and scattered to fully claim the title of geek extraordinaire). Occasionally a Muslim girl (out of three) makes a rare appearance. But the seminar class is just composed of ten of us. Most weeks the devilspawn lecturer is lucky to have 7 poor souls in the class. And now that the Chinese girls have arranged to fly back home this week, it looks like there’ll probably be three victims stuck in that gritty, cold, suffocating little room at the back of the library. Oh joy.

So, I’ll tell you something about the horrible 40-something lecturer, shall I? He went to Oxford, it’s generally agreed by most people I’ve spoken to that he’s “socially inept”, he likes to observe people in the class with his cold, piggy lazer-beam eyes, he has an odd, somewhat childish, sense of humour, he’s an obvious geek (the boring, cruel-faced ones) and he’s the definition of a slavedriver.

Never again will I choose a module if he’s teaching it. This guy is awful for reasons I’ll go into. Now this isn’t the case of a disgruntled, whiney student bemoaning a strict but fair teacher. No – I wish life was that simple. It’s actually much worse. This guy, undoubtedly, is the vilest teacher I’ve had the mispleasure of experiencing  (and trust me, I thought some of my secondary school teachers were insubstantial – devil lecturer makes them look like cheery tots). 

He expects you to magically figure out the specific details about coursework that lie embedded in the tangled depths of his brain. Even if go up to him and ask him straight up: “How do you write a good intro?” You will make very little progress in your task because the guy changes his mind so frequently that you’d think he was an old hag deciding on what stairlift to buy. He is the type that makes up his own rules on the spot. Too damn unpredictable. I think he specialises in psychological warfare, because you never know how he’ll be around you. If he’s smiling, you can’t just relax around him because your grades may get fucked.

So far, I’ve been trying to carry out a steady programme of buttering the douchebag lecturer up – and amazingly enough it’s been working to some extent. I got a B grade for one of my coursework drafts – I was scared to look at his feedback when he sent it on Wednesday. I thought I’d get a shit non-grade like a X maybe. In his feedback, he never even mentions most of the points he later reveals to us he wants us to include within our drafts during the class or office hours. No matter how much time you spend looking exam-related guidance on the website or spending time with him, it’s no use. With him, you can NEVER win. He’s ultra argumentative and he loves to nit-pick every sentence you say even though you may be clarifying his words into your own words. This guy is a lost cause. 

I’ll probably continue writing about my experiences with devilspawn lecturer in a future post, so stay tuned and FOLLOW ME! Cheers.