I teach at a college, but I’m not on campus every day. One day after class, a student asks to have a meeting with me on a day I’m not on campus. I suggest an online video call meeting, they agree, and I set up a meeting and send them a link.

That day, I log on at the appointed time. The student is a few minutes late and seems flustered when they log on. They’re getting their notebook and book and pencil case out of their bag, and they start flipping through the notebook. I wait, assuming they need to find the page with their questions.

Me: “Let me know what your questions are when you’re ready, no rush.”

Then, the student starts to write. I’m not entirely sure they heard me, so I wait a minute.

Me: “What are your questions?

Student: “Hold on…”

I wait. And wait. The student is still writing. They haven’t even made eye contact yet, which isn’t unheard of since the online meeting format can be awkward anyway.

Me: “Did you have any questions?”

They finally look up.

Student: “Yes, let me just find them.”

And they continue writing. I sigh and pull out my phone while I wait.

Finally, after twenty-five minutes of this, I decide that this is the most pointless student meeting I’ve ever had.

Me: “I have another meeting in a few minutes, so I’ll need to log off soon. Do you have any questions I can help you with?”

Student: “No, thank you! I’m all set.”

And they logged off.

I later spoke with a tutoring center advisor who works with that student, who said they like to do their homework in the presence of their instructor in case they have questions. And I should absolutely sit there in silence while they do that. I was pretty annoyed, since that’s a complete waste of my time.

Fortunately, that was the only time the student did that. The next time they tried to schedule a meeting, I was actually unable to fit them in, so I told them to do their homework, write down any questions they needed help with, and THEN come to me. They never did, though.

I had a professor who was a Sigmund Freud fangirl. She taught a class that had nothing to do with psychology, but she liked to relate the material to Freud and his discoveries (including reading a book from him that had no relation to anything else being taught).

By then, Freud had been thoroughly debunked. Every now and then, there would be a student who had enough background in psychology to refute what [Professor] said about Freud. Each time, she would pause, and then, while maintaining a bright smile and tone of voice, she passive-aggressively made it clear that the door was closed on all further discussion down that avenue.

Someone even brought up Karl Jung, to which [Professor] outright said that there was no such person. Apparently, the mere mention of Jung was a button of hers.

On the subject that [Professor] taught, she welcomed discussion and debate. But where Freud was concerned, we all had to pretend that he was the only psychoanalyst to have ever lived, his body of work was perfect, and all psychology and psychiatry worth talking about was Freudian.

When I was in college, back in ye olden days, my professor for Chemistry 101 assigned lab partners. We were also expected to “help” each other, tutoring as necessary. He had access to our transcripts from both college and high school.

He assigned me a tall guy we’ll call Bill. Bill was… not good at Chemistry. Every single lab consisted of me telling Bill how to do it, correcting every little thing he did wrong, and basically doing it all myself while Bill “helped” by writing down what I told him (after I spelled way more words for him than you would expect).

Bill would constantly chat about stuff — not chemistry-related stuff, just random stuff. I was venting to my fiancé one day and mentioned something Bill had said.

Fiancé: *Giving me a weird look* “Do you really not know why you were assigned to keep Bill passing?”

Me: “Why?”

Fiancé: “Football.”

This was a big football school, division 1. Bill was their starting quarterback.

He went on to a fairly unremarkable pro football career.

This was in the 1970s when security was lax. It was the end of my first year at university in the UK, a day before the official end of term. Many of my student friends had already gone home, and I was at a loose end.

I decided to go on a personal bar crawl round campus and had a huge amount to drink. On my stagger back to my hall of residence, I discovered that I didn’t have my key. So, I staggered out to the porters’ lodge to see whether they could unlock my door.

Me: *Probably slurred* “Very sorry, I seem to have lost my key. Are you able to unlock my door?”

The cheerful porter made no move to get up out of his comfy chair. Instead, he quickly unclipped a big bunch of keys from his belt and held one of the keys aloft.

Porter: “That one!”

I staggered back to my hall, tightly gripping that key of the bunch. I tried unlocking my door, but the lock wouldn’t turn. Was I using the wrong key from the bunch? Should I try all the others? 

But on instinct, I tried my door handle, and my door opened. And wouldn’t you know it: my own keys were still on my desk! I had never even locked my door in the first place.

I groaned at my stupidity for not even trying my door before haring off to the porters’ lodge. I sat on my bed, idly looking at my own keys and the porter’s ones. And then I noticed something: my own room key and the porter’s key were quite different. I tried the porter’s key in my own door, and it worked. Clearly, the porter’s key was a master key. No doubt many of the other keys on the porter’s bunch were masters.

Obviously, what I should have done was take the porter’s keys back to him straight away. However, I did not do that…

Instead… I somehow just fell asleep. I woke up late the next morning, maybe 9:30 or 10:00. I remembered what had happened the night before and realised, to my horror, that I had been hanging on to a massively valuable set of keys for ten or twelve hours. I quickly rushed off to the porters’ lodge, and the same porter from the night before was there, along with a colleague.

Me: “Hello, I’m very sorry. I forgot to bring these back when I borrowed them last night.”

The porter didn’t say anything, just stood there silently with his mouth open as I handed him the keys. The porter’s colleague just laughed; the laugh had a cruel edge to it.

Today, I wonder whether the porter panicked a bit when I didn’t come back the night before. Did he come out hunting for me? (I would guess he had no idea which room I was in.) Did they call in campus security? Did they put in a request to rekey every door on campus?

Even in the 1970s, what on earth would possess a porter to hand the keys to everything to a drunk nineteen-year-old? Although he probably knew me by sight as a genuine student, he was taking one heck of a risk.

Perhaps he was just fed up after a year of continually helping idiot students back into their rooms, etc. And right at the end of the year, the porters were rushed off their feet the whole time.

This story reminded me of a story my granddad tells of his brief time as a college lecturer. 

Granddad worked for the same bank for his entire career, working his way up in seniority. When my grandma got sick, he decided that he wanted to spend more time looking after her, so he changed jobs and took up a part-time lecturing role at a college, teaching about banking and accounting.

Part of Granddad’s duties as a lecturer involved setting and marking the final exam based on the content he’d taught during the year. As an inherently fair person, he made sure that everything he asked on the test had been covered at some point in his classes, although that also included tangential subjects that weren’t strictly part of the curriculum but had been discussed anyway. 

Once he’d completed the marking, he was called into the boss’s office during moderation.

Boss: “Now then, [Granddad]. I see that you’ve awarded [Student] full marks on his final exam?”

Granddad: “Yes, that’s right. [Student] has worked very hard this year, and it’s paid off. He answered every question correctly and provided a high level of justification, showing that he also understands why he got the right answers.”

Boss: “Well, okay. But we never give 100% to anyone. That suggests that their answers were perfect and there’s nothing they could do better.”

Granddad: “Yes, that’s what I’m saying. [Student] has done everything flawlessly. If he were my employee in the bank, I’d give him a bonus for exceeding expectations.”

Boss: “No, no, no, you don’t understand. We never give anyone 100%. The highest score we ever award is 97%. You need to change your mark to give [Student] 97%. It’s still an excellent score, and it won’t affect his overall grade.”

Granddad: “But it’s not true! [Student] achieved a perfect score! He couldn’t have done anything more unless he’d taught the course himself! I will not punish that. If your marking system only goes up to 97%, then you’re telling me that 97% is actually 100% which, as a bank manager, I can tell you doesn’t make any mathematical sense! [Student] will receive full marks for his assessment because that’s what he deserves.” 

The student kept his perfect score. Granddad went back to the bank shortly after this exchange. He decided that academia wasn’t for him.

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