Freshman Panic: Professors' most embarrassing moments

My most embarrassing moment in college occurred at the beginning of my junior year. I was in charge of freshman orientation and had been so distracted by those activities that I had failed to sign up for a lab section. I arrived on the first day of lab and encountered a young man in casual clothes who looked very young, and I assumed he was the TA of the course. He started to berate me for failing to sign up for the lab, and I told him, in no uncertain terms, what I thought of his officiousness. What I didn't know was that he was a new assistant professor and in charge of the course.

— Shirley Tilghman

Thirty years ago, almost to the day, I began teaching at Cornell University. Barely 24 years old, I had never taught, not so much as a precept. Worse still, Cornell asked me to give a lecture course. But the University of Chicago, where I had studied, offered virtually no lecture courses in humanities. Even elementary courses usually enrolled fewer than 20 students and took the form of seminars. So I had no experience to draw on as I started to prepare my first lecture. Trembling with terror in the blazing heat of an upstate New York August, I read several dozen books and articles about the Black Death, the cheery topic from which I had chosen to begin. I copied out quotations, studied graphs and read battling historians. Then I wrote my lecture and rewrote it and added to it, over and over, until I could come to class with a thick pad of notes as my frail security blanket.

When I arrived at my classroom on the first Monday of the term, I took my place at the podium and began to read, and I mean read, from the handwritten text, hardly daring to look at the students in front of me. The lecture seemed to go on forever. But when I finished it and looked up, I was stunned to realize, from the clock in the back of the room, that it had filled only half an hour. What to do? I couldn't let them go 20 minutes early? I was terrified that someone would find out, and I'd be fired. So I said, "Well, just in case any of that wasn't clear, let me go over it once more." And I read most of the thing again, faster. What a catastrophe, I thought. I averted my eyes when the bell put us out of our misery and the students finally left the room. Back home in my apartment that night, I assumed my career was over. I would never become even a modestly competent teacher: time for law school applications. Embarrassed? I thought I would probably die when I returned to my classroom for the second class and found it empty.

But on Wednesday, to my amazement, the kids all came back. I breathed again (as I hadn't since Monday morning). This time, I also managed to look at them while I talked and to give a connected lecture that spanned all of 45 minutes. There were a few laughs and a couple of questions. In the end, they stayed in the class, worked hard and wrote fine papers and exams. One of them, a freshman, ended up becoming a distinguished scholar in my field. Whenever we meet, she assures me that I wasn't nearly as terrible as I thought at the time. So cheer up: some of your professors are freshmen, too, and they are just as nervous as you are, or more so. We're all in this together, and, somehow, we will get through it and even manage to learn something and have fun along the way.

— Anthony Grafton, History

Well, here's one. It's a true story, and I'll remember it till the day I die. In my freshman year at Yale, I had a seminar with a professor of English, A. Bartlett Giamatti, whom I held in the kind of awe generally reserved for a deity. And believe me, I wasn't the only one who felt this way. He was a brilliant teacher, sublimely inspirational and acute, hilarious and incredibly strict. If you've ever seen the movie "The Paper Chase," you get the idea. (It took me years — I mean many years — to realize that his sternness was mostly an act.) Just to give you a sense of how intimidating he was: it took me six weeks to work up the nerve to approach him and tell him he was mispronouncing my name. "Gee guy," he said, as he slapped me on the back, "why didn't you tell me before?" Why didn't I tell him before? Why did no one ever tell Thor that his thunderbolts weren't perfectly aimed? Anyway, one day I was with a friend at a local bookstore, and we came across a big shelf of sale books in ancient Greek. I said to my companion, "maybe we should buy some and impress our friends." Not a hilarious line, I admit, but hardly bad enough to deserve the vengeance visited upon it. Suddenly a voice behind me booms: "You do that, my young friend, and you'll impress nobody!". It was Giamatti, of course. I'm not the kind of guy who wishes for superhuman powers. I never even had a superman cape when I was a kid. But I do remember wishing that I had the power to drill a hole in the ground and just disappear forever, right then and there. I also remember thinking of this as further proof (not that I needed any) that Giamatti was quite simply omniscient. In fairness to the memory of my teacher, I should add that, seeing my beet-red face, he took pity on me and invited me to lunch. (Not that I ever took him up on it: the idea seemed about as relaxing as having a beer with the Pope.) I should also add, in fairness to his memory, that no one has ever taught me more about literature, not to mention the educational uses of dread.

— Jeff Nunokawa, English

Some things look embarrassing only in retrospect. My mother can send me into fits of embarrassment by reminding me of the summer I spent in Oxford, England, just before I started college at Barnard in New York City. I had a crush on a hairdresser named Roddy or Neville or something else terribly British. So I went back to his shop repeatedly and let him do stranger and stranger things to my hair: he shaved the sides of my head and spiked the hair on top, bleached the top and left the bottom brown and finally dyed the top a fiery orange. This was in 1984, at the height of my punk phase. When I came to college, I wore a long black cape, my new creepers and this hairdo: I looked like a bat with its head on fire.

On line at the orientation picnic, I struck up a conversation about Siouxsie and the Banshees with a French girl, Jacqueline*. Her hair was dyed black, almost shaved on top, with long bangs that fell over her kohl-rimmed eyes. She wore fishnet stockings, combat boots and a vintage granny dress cut (not hemmed) to mini-length. We immediately became inseparable, which meant I was handmaid to her depression all year.

Every night, I was required to meet Jacqueline at Tom's Diner (yes, the one in Seinfeld, though it didn't look like that inside) to rehearse the same conversation: Jacqueline was terribly homesick and desperate to return to Paris. I thought she should go, but she said she couldn't possibly go because her father, an American diplomat living in Paris, would be too disappointed in her. We cycled endlessly through this conversation until, finally, I refused to meet her anymore.

All year, I also obsessed about being in the wrong place. Before I came to New York, I believed my life there would be like Andy Warhol's factory. I would make art 24 hours a day, I would be as glamorous and as troubled as Warhol's Harvard-education starlet, Edie Sedgewick. It was disappointing to find that I had to eat and sleep, take required courses and live in a dorm. I thought if I were downtown at the New School, my life would be much cooler. I dreamed of transferring, but didn't.

That was freshman year, and sophomore year was completely different. I fell in love with the discipline of philosophy, with scholarship, with the Columbia library and with the swimming pool.

I feel sorry for the child I was freshman year of college. You are smarter and saner and happier than I was then, and you will be okay.

*Name has been changed

— Sandie Friedman, Writing Center

>I think my most embarrassing moment as a student was a result of my inability to get up in the morning. I kept missing 8 a.m. classes in Chinese (I majored in the language), until one day my professor called me at home and told me to get out of bed and rush right over — which I did! I never missed another Chinese class....

— Edmund White, Creative Writing

A few years ago, I was teaching a session at Harvard Summer School on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The day before my class was to begin I was sitting at home, dutifully preparing handouts for the first day of class, when the phone rang. It was the Summer Session office asking me if I was aware that I was supposed to be teaching a class for them —a Monday/Wednesday class — as of 45 minutes earlier. As you can imagine, it's worse not to show up when you are the teacher because it is hard for other people not to notice. I got to the classroom before the session was over, however, apologized a lot and ended up having a great experience with that class.

— Christopher P. Bush, Comparative Literature

I'm absolutely terrified of bees, especially when one finds its way into closed areas. One day, during class, a bee entered the room and wouldn't leave. I found it impossible to do anything, let alone teach. I was so panicked and my voice became so high pitched that my students made me leave the classroom and only let me return when a certain large swimmer had taken care of the bee. My voice dropped several octaves, and I was safely able to resume teaching. At the end of the semester, the students gave me a stuffed bee as a present.

— Joshua Katz, Classics

After I was accepted to Rice as an undergraduate, I decided to visit the campus. I also met with an admissions director on campus. During the course of our meeting, I excused myself to quickly use the bathroom. After I exited the bathroom, I took a wrong turn and got completely lost. I went outside to find my bearings and ended up walking back to the front door. The door would not open no matter how hard I pulled, although, I had opened it about 20 minutes before. I realized at this point that I had been away from my interview for some time and that the admissions officer must be wondering what exactly I was doing in the bathroom. Just as I was wondering how I could open this locked door, I pushed it, and it opened. I had been pulling the whole time. I was exceedingly glad that I had already been accepted to Rice.

— Thomas Shutt, Physics

On the last day of exams (a Saturday, so all the various administrative offices were closed) I forgot where the final exam I was supposed to be giving was being held. I ran around campus desperately, trying to find something that was open, with the knowledge that somewhere 100 students were starting to get very impatient. I finally made it to the room and was greeted with much applause and hearty chuckles.

I failed them all.

No, no, of course not. But that was pretty much a low point. I'm afraid most academic embarrassments manage to be both excruciating to experience but dull to relate.

— David Sussman, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy