You’ve probably heard of college shenanigans a la Animal House, but in this story, an animal physiology department took things to a whole ‘nother level.

Seems more like savage psychology to me.

Let’s dig in.

University teacher does petty revenge to the class

Biology undergraduate students vs animal physiology teacher going like low-key feud…

I must give you some context beforehand, so you can understand the story. Unfortunately this may be boring.

There is a low-key dislike between the biology students and the different teachers of animal physiology.

Phylum, class, order, family feud?

Yes, the topic is difficult, but it’s far from being the sole reason: teachers and professors of this subject are often disliked not only because of the difficulty, but because most of them (not all tho) are quite jerks towards the students (significantly more than other professors).

Sounds like a weird stereotype, but we can roll with it for now.

At our university, for all fields, tutorial classes and lab work classes have mandatory attendance, but lectures do not. So, attendance to lectures is quite a good measurement of a given professor’s quality of teaching.

For example, one of our biochemistry professor has insanely high attendance to his lectures, despite the topic being complex and demanding hard work.

There are various professors that are really good and beloved by the students, but their lectures are boring so they have low attendance rates. They, however, do great tutorials.

Alright, so there are good and bad teachers, this we know.

This is true not only for biology but also other fields. For example, mathematics students prefer to attend one professor’s lecture than the exact same lecture but provided by another one.

Professors and teachers who have very low attendance rates are (understandably) upset by the students not coming (and they do so for understandable reasons).

Immunology lectures have average attendance rates, despite the topic being as much complex and difficult as animal physiology. So it’s not only because the topic is difficult.

I highlight this since both animal physiology and immunology are taught at a much higher level than in other universities. As undergraduates, we get taught things that usually are taught to graduate students elsewhere.

Students are more afraid of being bored than challenged. Message received.

So, once all that context is posed, we may begin the crispy part:

On Tuesday morning there is a physiology lecture. Extremely low attendance, more than usual.

Then the same evening (6:30pm so after the end of the teaching day when everyone has gone home) we receive an email from our current physiology teacher.

Something tells me this email is gonna be vengeful…

By Thursday morning, for the tutorial, we have to make groups, and analyse a given figure (issued from a scientific paper), and rehearse it so we may present it in front of the classroom.

This type of work is usually done not on such a short notice. We usually do the groups in class, right after being told the work we must do. Then we have a couple of days, from 3 to 5, to do this kind of work, for the following tutorial.

But here we have to do all of this in one day and evening.

Even professors of boring subjects can spice it up with some spite.

So yah. Our professor decided to do us dirty per retaliation for getting (deserved) low attendance to his lecture the same morning.

Who’s in the wrong here?

Let’s see what the comments think about this animalistic dispute.

One commenter is missing the point.

Another person thinks the best revenge would be getting the students getting their money’s worth.

Another commenter agrees, the teacher doesn’t need to seek revenge as the students are already doing themselves a disservice.

Wow, yet another user agrees – the teacher did nothing wrong.

And finally this person says, maybe you don’t like the teacher but so what? Maybe the teacher doesn’t like you but they still show up.

Teachers don’t know everything, but sometimes they definitely understand the assignment.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.