ROCKEFELLER HALL—Students of Professor Gary Whitman have expressed growing concern for their physics instructor after his lectures took a dismal turn in the last couple of weeks. While the discovery of Whitman’s ongoing divorce saddened his pupils, few of them were surprised. “Yeah, he’s kind of been hinting at it,” admitted Shriya Pradhan ‘28.
According to his students, many of Whitman’s recent example problems have included details seeming to pertain to the professor’s personal life. “We’ve been doing these elevator problems to learn about the normal force,” explained Pradhan, “but he always starts them by saying the person in the elevator was kicked out of his house and is living alone in a shitty studio apartment.”
“Also, he keeps making weird additions to the laws and equations in our packet,” added Cory Kellman ‘28. “Like, under Newton’s first law of motion, it says, ‘An object at rest tends to stay at rest, unless it’s my wife sneaking out when she thinks I’m asleep’.”
Whitman reportedly spends ten to twenty minutes per lecture “demonstrating Newton’s third” by banging his head against the blackboard while weeping softly.
Last Tuesday, he confused students by introducing angular momentum a month ahead of the syllabus so that he could explain the “downward spiral problem”, which comprised the entirety of the week’s problem set.
“He gets this vacant look in his eyes whenever he mentions ‘free-body diagrams’,” commented Kellman. “Also, when he grades them, he marks off with a jagged red arrow through the middle and labels it ‘i for the cruel, unforgiving force of Infidelity’. I just hope the poor guy makes it through okay.”
At press time, Whitman was cited asking his ECE 2100 students to calculate the electric field in a capacitor whose plates seem doomed to drift farther and farther apart to infinity.
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