Waltisms
Quips and Sayings of Professor Walt Will of Luther College
Collected by Nathan Pralle
Professor Walt Will is one of the many excellent professors in the Computer Science
department at Luther College in Decorah, IA, USA. During my tenure at Luther, I got the
pleasure of having him for a few classes, the most noted being Databases. These quotes
are collected from that class session. I typed them up and printed them out and handed them
to the class before the final exam began to entertain. I present them here so other students
of Walt's can appreciate his dry yet funny teaching style.
"Have you hugged your computer account lately?"
"...and I'll try to make those times as gentle as possible as we slam you to the mat."
-- Walt on relational databases and the math involved in them.
"One of the prerequisites for the course is to read -- or read if you are pressed. I'm
pressing."
-- Walt on his theory of motivation
"Oh...Oh...damn it anyway."
-- Walt trying to work out a math problem on the board and coming up horribly wrong.
"...couldn't we bring this tuple into the join and give it some friends to play with?"
-- Walt on sympathy towards tuples lost in natural joins.
"When you want it, you really want it. But you can go days -- weeks, even, without wanting
it."
"That should have given you who are going to copy this time to get it copied, and the rest
of you time to fall asleep. Good job on that so far."
"You walk into your typical bar in Decorah and I'll bet you won't."
-- Walt on the lack of
people who can write SQL in Decorah.
"It amazes me how you can walk down the street and meet people every day that couldn't
write a line of C++ if their lives depended on it."
"Have you seen this textbook in the room at all??"
-- indicating the course's one-and-only
textbook.
"...where you were thinking about something else and he was up here babbling on about
whatever he talks about. I've been there."
-- Walt on the attention span of his 2:30pm
class.
"You get a good score, I get the illusion that I'm teaching well, everyone's happy."
--
Walt on his teaching strategy.
"I apologize for being too lenient and I promise to make it up in the future."
-- Walt on
the easy grading on a certain test.
"I'm skipping over the part I really wanted to skip over for the time being."
"The great thing about standards is how many we have."
"So as you sit here ignoring me, in a skyscraper in Manhattan and a barn in Wisconsin,
people are writing SQL queries...."
-- Walt on the importance of SQL in daily living.
"...just imagining a person on a mountain bike with pink sprockets just puts a little joy
into my life."
"Well, you look around for awhile, and unless some of you have names I don't know
about...there are no Ferraris in the room."
-- Walt somewhere on the intricasies of
functional dependencies.
"And it caught the attention of those people sleeping, just for an instant; I don't have
high expectations here."
"I'm suggesting that most of you are well enough traveled that you know that there is a
First Avenue in more than one city. Also, that Decorah isn't the only city with a main
street."
-- Walt on travel habits of college students.
"You can come in here and hold hands and sing, 'We are the World' or something, but if you
can find something else to do at 2:30 on the Friday before Spring Break, go for it."
"...And if this trips your trigger, you can read all weekend if you want."
-- Walt on the
erotic pleasures of multivalued dependencies.
"I had this debate with myself, which I lost."
"We've all become so perverted that we think that a tree's roots are at the top and leaves
at the bottom."
-- Walt on CS vs. Biology
"I can only lose so many battles with myself."
-- Walt showing the strain of a long
spring semester.
"Oh, just kidding. Just trying to wake a few people up, just for a moment. Kind of ease
'em back into reality."
"Get a life."
"You have big buffers. Nothing personal, but you do."
-- Referring to the size of some
people's memories.
"They tend to love their computers in a way that's, well, kinda scary sometimes."
-- Walt
on Macintosh owners.
"Back in the 60's and 70's everyone thought it was smoking dope."
-- Walt on hashing
algorithms.
"Maybe it's a database of stolen cars. And the one you bought doesn't show up there.
That's a good thing."
-- Walt on the positive aspects of databases
"I have nothing against fractions and some of my best friends are decimals, but..."
-- Walt on his relationship to math.
"Dang it to heck."
-- Walt on stubborn B-tree algorithms.
"Dammit anyway. Or 'gracious', whatever the expletive of your choice might be."
"Sometimes your little sister could answer it."
-- Walt on the obvious answer to some
final questions.
This page and all content (C)2002-2004 Nathan E. Pralle.
www.nathanpralle.com
Unauthorized distribution is prohibited except with written permission of the author.