Absent-minded professor

**Absent-minded professor** is a archive of the original Troper Tales entry that was first hosted on the TV tropes website.

Definition:

"*This Stock Character is a brilliant scientist, but, uh, very flighty, often forgetting things like the date, people's names, meetings, eating, people's names, etc. His mind tends to run a mile a minute, he can often struggle to hold a normal conversation, and it's typical for him to become so engrossed in his work that he loses track of just about everything else.*"
―TV Tropes website
## The entries

* My Arabic teacher, while being very talented and passionate about literature (among other things), is a perfect example of this trope. He usually digresses into discussing moral quandaries and Arabic culture. Also, myself (minus the professor, but I've been mockingly described as one from time to time).
* This troper heard a literal story from her art professor - he was cutting something with an exacto, saw some friends leaving, said "See you at lunch" ( his exact words) and...long story short, that fingertip didn't grow back.
* This troper's English teacher goes off on random tangents that ... have absolutely nothing to do with the topic being discussed. For example, at the beginning of DST, the class (consisting entirely on 16-year-olds) had to spend the next 45 minutes attempting to explain Daylight Savings Time to a man in his late sixties who has lived in a place with Daylight Saving Times for the majority of his life. Another time, about a week later, he spent a full half-hour discussing social etiquette at prom... He also tends to go off on tangents about Mexico. And Arizona. And California...
* This troper had a teacher in Law School who would trail off mid-subject to things like advising his male students to not get involved with any of their clients, specially when handling a divorce case.
* Fawriel: had this image in elementary school already. The professor part could be explained by his intelligence relative to the other kids. The absent-minded part, on the other hand - let's just say he went to school in his pajamas once and leave it at that.
* Template:Tropers/Bossman's father is a comparative literature professor who's usually pretty aware of what's going on. Unless he's actually working, then good luck trying to get him to actually acknowledge that anything besides him and his work even exists. Tell him anything and he'll go "Uh-huh", but if you ask him what you just said, he won't have a clue what it was. Meals are a real challenge, as you can call him to the table five minutes before anything is actually served and he still won't show up by the time everything's on the table. And expect him to be cranky from low blood sugar when he finally does.
* Just recently, This Troper's class went to the school library for a portion of the block to do research. She picked up a book on Switzerland and started reading... completely forgetting to go back to class.
* My entire college was made up of Template:Absent Minded Professors. One of which left the class waiting for him to show up. One member of the class went and got the department secretary. He was in another professor's office, he'd totally forgotten that he had a class that day. If it hadn't been a lab, and if we hadn't been such nerds, we most likely would have left.
* I once had a really absent-minded Japanese teacher. She'd forget about homework she had assigned, use the first-year vocabulary flashcards on the higher-level classes multiple times a week and never noticed, forgetting her entire lesson plan (which she attempted to solve by writing down her lesson plan on paper, only to lose her place in it), and so on.
* My band director was notorious for this sort of behavior. He is a *brilliant* arranger of music, and seems to be the most well-respected musician in the city, judging by the way other professional musicians act around him. He also frequently forgot what day it was, when practices were held, what songs were being played in the concert, and who exactly was soloing on them.
* My Year 10 science teacher was *very* absent minded. He may be great at science but when he wrote on the white board, all grammar and spelling goes out the window. Now, I know it's Science, not English, but it gets to the point of HilarityEnsues when all is confusion and lost. His favourite quote: "**Shut up your mouth!!**"
* One of [[Template:Tropers/CaptHayfever my]] math professors is an absolute genius in combinatorics & problem-solving, has written two textbooks & co-authored two others... and is one of the least organized, most confusing, least attentive, & most inconsistent teachers I've ever seen. Since extremely few of his students end up researching combinatorics (& I'm *not* one of those extremely few), his value as an educator is... lacking, to put it mildly.
* My eighth grade Social Studies teacher borders on this sometimes. Every now and again, he'd be handing out a homework sheet or a study guide for an upcoming test, only to notice that he's handing out a quiz from two weeks ago, but he's fun.
* My 8th grade history teacher would teach things that were only tangentially related to what we were learning because they were interesting, so every quiz we had ended up being at least a week later.
* My otherwise adorable history professor. He'd promised to lend me a book, and it took him three tries to remember to bring it with him to work, despite some polite nudging. Then he forgot to leave it where he said he would.
* My physics teacher is always forgetting small, important things. For instance five minutes after a demonstration with a strobe light did he remember "Oh by the way, does anyone have epilepsy?" My friends and I have a theory as to an explanation for this. He is the Lord of Physics and is too busy to bother with such trivial things.
* This troper had a similar physics teacher in high school. For one lesson we were testing the resistivity of various materials, including human skin. It wasn't until the lesson was over that he called out "Oh -- nobody had any open wounds did they?" He was also an automotive maintenance teacher, and had been known to leave an exposed motor running (to show an observing class how it worked) in an enclosed shed for several minutes before suddenly explaining the dangers of carbon monoxide.
* My first year university physics teacher was... frequently distracted. The way he suddenly derailed mid-lesson to explain his pet gravitational theory that he couldn't teach us officially because it was "forbidden science" was bad enough, but what really takes the cake is how he'd often just stop lecturing to do something like pick up a pen and drop it several times, marveling how gravity worked each time. His notes made no sense either -- they weren't notes for the students to use so much as something to do with his hands. A piece of paper titled "heat transference" that features a box with some wiggly lines on the side labeled "like dolphins" with 4000K written underneath is not particularly useful without explanation.
* My world geography teacher has been giving the same tests for about 13 years. He still hasn't realized that on one of them, he circled the answers on the master test, white-outed those very answers, rewrote the letters, and copied it. Needless to say, everybody except the one idiot who FailedASpotCheck got a 90+ on the test (one section was entirely handwritten in, so some mistakes were made there).
* I once had a Physics teacher named Miss Banner (Yes, really) for a first trimester class. When it came time for the second half of the course during the third trimester, I discovered that Miss Banner had been fired during the second trimester. Upon asking around for details, several teachers informed I that she had been fired for coming to class whilst wearing a Star Trek cosplay uniform under her jacket. One of the explanations proffered as to why she was wearing it in the first place was that she "just forgot she had it on."
* I once had a teacher who taught both math and science to both seventh and eighth grades. It was not uncommon to have her give us worksheets that were for the other grade, or to give us assignments out of the other grade's books. When we were asked to do, say, problems 30-37 on page 263, it was a pretty safe bet that there were no problems 30-37 on page 263. She once spent an entire science class setting fire to various (non-harmful, I assure you) chemicals to see what colour the flame would be. There have been many occasions when she has stopped mid-lecture to talk about something completely off-topic, such as StarTrek. Another time, there was one student in her class whose personal NightmareFuel was a certain science fiction novel, and the teacher and most of the students in the class were very familiar with the situation. Well, one day in biology she asks, "Has anyone here seen or read Fantastic Voyage?" At this point she notices the student in question, who is pale and looks like she is about ready to run out of the classroom. Prompting the teacher's reply: "Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I totally forgot about that."
* Tropers/JapaneseTeeth This Troper had a teacher in high school who showed up twenty minutes late every day, was completely oblivious to the end-of-class bell (he'd usually go for about 15 minutes unless we pointed it out), constantly lost stuff (up to and including a *sword*), distracted himself by doodling on the whiteboard (he started trying to draw a map of the U.S. and wound up drawing a caricature of himself), lets us listen to 18th century drinking songs (and the Beach Boys), and to top it off he completely coated the inside of his classroom with posters and other random stuff, which distracted both himself and the students. Yet the vast majority of the students and other teachers know he's the smartest person in the school.
* My current biology professor showed up twenty minutes late for class, just as we were all leaving. Apparently she'd forgotten about daylight savings time which had switched over... four days ago. To add insult to injury that Saturday, she had sent us an email warning us that we better not try to use DST as an excuse to be late to her class!
* [[Tropers/Template:Agapantha This Troper's]] current English teacher likes to do impressions of drama students and tell us all about her childhood and the episodes of TheITCrowd that she's seen... during the tests that she sets us.
* My high school maths teacher used to get so caught up in writing and rewriting equations he would erase them off the blackboard with the sleeves of his suit.

* My math professor this semester gets distracted and goes off on tangents (no pun intended) and complains about her health while bossing her assistant around. Said assistant is much more focused and better at explaining concepts than the actual professor.

* One day the teacher didn't show up to class, so the kids went wandering around the school. "Don't you have class now?" asks the teacher, surprised to see them in the halls. "Um... Yes. With you. " "Oh!" ...And so she came back to class for all of 30 seconds before drifting off again.

* I have had several teachers like this. At the moment there's one that often forgets/calls us by the wrong name, and is extremely OCD about leaving exactly on the bell, except, he often can't hear the bell over his shouts at us to sit back down. We always just get up and leave early anyway, ignoring his yelling at us, because we're all so sick at him yelling at us to come back when we're all already halfway down the hall and they bell had rung a minute ago.
* In grade 8 there was one time when a (usually normal) teacher, managed to forget what room we were booked in for. He comes up to me and a few others in the same class at lunch as asks us if we know where we are next lesson. We say no, you didn't tell us last lesson, so he goes to check if we're in the library, the computer labs, SC block or M block. We're not, so after about 20 minutes out looking around for a classroom that was free and that he had the keys to, he just said 'screw that, let's go up to the oval.' So we just played sport/did nothing for the next hour.

* My university is full of Template:Absent Minded Professors, but two stick especially close to mind: 1) Manages to make everything about Japan being "wa" (i.e. dwarves) to the Chinese when his subject is Korea and 2) never never NEVER manages to finish his seminar schedule... but when you leave his course you know things you never thought you'd ever know - from thermodynamics to the practical applications of cottage cheese when you're out of tofu.
* My linear algebra professor wore a cordless mike while he lectured. One day he handed out a quiz and left the room. Five minutes later, we heard strange noises coming over the loudspeaker, and sure enough, he was taking a leak with his mike on. And then he burped.

* I had a social studies teacher, who had a projector and a large Scerne in his class, when he was not teaching Social studies he had a history of cinema class. The troper got to watch Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, and many other classic films, but that is not the absent minded part - he would sometimes squeeze an off-topic SNL or Youtube short into his lessons.

* My quantum mechanics professor could do six-dimensional integrals in his head, but once he solved an equation he'd forget why he wanted the answer in the first place.

```
* My (sadly former now, but I don't know if I'll get her next year) maths teacher was incredible like this. She adored her subject, but that meant she'd go off on bizarre tangents while dictating notes to us, so we ended learning stuff we wouldn't need for like 2 years in addition to what we needed this year. Also, we managed to get her to spend 45 minutes of one lesson telling us her life story and such. And she lets us play Family Fortunes or other games on the board that have nothing to do with maths in the last lesson of term half the time. Despite this, we still finished the syllabus about 3 months early. She was just that good a teacher I guess.

```

* My old French teacher was a favourite of many, mostly because he tended to stop whatever he was teaching to tell stories of his childhood, previous jobs, or that morning's events, usually making fun of everyone in the process.

* Nomic: This Troper's]] high school physics teacher was rather easily distracted, and could easily be provoked into telling about all sorts of stuff he had done in his youth (apparently he had worked as boiler man on a steamboat and as a bouncer in a nightclub). We sometimes took advantage of this when we thought the lecture had been going on for too long. He was also in charge of taking care of the school's computers, and often forgot to tell us if he couldn't get to the class because he had to fix a computer, causing us to sit outside his class for an hour (we eventually made a rule that if he didn't show up in 25 minutes, we'd be free to go sit downstairs where there actually were chairs).
* My calculus teacher was this incredibly awesome old lady who would wander into class about ten minutes into the (forty-minute) period, discuss television, news, or some such for another ten or fifteen minutes, then attempt to find her lesson notes. She remembered to check homework on about three occasions over the course of the entire year, and we spent the last month and a half of school playing board games. Somehow, she managed to trick the class into learning enough to survive the AP exam... and has been doing so for years.
* My mother has also told stories about two different professors she had: one, who smoked while teaching, and occasionally would very nearly start to write on the chalkboard with his cigarette or take a drag of his chalk, and another, a foreign languages professor, who knew three or four languages and would often start class in the wrong language.

```
* This troper had a brilliant young adult literature teacher, one of the rare few who like it when students challenge them. This remarkable woman could think of every single thing you needed to know before teaching it and taught us how to defend controversial books in the classroom by showing us how to structure our arguments. She also used a version of MLA format that is not MLA format, lost papers and forgot deadlines regularly, and had an office so full of junk that I is surprised she could traverse it. Oddly enough, this professor, aside from her messy absent-mindedness, reminds this troper of her favorite literature teacher in High School, who always called this troper AbsentMindedProfessor.

```

* My physics professor in his first year at University is probably one of the brightest heads in Germany (Peter Richter, if someone happens to stumble upon him, specializing in Chaos theory but about to retire right now) but happens to one to the lessons pretty much unprepared anytime and having to do all the calculations of various problems in real time (or rather, fast forward, a lesson only got 90 minutes). Anyway, whenever he was done he usually wondered what he was doing it for right now.

* My father. One of this Troper's favourite memories was when he came home after class cover in blue dye. He'd been doing a demonstration for his science class and had managed to spill it all over himself. This was during his first class of the day, meaning he'd spent about six hours covered in the stuff. And it didn't wash off completely for about a month. He also wears skirts (sarongs, technically, but he's whiter than sour cream and just likes the feel of them) and once gave a girl a re-test (she'd failed the first test, and was already re-taking the course because she'd failed it the first time) with the answers attached. Then it took him an entire day and night to figure out how she'd gotten a hundred percent - despite the fact that after cheating, the girl had been too stupid to get rid of the answer sheet. This troper loves her father very much, but wishes he'd remember her name once in a while. :)
* I once had a 6th Class (Grade in America) teacher, who seemed to have an extensive love of history. Irish history, specifically. As a result, he'd often end up being distracted by long tracts about what happened to the Fenians, and other things, usually from his past. We once got him to spend an entire hour doing this, until I pointed out that he was going on a side track.. Cue groans from rest of class. There was also the case of his 3rd Year (9th Grade) History teacher, who was incredibly SnarkSnarky, and once, when he had to come up with a visual aid to help us remember the name of an old Irish newspaper, what did he bring in? A picture of StarWars Darth Vader. (Note: the paper was named "An Cloicheamh Solais" or "LaserBlade "Sword Of Light".
* Ugh, I had a science teacher in eighth grade who was practically school wide famous for being absent minded (Hobby Middle School. If anyone from there happens to go to this page, they will know *exactly* who I'm talking about). Hmm, let's see, can barely use computers, can be insulted when you're RIGHT IN FRONT OF HER, and she won't even notice, teaches us about dinosaurs by showing us **Jurassic Park**, and don't even get me started on PANGAEA! Of course, the other science teacher is a CloudCuckoolander Cloud Cuckoolander, so maybe I was lucky...

* It's difficult to keep your attention on a subject after an hour, but unfortunately most lessons this Troper has are two hours long. Most teachers realize that students aren't listening anymore, so they give a small 5-10 minute break in the middle of class. My biochemistry & cell biology teacher used these breaks to go drink some coffee at the student cafeteria on campus, which was 10 minutes away from where we had class. The second part of class usually lasted ten to fifteen minutes. It could be worse, though. A friend of this Troper had class, and during the break the teacher got a call. He left, and didn't return. He has completely forgotten about teaching.
* I have had some of these in high school. Music was ten minutes to start, then listening to the song of the week and discussing that, and then watching some video half of the time. Religion was probably even worse, because every single teacher I had for that subject spent more time trailing of then actually teaching, yet somehow they where some of the best teachers I have had. The most absent minded one put on hit-CD's from 10 years ago during tests, talk about the various places he had traveled and what he had done there (although helping in an orphanage might be a somewhat related subject) or explain his various theories on life and people. Yet another one was a Dutch teacher, talking about the skull in his basement (his house was build on a medieval burial ground, which they found out once they dug the basement) or spend entire lessons on reading all the mistakes of previous tests to the class, and still he taught us much more then we needed to learn that year...

* This troper had a philosophy professor who was a truly brilliant mind, with an incredible knowledge of his subject and a gift for lecturing. However, he often forgot to come to class. It got to the point where students would take bets over when, if ever, he would show up.

* My piano teacher can be a lot like this. Sometimes I'll catch him eating crackers and playing with his iPhone instead of telling me what I'm doing wrong. Sometimes he'll start talking about something else instead of teaching me, so we end up having conversations about the SAW movies, cameras that look like sci-fi gadgets and how the girl in the other room can't sing. He's a great teacher however, and lots of fun.

* My Japanese class used to wait around in the lobby of the class building, looking out across the commons. Nine times out of ten, as the clock was chiming for class to begin, we would watch the professor leave his office and dash across the grass, papers flying and coat flapping behind him. This same professor was once caught typing up a five page long mid-term examination the *hour* before we were supposed to take it. He also, several times, *forgot* about class and later emailed apologizing.
* My Physics I teacher. He can easily wander through many subjects, and lose track of what he was doing. Also, his Digital Electronics teacher, though in a BAD way: he managed to lose a sheet where I put an answer to an exam question, thus making me lose 2 points. :(

* My Chemistry teacher is famous for it. She has a habit of starting at point A and rambling on about anything (I do mean anything) for about 70 minutes and then has to be reminded what she was talking about.

* My World Studies teacher is like this, and somewhat disliked for it. While taking notes, he'll bring up a story as a comparison, completely going off on another tangent for a few minutes before getting back to the notes. He himself hung a lampshade on it when he said in mid-story "How did we get to this point? Seriously, why am I talking about this?"

* This troper's father, who has several degrees in math and took university physics for fun, has been known to stop for gas, resting his coffee cup on the roof of his car, and then drive away with it still there. He is also (usually) unable to remember her birthday or age.

* My secondary school chemistry teacher was a great example of this trope. One day, he received new chemical supplies from the school board and decided to show us an experiment he hadn't done in some twenty years. The three chemicals were supposed to react and give off a toxic purple gas, so we all marched outside and stood ten meters upwind of the tiny saucer while the components were mixed... only the reaction failed to occur. So we all march back inside and teacher starts to rinse out the saucer at the sink when it starts reacting violently and we had to evacuate the whole block. Turns out he'd forgotten that water was the catalyst!
* My Calculus teacher. He will easily wander off from what he was doing (e.g. solving a large and complicated differential equation, or a triple integral) to speak on what he did last night, the last movie he watched, or comment on how he "didn't need to lock the windows on his 14th floor apartment", as "if a thief broke through the window, I would just give away all that the thief wanted" (real example, happened last Friday). Also I once screamed '42!!!!' as the answer for a problem, and he got the joke (but that's more into CoolTeacher Cool Teacher realm).

* My history teacher is really good at teaching, but she constantly forgets everything except for history itself. It's okay when she just confuses the days of the week or confuses us with other classes, but it gets annoying when she forgets our names and makes up completely unrelated or absurd nicknames. And even when she doesn't, she calls all the blond students (aka. half of the class) 'the blond one over there'. One time she forgot to bring our exam sheets, so we wrote in a week later.

* This troper has a teacher (which is freaking awesome) that is extremely absent-minded. His favorite Driver's Ed movie raps about the places you're not supposed to be around a big truck, and he teaches several computer classes, by giving us a list of assignments and wandering around once a week. This troper's mother was beginning to wonder what he actually /did/ at the school, since he was always in the hallway when she came to pick me up for some reason or another. Last week, he wandered in and gave us popscicles.
* My school is made up of them. For starters we used to have a Physics teacher who was also the football couch (which is a trope of its own) who would not teach you anything in his class, a current History Teacher who doesn't use the text book, but instead shows very off-topic Movies and rambles about the JFK assassination, a former history teacher who also showed movies, but where on topic but most of them where R-rated,a current English Teacher who acts very strange when she drinks a cup of coffee, then again her current principal used to be the typing teacher.

* My Teacher once started their English class telling a story about running into the BuffySpeak drivethrough banking...thing. One student next to her said,"I can top that." We spent the hour telling stories about car accidents. And he let us.

* Friend-of-a-friend story, so take it with a grain of salt, but at Fermilab several years ago this FOAF was working admin for the design team on a new satellite communications array -- obsolete now with the direction the tech went, but brilliant in its own way -- and she'd assembled a dozen or so guys who fit this trope together to work on it. She was at the reception desk one day when one of them came out of the room. He walked up to her, holding a pen as though he was using it to point at something, and says "it doesn't work." "What, the pen?" He nods. "No problem," she says, "we've got a whole closet full of office supplies over here." She walks him over and opens it up for him. Like a kid in a candy store, he grabs a handful of pens, still holding the dud in his other hand, and stuffs them in his pocket. He starts heading back into the room. He pauses about halfway there, points at her with the dud pen and informs her, "you're the BEST."

* There's a saying at Template:Tropers/MsChibi's college: Asking a science major (or professor) to remember stuff is, while not asking the impossible, usually asking a lot. The reason being because such students and professors tend to have a lot of stuff on their minds. This trope is also the nickname for this troper's father (a chemistry professor at another school), who is awesome but does tend to forget stuff unless you constantly remind him or write it down. And now you know where [[Template:Tropers/MsChibi she]] got it from!
* This troper's Classics teacher fits this to a tee. Brilliant at his subject, teaches us things that aren't on the syllabus just because "this is really interesting!", often goes off on tangents, most recently jumping from Achilles cursing the Greeks to how he [the teacher] used to be ginger. He's also apparently lost his glasses multiple times and once woke up thinking his eyesight had been magically healed overnight, before remembering he was wearing contacts. This troper wouldn't have anyone else for the world.

* I had a weird Math/Science teacher when I was in sixth grade. He would be teaching math, then he would start with bizarre stories involving random things such as email addresses and pencil graphite. We barely learned any science at all. He was the reason I decided to transfer schools the next year.

* Oh boy... Template:Tropers/endlessness has two of those. His Electromagnetism teacher, which is an inventor-type (he does research on electric cars and often has to create some stuff from scratch), will easily deviate from what he's doing and start talking about something random. His Electric Circuits teacher will suddenly turn the class into his soapbox: a rare male example of Soapbox Sadie.

* This troper had an English teacher who can only be described as the lovechild of Template:Lady Gaga and Template:Glee's Sue Sylvester. As a BunnyEarsLawyer Bunny Ears Teacher however, it did not detract from her teaching ability. Later, in university, one of my politics professors was the living embodiment of this trope, often diverging from the day's topic to rant about this or that, or kindly grill foreign students on their countries.

* My twelfth grade maths teacher was a lot like this. Readily acknowledged as the brightest mind in the school (we tried to test him, making him do the most complicated problems we could think of in his head. He always got it.), he spent all of his lessons telling us how maths was based on unsound principles and that any theory in the world could be proven by the phrase 'the moon is made of cheese". Once, I was found by him skipping class in the mall, and instead of reporting me, he offered me a cigarette and we talked about science fiction for an hour.
* This troper's college American Literature teacher was giving a demonstration on how to use the media search on the library online catalog, so she typed in two random subjects, in this case "animal symbolism" and "William Faulkner", expecting that nothing really would come up. Instead, it came back with 20 published articles, including several with titles such as "Animal Farmacology in As I Lay Dying". Our teacher spent the next 10 minutes skimming through several of these and giggling.

* This troper's college Chemistry professor. He opened an output file to show us and at the end of the meeting, we were closing windows and he was staring at the screen and asked "Whose output file is that?". The entire lab answered unanimously "Yours." And his response? "Oh is it?". Note this happened within 30 minutes.

* When this troper was in the sixth grade, her English teacher was forgetful like you wouldn't believe. Extremely unorganized to start with, then naturally absent-minded on top of that. She would forget when she assigned things, or if she even assigned them at all, which would sometimes work to our advantage in that we could get away without doing our work sometimes, but other times, she would insist that some random project was due Monday, when it was in fact due Wednesday, and then a debate would get going. She would insist that she was right despite the unanimous (and I would like to point out that this was an advanced class with kids who were more than willing to rat others out as long as they themselves had finished the assignment) cries of "No, you didn't do that!" from the class. At last, she would usually say, "Fine, since I 'forgot' to assign it, then you have until Friday to do it," even though it was a grueling month-long thing. Other than that, she was very nice and friendly, and I was willing to cut her some slack because this was her first year. However, when I became her student aide two years later, I discovered that she had not changed a bit, only now, I was able to look on with amusement and occasionally give the class some credibility in the aforementioned debates. It took a second year observing her teaching methods to appreciate how disorganized she really was. Filing her papers was a nightmare.

* And in one CrowningMomentOfFunny anecdote, two sixth grade girls (one of whom was my former best friend) once went around the class asking people what a scapula was. Since everyone either didn't know or pretended not to know, one of them finally got the bright idea of "Hey, let's ask the teacher!" When asked, she paused for a minute, thinking, and then answered, "It's one of those flat metal things that you flip food with." My mother's first impulse was to pull me out of the class after hearing this (which she never did), at least when she stopped laughing.

* Most, if not all, of This Troper's teachers since sixth grade have been this to some degree. Just give them a poke in the right direction and they'll start talking about something totally unrelated. Some interesting topics include deformations, ghosts, and whether or not plants can get cancer.

* This Troper, as a teacher-in-training, is already on his way to this. The school I'm training in this year is big to be fair, but I still get lost far too easily when looking for the staff room. I'll also go off on tangents in class fueled by students asking completely unrelated questions.
* My eighth grade social studies teacher was like this. One time we were doing a Power Point discussion about King George and the American Revolution. We started with King George and ended with nuclear warfare. I... don't... know... how... just... no.

* The same troper as above's sixth grade orchestra teacher was the trope. Once my friend and I were going to our our lessons as we did (the class was on Wednesdays) and we found that our teacher was not there. After a good 35 minutes of looking for him, we decided to go back to our writing class. When we saw him the next week, it turned out he forgot about us and went to do some errands. And then there was the time he was telling my friend and I how to make our duet better. He said, "So if you add more weight to the bow--

looks up
-- OMG A WASP!" The door was open because it was a nice day. I believe this is how he constantly injures himself in the winter...