Lots of you remember Severus Snape? I had a prof much like him, including telling us that we were all ignorant.

He wasn't the most personable teacher, but we did learn from him. Oh, boy, did we learn! He knew the subject dead cold and expected the same from us. When the semester finished, we too knew the subject.

Today he'd be out, since he didn't grade "on the curve." He contended -- correctly -- that the population represented in his class was too small to fit in the curve of random distribution and so: 92 to 100 was an A, etc.