I remember speaking to an engineering statistics (IIRC) professor once, who said that no one had ever gotten an 'A' in his class. (Presumably, the final grades were curved like yours.) He said it proudly. I considered asking him if he was teaching basket-weaving or underwater archaeology to his statistics students.

I heard a story from an academic coordinator once, of an instructor who had been hired for a required CS computer architecture class because he was a friend of the department chairman. He was an electrical engineer, which made some sense, but then students started showing up in the coordinator's office crying and trying to drop the class well after the last drop date. It seemed he thought CS undergraduates were supposed to be the same as electrical engineering grad students, and wanted to fail the entire class. (He did not, nor did he get hired for further classes. After many years, though, his friend was the department chairman again and hired him as a tenured professor and the department's external relations coordinator. This is part of the reason I did not go into academia.)

Many instructors are just stinking bad. Many aren't, and manage to tie together both interesting lectures and more active assignments. But the bad ones do leave marks.