I’m in college right now. It rocks. I’m having a terrific semester, and everytime I get stressed out I just think, “Hey, I’m not working full time at Borders any more!” and everything looks much rosier.
I have some very interesting classes. One of them is Critical Approaches to Literature, an introduction to literary theory. I realize that it might not be everybody’s favorite, but it is required for English majors and some minors, so suck it up. If you still have issues, there isn’t very much reading–two novels, a bunch of critical essays, and six films.
I like this class a lot. I do my homework. I read the critical essays, which are very thought-provoking most of the time, and I come to class prepared to discuss them. Apparently I’m one of only four people who does this. So I say something when there’s a big long pause after the professor asks a question. I’m trying not to dominate the discussion, such as it is. These are complex issues, and it seems to me that I’m going to get something out of the reading, and you’re going to get something out of the reading, and those things probably aren’t going to be totally congruent. So wouldn’t it be nice if we had a little discussion?
This is frustrating enough, but why do you snicker when I say something? What is your problem? Do you really need to turn around and say sarcastically “That’s another very astute observation, Amy.” Do all your little friends need to giggle?
All I can figure is that you feel threatened. Grow up! Do your homework!
This happened in class yesterday and I still feel crappy. Yeah, I know they’re losers. But I’m still in the process of fully owning my pointy-headed intellectualism…I can’t wait until grad school.
I guess this probably doesn’t have enough creative invective to be a good rant, but it is my very first.
I agree 100%. I’m usually prepared for class, and I’m not shy about vocalizing my opinions on the readings. I used to be, but now I just say fuck it. I’m working 30 hours a week to pay for this education, I’m trying to get as much as possible out of it, and I refuse to let some snot-nosed, spoiled nutfuck with the maturity level of my obsessive-compulsive Golden Retriever ridicule me into shying away from raising my hand.
I find that once you get into the classes geared toward your major, other students are more open to discussion. Maybe there are some idiots who still need to be weeded out in your class. I’m an English major too, and it was not until I took a senior-level seminar that I realized the degree to which discussion dominates the higher-level classes, to the point that if you don’t contribute in class, it hurts your grade. Hopefully the dirtbags that laughed at you will fail out before they get that far, but there’s always the possibility that they fail out with 117 credits because they are too immature and unprepared to converse intelligently in class.
That being said, I must rant about this: in one of my classes, there are two older students (in their 40’s) who dominate, and I mean really fucking dominate, every goddamn discussion. Half the class raises their hands, but these two women call out the answers before the professor has a chance to call on anyone. I was even more pissed when I was researching a writer (Pater) we were studying and discovered that every “contribution” these two women made were straight off of the first website my search engine supplied. The two of them can munch on my used tampons, as far as I’m concerned, for being dishonest cheaters (since class participation does count) and depriving the rest of us the chance to voice our opinions on the readings that we actually read and analyzed with some degree of original thought.
YOU GO ! Oh MAN I just got home, pissed OFF about the same thing. First of all, you should be pleased with yourself for having the discipline to DO the work, and be prepared.
I’m taking my EMT Certification, so in a class of perhaps 37 we have 18 year olds to 55 year olds. Great mix, but holy shit on a shingle, why is it that the same 6 PEOPLE give answers? Same complaint, except that nobody is snickering in here. This shit is dead serious. What? They signed up for this because they’re buffs? Because they thought it would be a lark, and required little effort? Who GIVES a shit if a 70% is passing on the State DOH Exam? You nitwits, if you don’t KNOW THIRTY FUCKING PERCENT OF THE STUFF, YOU CAN KILL SOMEONE. :mad:
Yersinia, welcome to the Boards and good rant. I’m so damned pissed off now, I’ll give ya a 9.2 even BEFORE Duck Duck Goose takes a look at it. Call it a Preliminary Recommendation
Fucking lazy students. ** Nacho**? We love ya. AND, print out that web page, copy it out and hand it out to the ENTIRE class, and then make it VERY clear that there’s a difference between plagiarizing and being intelligent. Those two women know the difference too, and now your whole class will. Oooooh, they’ll just become so very wall-flowerish…
I got some of the same when I went back to school. I finally snapped in class and them to fuck off and grow up. In a nice, calm, pedantic voice. The teacher about fell over laughing, and the kids were so humiliated they actually managed to shut up for the rest of the semester.
I don’t recommend it for everyone, but it felt good. It was one of the few ways I’ve managed to fight off the demons from high school.
Ah yes. At one end, we have the social student; the one who goes to college because all his/her/its friends go to the same college, and brags about getting a C and not showing up to class at all, then spends eight hours studying for the final and shows up hung over. What fun they are to make fun of.
At the other end we have the people who. will. not. shut. up. I have two in my english class and two in my psych class. What’s funny about this:
Two english people go on for ten minutes talking about a silly movie. When the prof interrupts them to ask for comments from the REST of the class:
Punha: “Um, it’s just a movie. It’s not THAT big of a deal. There’s no reason to get that worked up over it.”
Half the class just smiled along with me.
Two psych people go on talking about how Lee Oswald killed Kennedy for various reasons relating to abnormal psychology and his mental problems.
Punha: “Except that he didn’t kill Kennedy.”
::decides not to go on about the morons in his previous English class, who invented facts to support their theses::
Varies from area to area. Where I grew up middle school was 6th and 7th grades, the school in-between elementary and junior high. In other areas it’s 5th and 6th grades (called intermediate school in one town I lived in).
I don’t think calling a school with 5th or 6th grade students ‘junior high’ is very accurate.
Well, where I lived in Virginia elementary school was 1-7 and high school was 8-12. But this really doesn’t have anything to do with how much we hated the teachers’ pets who actually did the reading and the homework, does it?
[hijack] dropzone: Where I live, there’s middle schools AND junior highs - the progression goes: K-5 elementary, 6-7 middle school, 8-9 junior high, 10-12 high school. Why? Beats the hell out of me.
[/hijack]
As for the OP: Preach it! It always boggled my mind how many of my college classmates seemed not only to not give a rat’s ass about their education, but thought those of us that did were somehow worthy of contempt and sneering. Be careful what you wish for, though - in the first weed-out class for my major, there were so many egotistical big-shots trying to make a name for themselves in the program that you often couldn’t get these jackasses to SHUT UP during a discussion.
Which I wouldn’t have minded one bit, except it became less about thoughtful back-and-forth and more about scoring points with the professor and showing the rest of us what studs they were. What should have been short discussions of minor points turned into 45-minute yawnfests where the same four or five windbags would yammer on about increasingly tangential subjects, while the rest of us rolled our eyes and waited to get back to the material. I eventually just stopping going to that class entirely and just learned from the book, because the ‘lectures’ had become so pointless.
As an aside, has anyone else ever noticed that the true hard-core discussion hogs almost invariably tend to be, um, ‘non-traditional’ students? It wasn’t the case in the example I cite above, but it seems like nearly every other person who I remember having diarrhea of the mouth in class was over 35.
As I got older and kept trying to get a useful degree, I discovered I really didn’t give a shit as to what the little kids in the class room though. I was going to ask a question no matter what. Discussion? It’s embarrasing when you’re the only person in the class who can have an intelligent conversation on the subject.
Do you think that we ‘non-traditional’ students should just shut up?
Well a hearty fuck you! I paid my tuition fees just you did and I intend to extract value from my classes. If I happen to bore you, well tough shit. A trite once over lightly might be suitable for your intellect but some of us like the tangents and like going into depth.
I wouldn’t say invariably, but in at LEAST two lecture classes I’ve had (mind, I’m just finishing up my freshman year), the people who most wanted to get into hefty debates with the professor were older people. I chalked it up to their, uhm, increased life experiences that they thought they could nail the professor on a certain point, and occasionally it was a very tangential point. While I love to debate, in a class of 150 students I’d really rather listen to what the prof has to say than what some older student with a big head thinks. That’s what the smaller discussion classes are for, not the lecture classes.
I should add, Primaflora, I’m not including all older-than-usual students in this, and I don’t think schief2 was either. Just those that think they know as much as the professor because they’ve been out in the real world (I assume) before going to college. I’ve run into many freshmen well out of their teenage years who are just another student.
Our situation is a bit different - I’m in a class of about 8 people, not 150 and some of the 6 would like us older ones to shut up. It gets old having the peanut gallery make remarks and carry on. I’m also in the position of genuinely knowing more than some of our tutors. I’m formalising my qualifications and a lot of what we study is not new to me.
Perhaps my comments about non-traditional students were more vague than they should have been. I’m not suggesting that older students are worthless - the program I was in had undergraduates and graduate students taking the same classes (with different expectations as to the amount and quality of work produced), and there were several classes where the early-20s group was actually in the minority. All the students in these classes, regardless of age, were generally were able to contribute to discussions in a thoughtful manner, and I actually appreciated the perspective that many of the older students brought to the table.
No, my beef lies with the non-traditional students that were in my introductory-level, stadium-size lecture classes. No matter what the subject, be it biology or literature, there generally were a handful of them who would sit in the front row, interjecting questions that had little to do with the topic at hand or regarding the exact same thing that had been explained 5 minutes before (and derailing the instructor mid-sentence to boot), and expounding at length on minor tangents during discussions.
To repeat: I have nothing against non-traditional students in general. You’ve got an inquisitive mind? Great! Ask away!You’ve got a different perspective that you think might help shed light on the topic at hand? Great! Speak up! But if you just want to prattle on about something that doesn’t matter or ask an inane question, then I will kindly request you pipe the fuck down and let the expert do the talking, regardless of how old you are.
I guess this is one reason that I’m thankful I’m at a science&engineering school. Here, everybody participates in the tech classes and we just sleep through the hum classes if we bother to show up at all.
(Why yes, I am the guy who extracts quotes from movie reviews to use in the ads. Why do you ask?)
(okay, I’ll play it straight for a moment)
I’m one of those pain-in-the-ass older students who’s always answering questions and going off on tangents and who thinks there are times when he knows more than the teacher. Yes, I regret the tangents. I try to avoid them. No, I don’t regret the questions. I’m in school to learn something this time through. If the questions are needed to increase my understanding I make no apologies for them. As it is, I am usually one of the more-successful (gradewise) students, so if I don’t understand something then I can be fairly sure I’m not alone.
I also don’t regret answering questions, although I try not to be an answer hog. However, there is sometimes such a lag between when the teacher asks the questions and somebody else puts his hand up that I get sick of it and answer just to keep the class moving.
Age has the advantage of taking away some of my hearing. I don’t hear the comments. OTOH, in night classes at junior colleges MOST of the students are there for a better reason than filling in the time between frat parties. My fellow students are usually all on a similar level of interest and intensity. Were I the teacher, I’d be pleased to have any of them, young or old, as my students.
And ITR, the “hum classes” can be very useful when you get out in the Real World. Any chimp can code. It takes a brain AND social skills AND writing skills AND an ability to interpolate from insufficient data to be promoted above the other chimps. You build those in literature and psychology and history classes. Remember, the folks making the REAL money are the ones bossing the chimps. Easier work, too.
Ugh. I remember my Literary Theory class. There was one guy in particular, who was very intelligent and articulate and * extremely * well read. Actually, too well read. While I’m sure everyone in class was very impressed with his intellect, I don’t think it was necessary to hijack every single discussion into a dialogue with the prof about books ** NO ONE ELSE IN CLASS HAS READ! ** I don’t mean he was the only one doing the homework, I mean every week he’d bring up at least one book that wasn’t on the syllabus, and divert a good twenty to thirty minutes of class time to a discussion no one else could follow. Heck, while I’m at it, I also want to offer a hearty “fuck you” to the professor for letting this little show-off get away with it.
Yeah, I never liked those non-traditional older “students” either.
I went to a snooty private all-girls’ college, and I sure as shootin’ suffered through several semesters with a small (but very vocal) group of annoying older Wealthy Women With Nothing To Do But Go Back and Take Selected Chi-Chi College Courses type-broads who blathered on about whatever might or might not might have been remotely related to the class subject at hand, dominating the lectures so that they could show us all how fabulous they were. Those bleachy-blonde Tennis Trophy Wives who just had to take that course on the History of Urban Architecture or Brodcasting 275-Seminar Level for the sole purpose of having something to talk about at their next cocktail party made me tired.
Insult to injury, they consistently threw the damn curve! Naturally they had time to do all kinds of extra credit stuff and delve really deeply into the single course they took each semester. Naturally they got top marks! Crap, that one course per semester was most likely the only academic responsibility they had.
