The bright side is that my first final exam is over. Number two I will dispatch this afternoon.
Anyway, to the pitting. I pit my professor for a poor lecture format during the class. Lectures were in-depth explanations of the readings. Which would be good, except the punk professor goes through the lecture slides so fast you can’t write anything down!!! :mad: :mad: :mad:
Of course, he also sees no need to put these slides on the course web site so people can see what he blazed through in class.
I did all of the readings religiously, but there is no way I am going to remember what variable D signified in the equation on page 20 of John Doe’s 1987 article on whirlieghigs. Nor is my understanding of the 300 pages of articles we read helped by the fact that the prof blazed through the lectures so fast you can’t take notes!
Oh, and while I’m at it, I pit poorly worded True/False questions. Don’t ask me to answer a “question” that is actually a sentence fragment that makes no sense!
And have I mentioned how fast he goes through lecture slides?
I hate exams like that. Is the answer 51% false or 49% true? I have enough trouble with exams, being a slightly unusual thinker, so I have a tendency to misunderstand things to start with. Just make the danged questions so obvious anyone who paid attention in class would know the right answer.
Poor professors really really piss me off. For example my dynamics professor reads through the book and does one or two examples for each section. I have the book and I have the solutions to all problems in the book. Why exactly am I paying a ridiculous amount of money for you to read to me? Grrr I am getting pissed just thinking about it.
The good ones though man are they sweet. My circuits professor lectures by writing on a piece of paper and projecting that onto a screen using a video camera. He records both audio and the video image which we can access through the web. Plus he scans what he writes down during lecture and posts that on the web. I learned much more in this class and with far far less effort than any other of my classes. If in a year or so I need to use something from this class I can grab my notes and open up lecture video.
Honestly I don’t know why professors aren’t required to atleast record the audio. There is a computer in every lecture hall just slap on a wireless microphone and record it. It would only take 10 minutes a lecture and would immensly benefit the students.
God, me too. I overanalyze everything and my Biology of Sex teacher loves putting questions on the quiz that someone who overanalizes and has more than a basic understanding of the material would have difficulty figuring out the ‘correct’ answer.
For example, we had a question that asked about recent trends in accepting of different forms of sexuality. Unfortunately, recent isn’t a very definite term. Recent in the last 100 years? Recent in the last 500? Last 1000? And so on. We had studied sexual evolution from the days of microbes, so it wasn’t that unreasonable of me to be confused. Grrr.
Hey, CynicalGabe, you should really talk to him about this. Or, if you don’t feel comfortable talking to him yourself, I bet you can get a band of students to go to him. Just imagine the low level of comprehension for the non-native english speakers!
The professor I appreciated most, back in the day, was the one who sent his own class notes to the copier across the street from campus at the beginning of the quarter. He believed that you learned more if you weren’t trying to write it all down. So you had the book. And for, I think it was $5, you bought the notes for the whole class. Then you just had to learn the stuff. It was numerical methods.
I put my criticisms on his evaluation. And going to him would have no benefit for me, and potential risk, since he hasnt graded my final exam yet. This was also my last political science class before I graduate, so there is zero chance I will ever have the same professor again. But since it is a lower division course, there are a lot of freshmen in there who may endure The Pain again.
Often times I catch myself thinking, “Why the hell did I spend $100 for this book that the professor doesn’t even use?” In all of my classes, the tests have strictly been off of the lecture. The book is handy because I can look up something I am unsure of, but the net works just as well and is cheaper.
Finals already? I still have two days before I have to trudge over to Olson.
takes a nap
The style of teaching here varies greatly, and the occasional teaching-from-slides thing gets to me a bit. I’m used to my old JC, where the classes were much more interactive and most of the lecturers had little else to concern themselves with but teaching.
Except for the guy who taught me circuits. He must’ve been involved with a startup or something, because he always seemed distracted and loved to talk about the chip industry.
He also used to say, “Let’s attack the problem, yes?” We were always attacking problems in his class. If someone was confused about how to approach a problem, he would say, “No no, you misunderstand; you must attack the problem, you see?” Useless but fun.
I feel your pain. I just had a lecture/lab combo where the professor decided it was smart to have the lab notebook, question set, midterm and lab practical all on the same day. Joy!
