pepperlandgirl, I think you’re going to my school. College Writing is the name of the bullshit class I’m in Stupid Fucking English to pass out of. And I’ve heard it is that bad.
The worse part of it though is that I’m recquired to take two semesters of it. College Writing 110 and College Writing 111.
Fuckers. Oh well, it’ll keep my GPA high.
How is it that I’ve never had this problem, apart from one semester of basic English in first-year CEGEP, courtesy of Dr. Michael “You’re all a bunch of illiterates! You’re going to become beekeepers!” Kenneally?
Well… matt, I’m in Dawson Social.
(for you non-Montrealers, not a program of many great minds. It’s kinda where, if you don’t have the marks to get in anywhere else, you go.)
pepperlandgirl - have you asked about testing out of The Compleat Idiot’s English? They’ll still charge you for the credit hours (plus, probably, test fees): $$$Cha-ching$$$$, as Eternal so aptly put it. But at least you’ll save time and frustration!
Good point redtail23 I’ll look into that next semester. It’s too late to do anything about it now.
Now, this is a general rant directed towards my class:
Look, pigfuckers (bonus points if you can tell me if that is a noun or a verb), I have a large vocabulary, because I read books. I read a lot of books. And sometimes I use big words. (Which, BTW, is anything more than monosyllabic) Just because your vocabularly consists of grunts, groans, and the occasional “Oh My GAWD!” does not mean that I need to change my writing style.
I don’t give a fuck if you don’t know what “fathom” “countenance” and “vexed” means. If you don’t know, look it up! Jesus Christ people, how must your parents feel knowing that they are sending their illiterate spawn to school for 18000/year!?
If you can’t afford a dictionary, go to m-w.com. It’s great. You don’t even have to know how to spell the fucking word to find it!
I realized there was a REASON for my first-semester freshman English class when I got to the second semester. (I didn’t find out until after I finished THAT class that I could have tested out of the first one. Arrrrgh!)
One of the things the prof did (small school, small classes) was to take parts of papers that she either thought were really GOOD or really BAD and put them on the overhead and talk about them. (A few times she included something of mine – they were always of the good variety. I can BS my way through English papers really, really well.)
My God, people can’t fucking write a fucking five-paragraph essay in COLLEGE? HELLO! I can pound out a five to ten page paper in my sleep…what’s so hard about five PARAGRAPHS? I still can’t believe some of the stuff she said she’d give a C to. I’d have sent them back to, oh, about fifth grade, to learn to fucking WRITE.
I learned the hard way that there are very few teachers who actually teach anything beyond the basics. If you want to learn something, you have to take the initiative and discover it yourself.
Nothing is preventing you from moving ahead of the rest of the class. If you have the simple stuff down, go to the library and get more advanced stuff.
The bright side is, you should be able to ace this course. And also, when the stuff becomes more complex, as it usually does later on, you will have a big jump on it.
The bottom line is, learn, don’t expect to be taught.
A couple of sophomores in my English class had never heard the term “MLA Format” until I said it!!
Now that’s just scary.
You should look into it sooner, Pep. My school would let you test out at any time, for credit/no credit (it didn’t affect your GPA if you passed)
And in defense of “the system” that’s the answer to the rant/problem stated by the OP. Not everyone has the same capacity to learn, not everyone requires the same effort, not everyone puts forth the same effort, etc.
If one buys into the notion that everyone has the right to a college education, then classes and curricula must exist the conform to a pace much too slow for most individuals.
The OP makes a great point. Her chosen profession of Social Services draws a great many people that simply don’t have the tools to be doctors, lawyers, or physicists. This professional also draws a lot of people that “don’t know what they want to be when they grow up” so they take a class or two, find it interesting and not overly taxing, and when it comes time to graduate find that they have a degree in Sociology.
But the profession also draws some good people that genuinely want to help others. LaurAnge may well fit into this category. Her “punishment” for choosing a career with relatively easy academic requirements is that she must endure this tortuous pace. Her reward will be that she has the potential to advance very quickly – an important consideration when one considers that this is a typically low-paying profession.
It would be interesting to know her other studies. While a minor in business or law enforcement could propel her into management rather quickly, a minor in music isn’t likely to help her career very much.
I’ll close with this observation: LaurAnge has traits of an underachiever – seemingly above average intelligence and a propensity to rely on her intelligence rather than learning.
Endure the pain that this class is causing. If Social Services is truly your calling, it will be worth it.
SouthernStyle,
While I think your post was meant in a more complimentary rather than offensive way, I’m not an underachiever.
As a whole, Social Science has been working out OK for me. I took a special stream for some classes, which was challenging and interesting. It has only been the two classes that are compulsary for all social science students (RM and QM) that have been problems.
But I’ll graduate in two months and when I’m in university, hopefully it won’t be as bad.
Absolutely no disrespect or offense was intended.
Your last post explained a lot of things that weren’t apparent to me earlier in this thread. (I would probably have been aware of them if we had previously posted to common threads.)
The nature of your OP suggested to me that you were already a full-time college student. I inferred that you were nearing graduation. The quote above clarifies an awful lot.
First, you’re still in high school. Based on the types of classes mentioned in the OP I had no idea.
Second, you’re not a product of the U.S. educational system. I guess that there’s always a chance that a U.S. high school would offer those classes, but I’m not aware of any. Plus, the phrase “in university” is seldom used in U.S. English conversation where the phrase “to college” would have been used. Your grammar is much more U.K. English.
Third, I wondered why you would choose what U.S. English considers an alternate spelling when you wrote “independant”. Then highlight it. Then spell it the same way again. I’ve never seen U.S. texts that choose this spelling. But then, “independant” is the primary spelling in U.K. English I believe.
These things and a well written OP tells me that I was correct about you being intelligent.
The underachiever label certainly wasn’t meant as negative. Most people fall into this category, myself included. During my 12 years of grade school I certainly placed minimal stress on book bindings, but graduated in good standing with high placement scores.
Good luck “in university”. These will be the best times of your life!
Oh, one more thing – regarding this thread’s title, every professor or college administrator that I’ve ever met has been quite clear that students are there to learn. Teaching is a very minor part of the equation. If you attend a U.S. university, you’ll find that very few of the truly knowledgeable are willing to teach.
Again, good luck and best wishes,
SS
SouthernStyle, independent is the standard UK English spelling. In addition to which, we never refer to graduating to mean leaving school. Graduating in the UK means leaving university (having obtained a degree - otherwise you aren’t graduating, just leaving…*). You’re right about the in university phrasing, though.
Students may be there to learn, but they have to be provided with the information to learn from - or with the research skills to learn for themselves, and very few (if any) schools provide those skills. My first year at university was actually easier than my last year at school (sorry to tell you that, LaurAnge) as they dragged everyone up to the same basic standard before starting on new material the second year. The lectures were mainly a means to transfer information from tutors’s notes to students’ notes as mainlessly as possible (at least, painless for the tutors anyway). They thought nothing of talking full speed whilst having an overhead on a different subject, with important chemical equations on it that needed copying on the OHP at the same time - which do you make notes on? So yes, SouthernStyle, I guess they’re not there to teach. I’m not exactly sure what they are there for…
(*And I’m not posting to pick on you, just to inform).
Southern Style,
I’m not in High School. It’s weird, but here in Quebec (in Canada, I must just have spelled independent wrong) we have high school until grade 11, two years of “CEGEP” and then three years of university for your bachelors. I am not in university yet, but I am in college. And I will be going to a Canadian university.
LaurAnge, what a cool system. What does CEGEP stand for?
fierra, graduating here means the same thing. I must not have been very clear.
One of the thing I learned in college (university :)) that has no application in the real world is that one should seek out lower level classes that are being taught by graduate assistants. Of course, there are always exceptions, but the GAs were very gung ho and tryied to actually teach while the tenured professors, particularly the senior profs, felt that standing in front of a class full of freshmen was beneath their stature.
The best example I have is this: I took basis psychology during my third year because I hadn’t gotten around to it previously. On the first day of class the instructor open up by introducing himself and describing the class. He then let us all know, in unambiguous terms, that he was the department head and didn’t have time to waste on freshman psychology students. The only reason he was teaching the class is because they couldn’t find a qualified student so the tenured faculty drew straws and he pulled the short one.
I certainly hope that higher education has better stories in Canada and the U.K.
SS
Ahhh Phil 0500 Intro to Logic, required for my second degree beyond Chem Eng, mainly Philosophy.
I swear to God I am blessed with about 1/6 of the total IQ of the class (how’s that for stats use?) including the teacher, the Comp Sci major in the back, my buddy who sits next to me and the Comp Eng behind me.
The prof is a darling Finnish gentlemen, admitted commie pinko liberal, and a wonderful person who has more experiance with teaching this stuff than me.
Its all new to me, but once you get the rules (“here is how you build a truth table”) its not rough. Not at all. I look at the week’s lecture packet and am done in five-ten minutes. Homework takes me a 30 mins-hour while I’m at work. I was complaining baout the hyper slow speed of the class.
Then people started asking questions. jaw drop
My buddy and I have given up on paying attention. We sit in the front row and discuss the prize problems. We play logic games. We chat. We occassionally look up and answer questions. My adorable prof lets us because he feels our pain. And we feel his.
Lemme get this straight: Your wife does this and YOU are the engineer? She sounds like a natural! 
Thank you for your views. Something I like about this board is the diversity of ages. Sometimes it’s helpful (whether they realize it or not!) for the younger members to get “real life” input from somebody other than their parents. What you describe is precisely correct—college is as much training in working with people as it is education in any particular field.
I guess that I should be fair and tell on my best professor as well as dissing the Psych department.
I had a comp sci professor that was eccentric but a wonderful teacher. He was a dark haired gentleman that looked like a professor. Always dressed casually and always wore brown corduroy pants. Anyone that’s seen Fred MacMurray as the absent minded professor knows the type.
Class would start with him in conversation mode. He much preferred conversing with the class about the work at hand to lecturing. But this being a comp sci class, questions that required written explanations were inevitable. To illustrate his answer, he’d pick up a piece of chalk about the size of a small stick and begin writing. Before class was out he’d inevitably fill all three boards at the front of the class and begin writing on the boards that ran down the side of the classroom. Once they filled, he’d go back to the front, pick up the eraser, and clean the first board. This is when the fun really started.
Once he’d erased the board he wouldn’t put down the eraser. Instead, he’d take the thumb on his left hand and hook it in his pants pocket so that the eraser gently scraped the corduroy. The chalk dust instantly began falling from the eraser and clinging to his pants.
But he wasn’t through. As he wrote, he’d occasionally stop to think about what he’d written and exactly where the lesson was heading. He’d stop, scratch his head with his left hand, and initiate the cascade of eraser dust across the left side of his head, left ear, and shoulder. By the time class ended his left side would literally be covered with chalk dust from head to toe.
And us kids loved him. He could teach! It was his calling and somehow he managed to find it. I’ve got several more good stories about his classes.
SS
Right now, I’m taking two classes that make for a great comparison of teaching styles, both in subjects I don’t really care too much about, but don’t really hate either.
Sociology 101: The professor for this class not only completely fails to teach, but KNOWS IT. She gets in front of the class and acts like it’s so great that she doesn’t lecture, instead letting us “learn by doing.” However, we don’t “do” anything. Everyone stares blankly for an hour, then goes home.
Even worse, the grading system practically encourages a lack of effort. The entire grade this semester will be composed of 3 things. The first is class attendence. If you attend class, you will automatically get about 30% of the points possible. Secondly, we have a project that consists of filling out worksheets on our family, eventually to be combined and called a “genogram.” Finally, we have an option of an “acting out” project, which is another assignment almost completely unrelated to sociology, or… a TAKE HOME final. You know what I will know about Sociology at the end of this semester? Not one fucking thing. Hell, it’s been two months, and I hardly know what sociology is.
History 101: Now, here’s a professor that knows how it really is. Students are there so they can say “I went to college” and have a degree to prove it. Along the way, they try to get half-decent grades. He forces those students to actually learn something. He lectures, a lot. He teaches material straight from the book. He teaches material that’s not in the book. He lectures to our class furiously for one hour 3 days a week. And he tests. He bases the entire grade on difficult tests covering the material in the book and lecture. So, here I am, a student with little interest in history reading over a history book several times, studying all the major happenings of this country in the last 150 years. You can bet I’ll know a lot more about history than I did before by the end of this semester.
I’d like to agree loud and clear with that OP: Teach me something, fucker!