I sit in the back of the room and play Vice City or come here to the boards.
And its sociology 101, easy stuff.
Well, that changes my advice. I’d hate that class too.
In my Auditing I and Tax I classes, the professors recite class notes that we are required to print and bring with us. Neither professor goes beyond what is written on the notes, and they both have attendance policies. In these classes, I am thankful for my cellphone’s fully-functional web browser and my unlimited wireless data plan. Nothing like the SDMB for entertainment. In high school, it was my trusty TI-92 for gaming.
Well.
If the class is part of your required curriculum, you’d better pay attention. Failing won’t help you get your degree.
Oh, yea, cell phone games. I love playing Reversi on my cell. Beats workin’.
A pox on deliberately boring professors. A pox on their textbooks and 25-year-old overhead slides. A pox on their attendance policies. I truly believe these are the teachers of whom it is said, “Those who can, Do. Those who can’t, Teach.”
A shiny gold star for the teachers who put as much work into each lesson plan, as they expect their students to do as a result of it. Two shiny gold stars if they allow you to sink or swim under your own personal attendance policy. And a whole freaking box of gold stars if they’re passionate about what they teach, and teach in order to feed their passion.
I had a few professors of the poxy sort. Time well wasted.
I had a professor of the passionate sort, and I am still excited by the ideals she tried to instil into us, even though it’s been several years since I graduated, and I’m not even working in the same field.
Draw. Some of my co-workers and I do that doing boring staff meetings.
If you can discreetly use crayons, color your PeeChee. Or write funny balloon captions to the PeeChee characters.
Incidentally, here’s a fun game you can play if you have friends in the class. It requires two different colors of colored pencil.
The first person draws a squiggly line of some sort on a sheet of paper, any kind of random pattern. The next person takes the other color and must incorporate the original pattern into a doodle of some sort.
Two friends and I filled an entire notebook over the course of a rather boring math class.
My favorite was one of my Psych professors, who said, “I don’t have an attendance policy because you’re all adults. You’re all paying to be here. And if you can get through class without showing up once, you should be rewarded, not punished for it, because it’s my fault.” All I can say is “Yes!”
And quite a few professors don’t seem to have any interest in using what’s easily available. Every classroom at my current university has a computer and projector, so they could make Powerpoint slides, but they’ll spend 30 minutes wrestling with the overhead projecter thing to use 25 year old transperencies. And the hissy fits they throw when there’s no overhead thing in the room!
One of my psych instructors is doing things right. She posts the lecture slides on the class website, so we can download them and print them out, and then, rather than spending all of the class period frantically scribbling down what’s on the overhead, we can actually listen to the lecture and jot down notes as we need to. Horrors!
Out of curiosity, if you’re an athiest, what the hell are you doing at a school where theology is part of the core curriculum? That’s…odd.
Ah, do what I did. I used to ask myself “If the women in this classroom were the only women left in the world, in which order would I fuck them?” Then go through the guys. 
I too have asked myself that question, KidCharlemagne, and more than once.
If it is that bad, why are you taking it? If it is a liberal arts thing, did they not have anything else. I laugh when I hear of freshman taking liberal arts stuff they hate. Why don’t they just sign up for something else. At my university we have one week to change our class schedules without being penalized for it. And a benefit to being at a major research institution is that you have all sorts of interesting folk who design interesting classes who do research in those interesting areas.
I am in my major classes (I have a few electives left but I am saving them for a really bad semester) and if we aren’t paying attention we get pop quizzed. Or at least that is the threat…it really isn’t a problem.
I am still wondering where you all go (or went) to school. We have terrific professors.
I am with everyone else. Just pay attention. It is disturbing that you don’t want to pay attention to a class you don’t agree with. Being open minded is listening to another’s opinions and even if you don’t agree with them, you respect them. (Here that is where alot of students get into trouble with the profs. By taking issue with someone else’s opinions…making fun of them or being condensending…mostly those are freshman and they learn quick enough. Not really much of a problem this time around…all upper division stuff.)
I’m an athiest. I went to Catholic school for 12 years. I went to a Jesuit college for 2 and a half, mainly cause they gave me enough scholarship money to go, which was my major consideration.
If it is that bad, why are you taking it? If it is a liberal arts thing, did they not have anything else. I laugh when I hear of freshman taking liberal arts stuff they hate. Why don’t they just sign up for something else. At my university we have one week to change our class schedules without being penalized for it. And a benefit to being at a major research institution is that you have all sorts of interesting folk who design interesting classes who do research in those interesting areas.
I am in my major classes (I have a few electives left but I am saving them for a really bad semester) and if we aren’t paying attention we get pop quizzed. Or at least that is the threat…it really isn’t a problem.
I am still wondering where you all go (or went) to school. We have terrific professors.
I am with everyone else. Just pay attention. It is disturbing that you don’t want to pay attention to a class you don’t agree with. Being open minded is listening to another’s opinions and even if you don’t agree with them, you respect them. (Here that is where alot of students get into trouble with the profs. By taking issue with someone else’s opinions…making fun of them or being condensending…mostly those are freshman and they learn quick enough. Not really much of a problem this time around…all upper division stuff.)
In my first high school, our schedules were shuffled for the 2nd semester (though we’d keep the same classes, sometimes we’d get different teachers). I was taking “world cultures” my sophomore year. 2nd semester I had a completely daft teacher. We went through the class at a snails pace, and many times she had no idea what she was talking about. I was bored out of my mind, so I practiced writing with my left hand. I had pages filled with letters. I stuck to capitals, because I figured those would be easier. I would repeat the letter over and over until it looked like my regular writing. Then I’d advance. I think I only got to E or so.
I couldn’t get an interpreter or a notetaker for all my classes, only about 45% so I just spent time writing personal notes to my friends in the class so it looked like they were notetaking for me. One time I decided to take 2 classes that overlapped. I went to one class & put a notetaker in the other. Found out a year later that you’re not supposed to do that.