College Thread • Page 54

I get off work at 2am and have no choice but to work on my project after haha. I requested a day off of work not this week, but the following. I’m experiencing some serious burnout

 

Ok let’s see

Novel and film - project tomorrow, paper next week, then final

Linguistics - make up the last project I didn’t do, then 2nd project (idk when) then final

Grammar - quizzes then final

Comic Spirit - I think just a final but idk

Music in Film - this class I’m worried about. It’s the easiest piece of shit class but all the tests are online and I haven’t done em yet but they don’t lock it just says “always open” so I hope I can still do them. Then I have some short essays and a paper.

None of my classes are particularly hard, just a lot of stuff to do and work is killing me right now especially with Avengers coming out. All next week the last movie doesn’t get out until 3am and I always close

 

Avengers is the only thought getting me through this week lol

 

Exact opposite for me ahah

How did your paper go?

 

Still writing! It's not due till in class tomorrow at noon so I potentially have another late night if I slack off again

 

I finally looked into some graduating things and am feeling a lot more at ease now lol just waiting to hear back from USF now.

 

Those classes all sound really cool. Definitely a big work load tho

 

Finished the paper, time to sleep until Infinity War

 

My professor just assigned three long chapters of a book to read and a short paper to write for Thursday. And I have a physics test that day that I have no idea what we've been doing for the last month. Well, it's going to be a fun two days...

 

one of my papers got pushed back to Thursday so



I'll do it


tonight

 

wait fuck no I guess I'll do it tomorrow I have a separate paper due on Wednesday which is tomorrow as it happens

 

I had a media use reflection paper for intro to mass comm and you needed 5 resources (even tho it was a personal reflection paper???) so I was just like...nah. I didn’t include any or a bibliography at all lmao...just got my grade and I got an 88

 

They would be if they were taught properly. I had the same teacher for Comic Spirit and Novel and Film who was awesome, but he got pnumonia so we have replacements and they are meh. And my Music in Film class is a fucking joke. She's not a teacher in the slightest, she just reads off of a powerpoint the whole thing and shows us clips of movies. Then my Linguistics teacher is ok I guess but disorganized and doesn't seem to know what she's doing. The only one who is like a true professional is my grammar teacher, she's great.

 

college made a lot more sense to me when I accepted that professors aren't teachers. I know this is a point of contention for a lot of people and it often makes people get mad at me but I also think it's a lot better that they aren't

 

Disagree. If professors were merely tools to present information then why not just have every class online? I've had professors who are clearly invested both in the students and the material and "professors" like my Music and Film teacher who literally just reads a powerpoint, shows clips, and then doesn't expound upon the material at all. Also, nothing we cover in class has to do with what's on the tests. School is expensive, I should get what I'm paying for.

 

because collaboration, community, and peers are important parts of engaging with information and just researching alone isn't really enough to get the whole picture. and your latter example is absolutely a bad teacher, but I know that there are plenty of people (depending on the subject, myself included) who prefer to get the broad strokes and engage with the material's intricacies themselves. ofc there are limits to that, but I guess the big point is that there's no style of teaching that will be effective for every student anyway, but I don't think not presenting information in a way that doesn't allow for a lot of interpreting is a bad thing. ofc, that's not like unilaterally true, if it's something completely objective like math then by all means go over it from every angle and make sure your students understand, or a foreign language could fall under this as well, but it just depends on so many factors is what I'm getting at I guess. and I entirely agree that you should get what you paid for, but I also don't really think education is something anyone should have to pay for anyways, and furthermore that you get something out of it shouldn't be contingent on something like grades but that's a different convo. idk, I know this doesn't apply to you bc despite the procrastinating you work excessively hard but the whole "bad teacher" thing is a thing I hear a lot from freshman who need their hands held through every step of a process or people who just never did the reading which is what would've been the puzzle piece that made the "bad" teaching click for a lot of my peers and part of that is just people thinking there should be one way to get info bc that's what high school was like for them


tl;Dr people learn differently, there's mutual responsibility involved, college should be free, high school sux

 

also re: the test thing which I didn't see, that's poor planning on that professors part, absolutely

 

Well I just took a physics test that likely did not go well. I'm barely passing the class right now (maybe even failing since he still hasn't given our test that we took 2 weeks ago back). If I fail this class I'm fucked and I have no idea what I would do

 

I also have a physics test coming up on Thursday and I kind feel like I know that material now that I reviewed it a bit, but I'm also kind of terrified because when I feel like I know it, I usually don't. Also there's the thing where the class average was a 21 on the last test (happiest 39 I ever got, even though I thought I knew everything going into the test).

 

Yes, but what perfect world do we live in where this is actually possible? This is college if it existed in a vacuum. Like, I work 40 hours a week on top of going to school and having to do homework. When am I supposed to collaborate with peers? That just doesn’t happen.

I guess what I’m saying is that a teacher/professor should be able to provide knowledge to their students, not just information. I’m not asking for a meticulous breakdown of everything, but I also think they should be able to do something that I can’t, and a lot of these professors just sit there and read a PowerPoint that I could just read on my own without expanding much. Like, I could teach that lol

Agreed wholeheartedly, but that’s not the way it is in America so I feel like I deserve teachers who aren’t just phoning it in

I know you’re not saying this is me, but just to be clear, I’ve had great teachers who were incredibly difficult. I too see a lot of idiots just say a teacher is bad because they are hard. No. I’ve had awful teachers who were easy. The difficulty of the class doesn’t have to do with how a good I think a teacher is, unless it’s only difficult because the teacher is over complicating matters or is disorganized.

 

Point by point bc i don't know how to do the broken up quotes you just did:

1. I suppose that depends on how you define collaboration? Like, I would consider discussion and just talking about the material as a form of collaboration, and generally that happens more and more as you enter major specific classes and class sizes get smaller. Peer reviewed papers are fairly common and have been built in to a lot of my classes, I've also had professors engage in pretty beneficial back and forth feedback that I would also call collaboration. Most of these can happen both remotely and on campus so the "when" seems flexible, but it definitely happens

2. I don't really disagree here, I just haven't had a professor just read off PowerPoints without useful input like this since my gen eds. I don't necessarily think they have to to be able to do something you can't but that's bc I think of most of my professors as my peers and I recognize that's probably a little weird. this isn't a rebuttal or anything, i don't think your way is wrong and mine is right or anything like that, just explaining myself

3. oh for sure, you deserve that in any circumstance. that might have been a dumb privileged response on my part bc my scholarship makes it so i might be a little more removed from having a bad professor here or there. it's idealistic of me to want to operate that way, and it's entirely stupid for me to act like that's a viable way for everyone to operate when college does cost money, you're right.

4. yeah i don't have anything to add here really except that i'd say most of my easiest classes (though there are some) haven't been particularly rewarding, i think struggling with material is helpful in a lot of ways but that's totally relative and just my preference


sorry these aren't particularly detailed, it's 3:30 am and i have been writing essays on and off today for almost 9 hours now. i am big tired and i am not even done yet

 

So my average in physics is a 61.75% right now. I don't feel that I did well on the exam yesterday, so looks like it'll all come down to the final

I also don't understand the logic of my professor. He curves each test (the first 3 were curved between 5-10 points). This test was much harder than the rest that many of the students that usually get 100+ got in the 60s and 70s, but he still only curved it 10 points.

 

I finished my paper at 7 am this morning, currently writing my next two papers. I love to suffer and be in hell

 

Welp, I just completely failed my physics test. But, on the bright, everyone else that I talked to after the test felt the same way so maybe the professor will have to curve it like 50 points. Crossing my fingers on that one.

 

I had my asl final tonight that I've talked about and it went SO WELL! I got a 100 and the professor wrote "excellent job, you are a natural" that means sooo much to me because I care about the language so much! I have never felt so passionate about a subject.