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2004-02-21 - 12:40 p.m.
go read a book you illiterate son of a bitch and step up yo vocab
It seems to happen every damn semester. I start out with a full plate of 5 classes, and have every intention of sticking with them and getting 15 credits. But then either I do something to fuck up one of those classes, or I realize that it’s going to be more work than it’s worth, and I end up dropping it a few weeks into the semester. And, just like clockwork, I’ve done it again, this time for the latter reason. One of the night classes I signed up for this semester was with a professor who has a monumentally bad reputation among English majors at Towson, but I knew not to avoid him, because he goes primarily by his first name, and I only saw last names when I signed up for classes. And the first week of class (or rather, the 2nd, since the first class was cancelled by a snow closing), he owned up to his reputation right off the bat, without apologizing one bit for his stringent requirements. I’ll at least credit him with being upfront about what he expected. He basically said that if you can’t make this course your top priority, then you shouldn’t be there. Which, in my opinion, is completely pigheaded for any professor to say. I understand that his intentions are basically good, but if 25% of your students fail, as he claims, then you’re doing something wrong. If your standards are that high, stick to teaching grad school. Granted, I’m not the most dedicated student, but there are plenty of good students who, like me, have 4 other classes and 2 jobs to worry about, and don’t have the damn time to let just one class run their life for the next 3 months. In the course that first class, at least 3 people, in a class of maybe 20, got up and left. I wish I had been one of them. But I hung in there. The basic gist of the class is literary research and criticism, which amounts mainly to a big paper on the topic of your choosing. I took a similiar course for a different credit last semester, and the professor was pretty easygoing and accomodating, which worked for me because generally I dread any kind of serious getting-your-hands-dirty research. I hate going to the library. It’s just not my thing. I’m an English major, because I like to write, and I prefer to just go off what’s in my head, and not have to annotate everything I get ideas from. And this guy is apparently a research nut, and he stresses using the U of M inter-library loan system to get books from other schools, and I’ve been told that he’ll actually fail people simply for using nothing but sources from the Towson U library. Which is insane. The other thing that intimidated me is that the guy wanted us to have an idea to tell the whole class about what we’d write our papers about the very first class, an hour after being handed the syllabus, and expected an informal proposal a couple weeks later. Now, generally, I think it’s cool when professors let you pick your own topic, and I might’ve been excited about the prospect if I hadn’t just done that last semester. So at this point I just want to be handed a topic and go to work on it. Sometimes you get tired of thinking for yourself, y’know? Plus the class entailed group work, and the first week’s assignment was quite hefty for basically an research exercise. I ended up not really working on it at all before my group’s meeting, and was kind of deadweight. So by the end of the 2nd week, not only did I feel guilty about that, but I just felt a sense of dread about the whole thing, and decided to just let myself off the hook. I really think my chances of passing were pretty much null. And I’d rather pay for a class I didn’t finish, than pay for a class that I’ll fail and bring down my GPA with. So I’m dropping that class and washing my hands of that shit. I can get that class credit from a much more reasonable professor. Speaking of failing, I took my first test of the semester this week, and um, I didn’t do so well. It’s a math class, one of the lowest level ones I can take for the gen. ed. requirement. The professor is pretty realistic about the fact that most of the people in the class are there because they’re not good at math, and just need this class to move on with their college requirements. So, as basic as the class is, I was pretty disappointed with my F on the test. I took studious notes in class, and crammed hard for the test, and thought I had a good enough handle on the ideas to get a low passing grade. But I made a few stupid errors and it fucked my grade up. But I’m sticking with the class because the requirements are so low that basically, all I need to do is keep having perfect attendance and pass one or two of the four tests in order to pass. The funny thing is, the most studying I did this week was for a class I’m not even taking. My friend Kelly is taking the same grammar class I more or less aced last semester, and since I did a pretty good job tutoring our friend Angel when she was in the class with me, Kelly has enlisted my help in getting through it. For some reason, a lot of English majors who glide through every other class get tripped having to diagram sentences in this class. So I handed Kelly over all my notes, homework and tests from last semester, and met with her and a classmate a couple times this week. The first test is the easiest, but there’s still a lot to digest, so it took quite a bit of practice for them to get a good handle on it. The funny thing was, the professor ended up re-using a few sentences from the test I took last semester, so Kelly had seen them already. So she ended up getting a B, which was pretty badass. I wish I could get class credit for tutoring people on the handful of classes I’m good at. It sure would help me make up for all the classes I drop or underachieve in. -al
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