Monday, November 8, 2010

(Campus) Life is a bitch #3

There's inevitably a point in the semester where shit starts to go down. It's like all of the professors on campus get together and decide "Alright, time to crack the whip." Suddenly you go from having idle time between homework to weighing which class you can ignore to focus on that one class with two exams, two quizzes and three long homework assignments due in the next two weeks. Well, this semester has reached that point.

Statistics is super easy but extremely time consuming. The teacher (who I'm convinced is a dragon in disguise) is very particular about the way things are done for her class. She uses nearly 10 minutes out of a 50 minute class period to have everyone form a huuuuuge line at the front of the class to sign in, instead of taking attendance with a clicker that takes a minute at most like other teachers who care about attendance. This process takes even longer if there's homework due, because it has to be folded a certain way with your name on the outside and placed in piles at the front alphabetically. If you're late, you have to sign in on a late sheet, with the time of your arrival. This also cuts into class time because she has to verify that you're not lying when you write down what time you got there. The extra credit pop quizzes are a nice gesture, but the answers always come from lecture slides that we haven't had in class yet. There's also a second type of homework that has to be turned in at the exam, two or three of them per exam, and they have to be put into a colored folder (no brads) and arranged in a rainbow-organized pile before you start. Another traffic jam at the front of the room. The third type of homework is due online every few weeks and this one bothers me more than both of the others. It's literally a page with 7-12 instances of "See Textbook #__" and five bubbles or a blank that you're supposed to answer according to the question in the textbook. Instead of just being able to do the online homework ONLINE, you have to buy the textbook for $40 (that can't be sold back because it's paperback) and go between the book and your computer screen to answer questions that don't even require any calculation. The questions will literally be "How many people were involved in the study?" and the first thing that the study paragraph says is "This study used a sample size of 51 people."

Physics isn't too mentally demanding outside of the homework. I'm actually typing this in physics right now, because everything in the homework and the lecture slides is irrelevant when you get to the exam. The homework is intentionally about 10 times harder than the exam, which forces you to get a handle on the subject, but most of the time there are no hints or ways to understand what you're doing wrong if you're struggling. You have 5 tries per question, and something as little as having 8.56 when the answer was 8.57 or 8.561 is enough to get it wrong. It's also due at really random times. 11:43 on Thursday night, for example. The professor also doesn't know how to handle questions. To him, every question is a stupid question, and you're wasting time by asking it, so sit down and shut up. He also makes mistakes, frequently, and it takes 5 or 6 students pointing it out to him before he takes it seriously and considers that he might have messed up.

English is actually a good class. There's some work due online each week, he's not super strict about it. We have a reasonable load of readings every week that we have to comment on online and then read someone else's comments and make a reply. In class, we discuss our readings, and once in a while we have a paper due. I think this is an appropriate work load, but I can't manage to keep up with these assignments because of how much time I spend on Physics and Statistics.

Painting is a simple class, the projects are all worked on in class, we're not asked to spend any extra time on them unless we choose to or feel it necessary. Attendance is recommended but not required, except on days when the paintings are due, when we put all the paintings on the easels along one wall and we talk about the successes and failures of each painting. My only beef with this class is that sometimes the assignments are too restrictive in what we're allowed to do. For example, our last painting had to be a reproduction of a Cezanne still life. Not a re-interpretation, a reproduction. If you google search Cezanne still life, you'll see that he almost exclusively paints oranges. Do not want. I don't want to paint something I'm not going to consider hanging in my room, and I don't want a poor copy of some guy's painting of oranges.

My last class is Biochemistry. When I enrolled in this class, my understanding was that my previous knowledge about Biology would be at least as important as having a basic understanding of organic chemistry. If this were the case, I wouldn't be struggling so much in this class. Me and Chemistry? We don't mix. I had a terrible Gen Chem teacher and a pretty bad Orgo teacher who couldn't help me catch up on Gen Chem enough to understand the new material. I can understand the concepts, but I have this mental block about memorizing mechanisms, and that's almost completely what Biochem is. Memorize the structure of Glucose (easy enough) and then also memorize the way it changes as it is metabolized. A missing hydrogen is enough to mess the whole process up, and is nearly impossible to spot sometimes.

Now all of these classes have something major due this week, and I don't even know where to begin.

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