School.

[Raesvelg]

I hates it.

Kinda.

A little.

I actually enjoy the process of being in class, to be honest. So long as the instructor is reasonably entertaining, the material is interesting, and/or my classmates are at least a little amusing. When things don't line up, of course, class becomes a painful exercise in tolerance and self-control.

I even enjoy writing some papers. The ones written about things that interest me, mostly. I had a class in high school, for example, that basically mandated a 3-page paper due at least one a week, and often two, and I loved the class and the papers I wrote for it, because they were all relatively free-form papers on government and history. I had a similar class when I was at Virginia Tech on the history of engineering, and similarly enjoyed it.

What I don't like is grinding out makework that serves no real purpose other than to satisfy the assessment needs of a given instructor, frequently just to meet some mandated standard dictated by a faceless government bureaucrat.

And it really pisses me off when I get marked down for disagreeing with a teacher on a purely subjective analysis. I ran into that problem during a couple of my classes last year, wherein I simply didn't agree with their feelings on a given subject, and they made excuses to penalize me for it.

Another thing that bugs me is subjective grading, something else I've run into from time to time. Now, don't get me wrong; subjective analysis has its place in education. It's how we assess effort, after all, and it's downright essential in the lower grades.

But college isn't the lower grades, and every now and then I get a professor who thinks that just because I can outperform pretty much the rest of the class, I should be forced to do so in order to earn the same grade.

And that bugs the hell out of me, mostly because I'm incredibly lazy. Present me with an opportunity to coast and I will almost invariably take it, and if I can coast by relying on my colossal brain, so be it.

But one of my instructors eventually figured out that that was what I was doing. That I was writing these multi-page papers in about an hour, the night before they were due, and sure, they were probably the best-written papers in the class. I could do better, and she felt that I should.

Of course, it took her about two years to figure that out. It was actually somewhat entertaining to pull out my old papers she'd graded, and watch how it slowly dawned on her that they didn't represent my best effort, and the grades started declining in the last few despite the fact that, by every objective measurement, they were functionally identical to the earlier ones. Then again, this was an instructor who never read for pleasure until she discovered Twilight, so it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that she was a trifle slow on the uptake.

I also dislike it when instructors make their points/grading systems too simplistic. Giving an assignment, say, 10 points means that you cannot give an "A" to anything less than a perfect paper, but giving it 20 points grants enough leeway to dock a point here or there for a flawed argument without actually knocking it down a full letter grade equivalent. What's worse is I've seen instructors knock things down all the way to 5 points for an assignment. I often suspect it's because they have difficulty doing basic math, and just assigning 100 points total makes their lives easier.

 

[Georgebobbilly]

I can feel your pain here, Luckily all the papers I've written so far, save one, was on a subject I actively cared about (Violence in Video games, Work place monitoring software, etc). I'm also getting sick and tired of teachers that are just oblivious to what they are teaching. I am taking a class this semester on Assembly language programing. Which means I'm doing a lot of math in Hex and Binary, and since these number systems are different and yet the same and decimal our teacher felt the need to go over things like subtraction and addition at length. That is fine after all some people just can't see 10 and wonder if it's really 16 or 2. But when he sets up a hex subtraction problem then follows it up by going over decimal subtraction at length it get frustrating. And if your wondering what I mean by at length I mean he took 5 minutes to explain 100 - 14 in decimal, and set it up as

100
-14
____

and then proceded to explain to a class of at least juniors how to borrow from the neighbor.

 

[Ecks]

You guys and your fancy-smancy words and talkin about yer big old brains. You.. you... I'll kick your ass! That's what I'll do!

Think yer somethin special does ya, ha! I'll show ya. Gosh dern fancimacat'n books and thingamabobs like knowledge and math! Ooooooo that just burns me! I bet I could whoop 3 of ya wit mah hands behinds mah back! Stupid....stupids. Yah, serves ya right.

(For those of you that might perhaps be mentally handicapped, that was me not being serious in the slightest.)

But yeah. What do I know. I never went past community college. *shrug* High School =/= preparation for College unless you're one of the few really really smart dorky kids that are chosen to attend the IB programs (International Baccalaureate). At least that's what they're called where I went to school. Those students have a class load that's unbelievable and they're taught like their at a college level while in High School.

I had one honors class my senior year in high school and it was really pretty easy, but it was English and I enjoyed the class. Then I took a break from school because the last thing I wanted to do after high school was go back to school again. By the time I did attempt to go back I had no motivation to do much of anything. I think I only managed to complete a couple of classes and dropped out of most everything else. Failed all of my math classes to the point I couldn't take the same math class the last time I attempted. My final, costly (because I paid for it out of pocket) attempt to do some college courses yeilded no results because I was working nights and had daytime classes. Didn't work out for me, and I didn't finish anything. It sucked.

But hey, I'm pretty lucky I guess because I ran into a guy at an old job who talked me into wanting to be a Correctional Officer (mostly when he told me how much he made a year). I put in an application with his reference, got a phone call a few days later for an interview. Went to the interview and pretty much had the job. Quit the crappy lame job I was working and have been doing corrections ever since.

It helped that the company I worked for paid for my schooling and paid me while I went to school. (F'ing awesome deal.) I enjoyed the classes though I had a few times where I was late, I never exceeded the limit on tardiness and completed the course being one of the top 3 students in the class. Then took the State Board Exam a few weeks after the graduation ceremony and passed it, becoming a fully certified correctional officer and earning a nice fat pay raise. I'm no genius, but I am fairly smart.. as long as I'm actually learning something. Right now.. eh, probably not as smart as I was while I was in school, but that doesn't matter.

I've got a decent paying, well respected job with room for advancement, a state funded retirement, and the added bonus of now working for the local Sheriff's Office while doing the same job I've been doing for the last 4 years. Further education isn't out of the question, but I just see it as something that would be hard to commit to while working full time. The last time I went to college (not counting my C.O course) I had only a part time job and plenty of free time. Not to mention I was like 9-10 years younger.

 

[Misi]

Ugh, been there. I had an instructor that did the same thing, arguing with him was hard because he was the only instructor at my college for everything web based. Could not get away from him, If a student showed any signs of intelligent retaliation or disagreed with anything he said, he took it off of your GPA, on your final semester. I used to do the same thing on my writing papers. I just wanted them done and only put about 2 hours into them. Didn't get caught with that thankfully, I'd be pissed if they tried to make me " try harder" like people don't have lives outside of school.

Thinking of going back for a better degree, but really, all that stuff I do not miss. Specially the general education and elective classes. Seriously, how many times do people have to take math, english and ethics classes!

 

[ShomeGhuye]

I had a similar experience when I took a class called faith and reason, which was largely a philosophy class. Here, if you disagreed with the professor on what a given philosopher would have thought, or how they would have felt about something, he would knock your grade down by at least 10 points. Even if the philosopher was dead long ago, leaving him no way to know for sure... Of course I disagreed with the professor on many points, so I pretty much sucked in the class :/

But, I've also had teachers who're fine with students disagreeing with them. I took a business law class and the professor there was great. He didn't mind when I disagreed with him as often as I could (with grounds). He probably minded when I accidentally told him his book sucks (to my surprise he was one of those professors who use their own publications as reading material). But he still wasn't a douche about it. I did really well in that class, better than most of the others I took at that school actually.

I guess all this is what ratemyprofessor.com is for, eh?