This summer I took an economics class. Our teacher was easily frustrated throughout the class whenever someone asked a question. It was only a month long class so I can understand that it was a lot of material to shove into one class but there's only so much you can do about that. So rather than taking out some of this info and reforming his class to fit the time and still give us all the information that we needed, he just got frustrated whenever someone asked him to slow down.
However, whenever someone asked a question that had nothing to do with what we were being tested on, but just a curious question about our economy, he seemed excited to go on an hour long rant and explain the issue.
We had a LOT of students in this class that did not seem to grasp that our class was time sensitive and we needed to get through the stuff quickly if we were going to be prepared for future economics classes, so we spent a lot of time discussing China's roll in our economy rather than how our money system works.
Maybe I'll tell that full story later.
However this semester it seems to be happening again. Psychology.
Our professor seems to want us to discuss everything we learn. It's psychology so I can understand that but this is a large lecture class and honestly I don't see any discussion happening. But -- she holds out hope! Even though she has a lot to get through, she makes plenty of time for pointless discussion questions and long awkward pauses.
What exactly does she need to get through? Well we have a very large, thick and boring textbook which we are assigned to read a chapter from each night. Yesterday I began my reading and after two hours I finally turned to the end only to find out I was only half way through. TWO HOURS!
You may say, "Silly Alli, just look at the pictures and skim the articles" but this is not an option. She wants us to know details. I've taken this lady's tests -- she wants details.
So we've got about 4 hours of textbook reading to go through. I don't know if you've ever read a textbook but I'm not gonna lie, it's not real exciting. In fact, I get lost. I count on that precious lecture time to make sense of it all!
But does it? Sadly, no.
Why not? Because this professor is so obsessed with knowing every thought in our head that she would rather spend our class time listening to our ridiculous answers than actually teaching the material we need to know.
Today for example she posted a large list of items on the board and asked if we would add anything to the list. One guy ventured a guess but his silly little thought was already part of the list. Other students tried to explain this to the professor but she was so interested in knowing his thoughts that she would not forget about it until he said something. So after about ten minutes of confusion we were finally able to move on.
Then she could get back to explaining the material... you'd think. Wrong. Movie time! Let's show a 30 minute video I thought was interesting -- who needs to know the basics?! Let's learn what's being done now! Applying this information will help you automatically understand all this, right? Ummm... no.
So as everyone is getting restless at the end of class and getting loud as they gather their bags this professor is forced to yell tiny details at us that will be important that maybe she could have explained had she not spent so much time teaching us stuff that we will not be tested on.
I just want to clarify -- I'm all for applying what we've learned, but let's learn it first, m'kay?!
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