Last Wednesday was my midterm for my Roman culture class. I got an A on the final but my grade isn’t what I wanted to write about here. The class is twice a week from 6 to 8 PM. The schedule insures that a great deal of the time the people whose names are on the roll are only in class during tests. This is complicated by the professor, who seems to lack basic organizational scales. This is her first year here at UCD, but she has been teaching a number of years at Santa Barbara. Despite her professional history she can’t come to class on time, nor can she prepare her tests.
Wednesday night I come to class at 6:15, I can do this because I know she is not going to be there. I sit in the back of the class and talk with some of the friends I have made in the class expecting her to be in around twenty after. At 6:26 one of the other professors from the classics department comes in to tell us that she is having problems with the copier but will be in soon. More times passes and then some more. If I knew the midterm wasn’t today I would have left. UCD has a policy saying students can leave the class, if the teacher does not show up after a reasonable amount of time (generally 15 to 20 minutes) without penalty.
At 6:57 she stumbles into the room! Complaining and explaining all at the same time about copiers and toner and computer complications. The bottom line is simple. It takes her another 15 minutes to hand out the midterm and “give directions”. It is a simple scantron the same type of quiz that those of us who have gone through public school have been taking since 3rd grade! Needless to say the instructions are overly complicated and unnecessary, no one in the room needed to know that the circle had to be completely filled in with a number 2 pencil. But she felt this knowledge was crucial…
It took me 10 minutes to take the midterm. A midterm that had no number 8, 15, 31,32, or 37. Three of the questions only had options A, B, and D?
I don’t know what to say? This is what I am paying three thousand dollars a quarter for? I hope she does phenomenal research because Lord knows the Regents couldn’t have hired her for her pedagogical abilities.
IrishBlogs – Minor Changes
I made a couple of minor changes to IrishBlogs earlier this week, but forgot to mention them.
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