whining about education
so…last week, I posted about my lab TA and how she is famous for unwittingly insulting the class. Well, over the weekend, I noticed that the post disappeared — our host relocated our sites to another server, but restored from a backup.
Summary:
Our TA said “Hold on, I’m confused. And if I’m confused, you must be really confused!”
I mean, come on! We were going over an exercise in the book, and she was unprepared…don’t push it off on us as if we can’t comprehend how to log into our workstations.
The book…oh, yeah, the book that nobody has! This caused her to have to read the exercise verbatim and then say: “Reading this feels like i’m reading a story to a bunch of kids I’m babysitting.”
Shit! At $334/credit that’s one large motherfucking babysitting tab!
I have the book. There is at least one other person in the class that has the book. Did I fail to mention that eariler last week we ALL had the book?
The professor for the class told us, after everyone had bought the book that we didn’t need it. There had been a mix up in the schedule and a different professor was supposed to teach the class and wanted the book. We were told that we should keep it if we wanted to pursue other GIS courses. Well…nobody told the TA that we didn’t need the book and she’s planned our entire lab around the exercises in the book.
Lab on Friday was a waste. I had read the sections before class (yes, I’m a nerd…at least for topics that I like), so I had to sit through the oration. There are a few students in the class (20-year-olds) that honestly don’t know how to use a computer — this makes a class on Geographic Information Systems pretty much like taking a foreign language to them.
Oh, yeah…and now everyone is bitching that they’re going to need to re-buy their books.
And UMASS is increasing tuition again!!
Edit: Five minutes after this was posted our professor told us that we do not have to re-buy the books, and that he’s spoken with the TA and she’s only administering the labs and not going to be guiding us through exercises. Ooookaaayy.