For the past 5 horrible, long weeks, I have been reading these three books. Exciting right? No, not by choice, but for my horrible history class called "Europe and the West since 1939" Still with me? I know, I about konk out when I repeat the title of the class too.
Well, in all honesty, the content of the class was kind of interesting, it was the teacher that was absolutely horrible to deal with. I took great pride filling out my evaluation on him. It only allowed me 1000 characters! I understand they don't want 10 pages, but I would have been able to get all my complaints out in 2000 characters. Maybe even 1500. But 1000? It was tough.
Anyway, about this horrible teacher: First off his syllubus was extremely unclear and vague. I even had my history major friend (she was completely jealous of me being so priviliged to take this class) look over it incase I was absolutely crazy and missed something. She read it, and I asked the most basic question. "Based on this syllubus, what do I need to do to succeed in this class?" She could not answer me! The thing didn't even have a grade breakdown. Ok, I can pretty much figure out the grading thing, but what made me upset about it was that at the same school, I have taken a class with the breakdown being A= 95%, 93%, and even 90%. I wanted to know the breakdown so I could ya know, set a goal? So I asked the teacher what the breakdown was. He replied with "I havn't decided yet." Well, even after the class is done, I still have no idea what I got because he still has no grade breakdown.
Second, he had no rubrics! His only discription of assignments was how much they were worth and a discaimer basically stating that shallow and late work would be penalized by points. Ok. This guy has a doctorate in European history. I'm pretty sure our defenitions of shallow are different. I wanted to be protected by a rubric! When I asked about this, the reply was "history is not objective" you are right! But, grading is!!! grading has to be measurable! SO, for all I know, he threw the papers in the air, the first 10 he grabbed were A's, and so on and so forth.
Third, the guy gave absolutely no helpful feedback. I got my papers in the mail with random lines, and other random squigly marks and a grade. Some feedback I got however was that I was docked for lack of thought (when I asked about this, and wanted to know what I could do to improve, he could not tell me! backing up my throwing papers in the air and grading theory) another thing I got docked for was "short paragraphs" ok, you had no standard set for paragraph length,and is it just me or does that sound really retarded? And, apparently I didn't pull from another author. again. how am I to know that without a clear syllubus and rubrics? Oh, and another, at the bottom of one of my papers, it said "Egypt?" SO I'm assuming he wanted things linked to current events. ok... agian, where was that stated as part of the expectation? And another thing this is "EUROPEAN HISTORY!!!!"
But, I believe my absolute favorite about this guy, if you don't already have a clear picture of what a dweeb , and how impossible to work with he is one of his announcements stated this. "The final should be the same length as the midterm, 3-5 pages. I would expect it be no shorter than 4 pages" Bout sums up the clarity of it all. Everything he put out was this clear. Kinda reminds me of the stupidity of "We have to pass the healthcare bill so that we can find out what is in it"
And the last thing that just made me shake my head was that after the above announcement, he proceeded to tell us what a great class we were, and we were his hardest online class yet because of the numbers. (there were 20 of us, he is retired from campus, and he was not "teaching" other classes at the time) And that it has been pleasurable, but also challenging for him to teach us this term, and thanks for the great term, yada yada yada. The thing is, all he did was assign reading and papers. He didn't even comment on our discussion boards or anything. Um sorry guy, that is not teaching. and even if it was, you still failed miserably.
But, after this super long post complaining about this history class, I AM DONE! The funny thing is, after I stopped carring, and putting less effort into my work, and just wanted to get through it and be done, I got better grades! I guess I sound more intelligent when I don't care. Atleast according to a doctorate in european history.
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