What is the worst class you have ever had and why?

[ZaichikArky]

A new topic by me :|. Don't hate me plz. I promise I will be less post happy very soon...it takes me a few days to stop posting all the time.

Anyway. I honestly have had a pleasant education with pleasant teachers and classes. There have been a few exceptions-

PE. In middle/high school I had PE for 5th period all but 1 year when I had it 1st period for one semester. Let me tell you 5 must have been my unlucky number. Not only did I suck terribly at PE, but it was full of very mean students that made fun of me for running around! I had ADHD and I liked PE only because it made me less hyper because I'd use it as an excuse to run around and basically get rid of some pent up energy so I can be productive in 6th period. My classmates would make fun of me so much that my pe teachers would literally lecture the class why it was wrong to make fun of me! They would guilt trip the students and 5 minutes after their lecutre, classmates would come up to me and apologize XD. The next day, there would be less of them picking on me, but eventually they'd forget :p.

I can complain of only one teacher right now. Last quarter I had this brand new anthro class called "Jews and Jewishness". It was by far the worst class I have ever had. The women teaching it literally was from the middle east who "had an interest in religion." She was a recent graduate student and knew nothing about being Jewish. She would "engage" in class discussions by mumbling random nonsense at us and then arguing with us when we were like "no, that is not how it is at all. Most of us in the class have Jewish blood, we know......."

We did get to see some interesting documentaries from the 80s(for some reason every documentary we watched was from the 80s...). Literally everyone in the class gave her an extensive, terrible evaluation saying what kind of a terrible teacher she was.

And to top it off! She actually phonecalled a student to complain to them that they were being "rude" to her in class. guh. I'm so glad I'm done with that class

Only good part about it was that we literally had almost no work to do at all and all our essays could be finished in 30 mins. My 8 page paper in that class took half an hour to research and half an hour to write. I got an A in the class. However, daily students complained about her, and complained to the anthro department. Little action was taken. i mean, what can be done? She just sucked. End of story I suppose.

Anyway, discuss stories you have about awful classes.

[gyoza]

I hated PE too. Not that I hate sports, mind you, but our PE consisted of nothing but running long distances. Every week. I know that there are a few people here who love running, but personally it gets kind of monotonous after a while for me. And it was all we ever did...

I once had a musicianship teacher who looked and acted like Richard Simmons. Very catty too. I don't think I need to add anything else.

[Pookie42]

my worst class... well my worst TEACHER who made the class horribel was Mr. O, AP BC calculus. he was an awful teacher. had this habit of giggling when we had a particularly hard problem adn then sitting back adn watchin us suffer through it. When iw as sick and couldn't take a quiz he basicaly said i waited too logn to take it so hewoudlnt let me and gave me 0 points. great thanks mr. O. Also he had this annoying havbit of saying NO WAIT DONT take notes jsut SIT there and WATCH what i'm doing. then u'll understand. u'll get notes later. but we never did. so ...we never really knew what we were doing. yea..i didnt' like him.

[Decade]

One of my top worst teachers ever was definetly my Calc 1 professor freshman year. He was a jolly fat old man who was actually always really happy and "nice" persay, but he was a horrible teacher.

We'd have daily quizzes, all of which would count towards our final grade, but they never had ANYTHING to do with ANYTHING. They were literally made so we couldnt POSSIBLY do well on them because they were never based on class lectures, the textbook, or even homework. Even worse, none of the above were ever linked to the others.

Let me give some examples of actual test questions hes given us:

1) What's the name and location of the building on the cover of the textbook?
(His reasoning for this one? "Because you all should be reading the book!" ":confused: But professor, that's not in the chapter you assigned last night" "What, you read ONLY what I tell you to??")

2) Without a calculator, tell me APPROXIMATELY what is 2^root 3 power (I hate hearing root, it's SQUARE root, dammit)

Needless to say, I dont miss him.

[CrazyAce86]

I've had a few...

In HS, there was:

1. PE, of course. I'm not an athletic person; I like games, having fun, etc., but not being forced to be athletic. That aggravates me. The teacher I had was cool most of the time, but I hated it when her idea of gym class was when she put in a TaeBo video. Ugh! For a few years I had it last period, which was kind of nice because I could just walk out of the school in my gym clothes. Well, up until senior year, when the principal bitched because he thought our gym uniforms was distracting. (Yeah, like the regular clothes most girls wear aren't!)

Then I had it right after lunch once, which absolutely SUCKED beyond words. One year I had technically had it last period again, but I took it during morning study hall so I could sleep ninth (last) period. It was funny, everyone thought I was failing when I was actually passing with an A.


2. Chemisty and later Physics, both with the same teacher. Gah, I hated that woman. She wasn't a bad teacher exactly, since most understood her, but I have a huge mental block when it comes to math, especially formulaic problems, and when I asked for help she'd just keep explaining it over and over the same way, which obviously wasn't working for me. I hated those two classes with a passion! Talk about useless, I haven't needed or used any of that crap since. It was so bad that when I got a 65% on my Physics final, I was overjoyed because I passed. That was all I gave a shit about by that point. My mother was about ready to skin me alive (she's one of those people that wants be to be perfect so she can brag).


In college:


1. 8 AM Sociology class, which they stuck me with just to torture me, I'm convinced. I did well in that class-- except for attendance-- but it was just a drag. The guy had a thick Indian accent and was hard to understand; not his fault, I know, but at eight in the morning I'm having trouble understanding perferct, clear, crisp English, let alone accented English. Hell, that early, I can't even speak English!

2. Spanish 103. The only reason I hated it was because it was all a repeat for me and I couldn't drop it. The dumb bastards at the school wouldn't let me take a 200 level class, even though I PASSED INTO SAID CLASSES, because "I was a freshman and it would be too hard for me." I am not kidding, that is what they told me over the phone last July. Damn bastards.

3. Tech & Sci Writing. I like the teacher, she's nice, it's just that it's 9:30 AM and I'm tired, my partner is sick as a dog most of the time and if he does make it in, he's in fucking La-La Land, and sorry, English major I may be, but Tech & Sci Writing is fucking BORING AS HELL. Who gives a shit how to write a memo? If I get stuck in a situation where I have to write one on a daily basis, I'm shooting myself in the head or pulling a Fight Club, that's all I can say.


That's pretty much it, though I've loathed every math class I've ever met. Well, except for Math 7; that was fun, the teacher was cool, and she tried her damndest to make sure you understood at least what the hell was going on. She was funny, too-- I still remember to this day how she taught us improper fractions: "They're like Dolly Parton," she said. "Top-heavy!"

[M.Laird]

High school music: All the lessons for the class were geared to two people working on one of the bigass keyboards. You got put in a pair at the start of the year, and worked on all the assigned songs together. Thing is, the guy I was paired with decided to become a guitarist about three weeks in, and the teacher gave him permission to use his guitar instead of the keyboards, and work solo. For a year I was somehow expected to play two people's worth of music at the same time. Maybe I was going to grow an extra set of arms? I don't know.

University, Human/Computer Interaction. It wasn't so much a bad class as it was terribly dull. 9am, 8th floor of the building with no lifts, and most monotone voice you've ever heard from a lecturer. He shot himself in the foot when he mentioned that all the assessment for the class would be based on stuff from the labs and the lectures were basically meaningless. Attendance fell sharply after that.

[Darkblade]

P.E.

although I excel in sports, this is the only class I have ever been forced to play basket with a broken tailbone in..

Horrible experience. the teacher thought "i just didnt feel like participating" so they threatened me with an F if I didnt get in there and play.

I dont really like basketball either... unless its being played on concrete and we are playing "full contact tackle concrete schoolyard rules" basketball. then Im all for it (which is why my tailbone was broke in the first place)

[mamba]

PE aswel, though i was fine with rugby football, but i hated athletics with a passion, i just dont get the idea of running with no goal in mind, that and gymnastics! asking a rugby player to fuck about trying to do flips ect is a waste of time, im built so that I take hits and hit people not bend in weird ways! that was possibly the only class i didnt enjoy.

Yeah iv thought about it and pe was really the only one that sucked! though i was never a fan of english, it wasnt that bad.

[MeneerDijk]

Hmm, i never really cared much for PE, but when i was going through puberty i had a problem with my knee (Osgood Schlatters disease) Wich excused me from all PE activities during high school.

I had nasty teachers but i never let them get me down too much, i was to busy having fun in class with my mates. And i never was a disturbing factor so school was always pretty much smooth sailing. I guess the lessons i dreaded were the ones i never did my homework for. I'd hate having to worry for 45 mins if the teacher was going to check my homework or not. But i managed to get away with it most of the time...most teachers would ask questions to each student in turn, so i could figure out wich homework problem would be asked to me, and while the other students were questioned i looked up the answer.

Now i think about it there was one teacher i didnt like, she thought math and was very very strict, always checking homework thoroughly and keeping the reigns tight in class. But i solved that problem by at least acting like a good student, so after a while she pretty much left me alone.

[Shishio]

Math.

Because it is the work of the Devil.

[kiev33]

Ooooh, how about my World Cultures class in college that was a revisionist African American history class that catalogued the teacher's beliefs that African American had actually done almost everything and because Egyptians were on the continent of Africa they were really black too but it was a world wide coverup to deprive the black race of their rightful heritage.

I hate that crap. Now, let me explain that I am a graduate in Social Studies Education, I had 5 classes in African Americna history and enjoyed the hell out of them, because we really didn't get all that information in high school, and am not making fun of the African American experience. They went through a lot that most people no do not appreciate it. But I hate revisionist history, and making blanket statement based on personal wishes does not make something true. And for a college teacher (not professor) to make these statements of conspiracy theory is almost criminal.

Or how about my Spanish 1 class in college that I could not finish because the teacher jsut came from Mexico and could not speak enough English to explain how to translate things. I would ask questions he didn't know how to answer. I dropped out and got an "F". I hate "F's."

[ellie]

Hmm. . .I've had a couple less than stellar teachers during my lifetime of education. . .

My middle school PE teacher was a nice old lady, but the health section of PE probably has mentally scarred me for the rest of my life. She was really old, and I guess no one taught her more modern aspects of sexual health and such, because she had many old-fashioned ideas, and ideas that were just WRONG. And a very bad way of expressing herself, most of the time. She said young ladies must always wear a bra, that once a month you would have a cursed event (you shouldn't really describe something to a bunch of young girls as "cursed", that's likely to cause panic and pandemonium amongst all that have not yet had their periods) and the nastiest, worst thing. . .she told us that we would all have "yallowish discharge" in our panties, which caused some hysterical tears from one girl when the teacher refused to elaborate on what the hell that could possibly mean.

I had the same band teacher from 6-12 grade. She wasn't even 5 feet tall, and definitely was a classic example of a sufferer of the Napolean complex. I must admit, she was doing SOMETHING right (when I was in high school, we played each year at different national conventions or events, including playing at the Orange Bowl halftime show my sophomore year and playing at Carnegie Hall in NYC my senior year) but she was just mean. She would degrade us and make us feel like shit for hitting a wrong note, or for being slightly out of tune. She would scream at us to play individually into our tuners, and even if you were exactly 100% in tune, she would tell you to do better. I was first chair clarinet, and she constantly provoked me and was picking on every little thing. It drove me crazy, and I admit that she drove me to tears on more than one occasion.

I go to a supposedly top notch university, but here I feel like I've had more than my fair share of shitty teachers. I've been taught by countless TAs (teaching assistants, for you not in the know) who don't adequately know the subject; I've been taught by tenure professors who only teach so they can get research grants, and therefore detest teaching and do a terrible job at it. I've been taught by professors who barely speak English, and I've been taught by professors who constantly add extra components to the class without any warning, such as an extra class session each week. It's rather annoying.

[The_Penguin]

Anything that's connected with writing essays... I hate writing essays.

[KelliShaver]

The only class/teacher I ever really had problems with was 7th grade US history. She would punish the entire class every time a single student got out of line which, in 7th grade, wasn't all too uncommon. Her idea of punishment was to make the students copy text from these old history books she kept at the front of the class with microscopic print in them. If you didn't get all of the text she "assigned" copied, you would get additional homework. Yah, hello... hi... legally blind! Can't get this book in large print because you only use it for punishment. Never once done anything wrong in your class anyway.

Eventually, after a few weeks of complaining to the administration by my parents, the teacher was nice enough to let me copy text out of my large-print textbook, while making comments like "come here and let me give you your special work, since you can't do things like the normal students." Oh joy... Nevermind the fact that 99% of the class shouldn't be punished anyway.

Thank god she fell and broke her hip around Thanksgiving and we had a substitute for the rest of the year. The class was fine after that, but the first few months were brutal.

[Firefly]

Probably the worst class I've had was last semester, where the teacher was a complete idoit. The sad thing is, I was actually INTERESTED in the material, her teaching style was just...not even human. Her voice was monotone, she gave us more information we DIDNT need than information we did, and then...there were her tests. Everyone says it's hard to fail multiple choice. Well, she did everything possible to make sure you did fail, even if you studied. Not ONE THING she talked about in class was on her tests. I read the book that corresponded with the class, and NOTHING about the book was in the test either. This is an example of one of her test questions:

This painting was made in what year?

a. rococo
b. international gothic style
c. all of the above
d. c and b (Yes...she actually did this once)
e. art noveu
f. renaissance (this would be the actual answer, but "f" wasn't on the scantron.)

She read test scores aloud in class. Nobody ever got an A or a B.

[ellie]

Oh my kindergarten teacher was terrible. I think she was mentally ill; she clearly should not have been teaching young, impressionable five year olds.

Corporal punishment is legal in NC, or at least it was when I was young, I'm not sure about now. Anyway, there was this one little girl who was TERRIFIED of the teacher, so the little girl would cry every day. Mrs. Lanning would get fed up with the crying, and say, "I'll give you something to cry about, and you'll learn to quit crying just because you're a little scared", and take Morgen into the bathroom and hit the shit out of her with a ruler. The rest of the class would be sitting on the floor outside, listening to the sound of the ruler whistling through the air and then hitting Morgen.

Mrs. Lanning was also incredibly racist. She would often make racist statements to the class, and five year olds repeat everything they hear. So, one day I went home, and said to my mom, "I hate those dirty black kids", and my mom FLIPPED OUT. I have several black cousins, and I never even realized they were black--they were my cousins, I didn't associate them as being a different race than me. My mom was at the elementary school almost every single day, talking to the principal, and nothing ever happened. The school system won't let kindergarteners transfer mid-year, so I had to wait the year out. I eventually transferred to a public city school, which I liked sooo much more and was sooo much better. . and no racist teachers.

[FireWolf238]

i hate english classes, i so fucking hate english classes. currently my math profesor is physically uncapable of teaching even though he actually knows the stuff, and the text book is utterly useless. and i hate english classes more than anything else, HS spanish being the only exception.

[Angelyne]

Quantitative Methods: I busted my ass off working on an assignment that involved lots of calculus. The next day, we were going over the assignment, and I was pretty much the only one who understood the material. So I answered one of the teacher's questions correctly and in detail, and you know what that c*nt said in front of the class?

"Did your boyfriend teach you that?"

Right, because women clearly aren't capable of learning math. I don't think I've ever been that angry over something school related.


Business writing: I got an 80/100 on a paper simply because I misplaced a comma. The content was perfect, and there were no other grammatical errors. Yet I lost 20 points because I put a comma in the wrong place. I wouldn't have been upset if I had only lost a few points, but 20? Give me a break. I dropped that damn class immediately after that incident.





I'm so glad I switched majors.

[NERD]

Quick question- which one would you rather have, a multiple choice final exam with about 100 questions or more, or a an essay with secondary sources required, about 8-10 pages long? Both of them work for about 20% of your final grade, give or take.


Back to the subject- My Logic class. If anyone took logic, then you'd know it takes some time before you can grasp the concept and apply it, not unlike math, except that logic is with words instead of equations. The professor was an easy-going guy, but he never did a good job of breaking down the logics for the students, and with the exceptition of other students who either took a similar course or just smart, everyone struggled with the class. Luckily I managed to get a B for the class, so perhaps he had a good grade curve going on since I didn't really study the subject that much either.

[gyoza]

Multiple choice without a doubt.

Secondary sources require addition research. Additional research is teh suck.

[Firefly]

[QUOTE=NERD]Quick question- which one would you rather have, a multiple choice final exam with about 100 questions or more, or a an essay with secondary sources required, about 8-10 pages long? Both of them work for about 20% of your final grade, give or take.



Depends on the subject and the teacher's ability to make multiple choice tests in a manner that everyone can understand.

[NERD]

Depends on the subject and the teacher's ability to make multiple choice tests in a manner that everyone can understand.

Mmmm, good call, though I never had much problem with this matter since most of my professors have been straight forward about this. All questions from the parts we studied. I only have one class per semester that take tests as a grading measure due to my major anyway. (English/Fine Art)


Multiple choice exam with about 100 questions or more, with some write-in questions thrown in, well presented and all from the subjects covered in class, versus:

An 8-10 page essay, also about a subject covered in class, with two to three secondary sources in addition to the text/subject you are covering.

I still take the essay unless the exam was easy to manageable. I have to write a lot of essays anyway due to my major, and I usually have three final essays, 1 exam, and 1 portfolio for my final grades.

[Firefly]

I take the essay. In my current Art History class, I've already had my first exam, and I wrote about 8 pages. If we had a cumilative final on Art History I could probably write about 20 pages on the material, and finding outside sources is easy to do (Our library is huge, the internet is huge, and we have other art department professors, etc). I could also practice writing the essay before the test.

With multiple choice, you could be almost gambling. :boggled:

[Shishio]

In response to NERD's question:

I would take the essay.

[Lisa M]

I would take multiple choice.

I HATE outside-source essays. Being an English major, I have to write them ALL THE TIME. Grrrrr.

[Betrayer of the Light]

Biology honors: By far the most boring 80 minutes of my life that I've ever had to endure. The teacher drones on and on over one thing so by the end of class no one learns much, so we have to learn the whole lesson by ourselves basically. As far I as know Everyone in that class, and everyone who had it last term hate it.

[setrict]

It's a toss up between two classes for me:

Engineering dynamics.

I was an idiot and took the class before having the matching level calc prerequisite. That hurt, but the absolute worst part was class design.

3 Tests (which always had only 3 questions, no partial credit)
Weekly quizes on a random day
3 Projects (mostly fortran number crunching)

If you got less than 50% on anything assignment, quiz, or test you failed the class immediately. His reasoning was the engineers can't afford to make mistakes. He also did not believe in curving. I really hated that SOB. I think he was bitter about having to teach at the sophmore level instead of research for the dept and took it out on us. Gotta love tenure. (No, I did not pass thanks to an error caclulating significant digits on a test)

Computation Robotics (or something like that).

Dr. Ho. Chinese. Didn't speak english very well. Had emphysema so he spoke softly. One of the smartest people I've ever met. I didn't understand a word he said all semester. To make it worse, what were were doing was manipulations of 6x6 matrices, which would take several chalkboard fillup/erase cycles on each problem - and he had a tendancy to change numbers as he went along so they would come out even at the end of the problem instead of bizarre fractions. It made taking notes worse than useless, since they confused more than helped.

[NERD]

Any classes with non-native English speaker is bound to be frustrating, unless they spoke really well. I have that problem with my Japanese class, so whem I ask questions, I don't get the answer I wanted from time to time.

[harper]

I liked PE in high school. We had lots of fun at various activities and games. I didn't have any class in high school that I hated, but my Personal Economics during my senior year was probably the worst. I liked the teacher and the classwork was easy enough, but there were a lot of idiots and jerks in the class who made it very hard for the teacher. He ended up having a heart attack around Halloween and was out until January. We had a number of subs after that and I was happy when the class ended at the semester.

My worst class in college was probably my Philosophy class. It was a Basic Studies requirement so I had to take it. The professor was the author of the text and if you disagreed with his opinion on something, you were wrong. As long as you were able to quote the party line on tests, though, you got a good grade.

[Shishio]

That reminds me of another class I despised. In grade 12, I suffered the misfortune of being forced to attend a catholic highschool, and such highschools require that you take a course in religion/philosophy (Read: christianity.) every year.

One of the first things the class had to do when I got there was write an essay on what we felt a perfect world would be and present it before the class. Two of the students teamed up to present a little skit of life in their perfect world. That skit is one of the most horrible, sickening things I have ever seen in my entire life.

Another time, we had to answer a question on whether pornography is right or wrong from the textbook. I argued that it is right so long as everyone involved is a consenting adult, and wrong when it involves anyone being forced to participate against their will, or too young to be able to decide whether they would like to participate.

The teaher marked my answer incorrect, and told me that I was not supposed to answer the question with my opinion, but with what the textbook said about it. (Which of course was some religious bullshit stating that it was sinful.) He then told me we would have the opportunity to express our opinions in class, but of course, we never did.

[Masa the Masta]

I don't really recall TOO many worst classes, but I can think of a few that I dislike equally.

My english teacher in the 7th-8th grade. The guy was a prick. There's this stupid ass program called AVID where it basically teaches you how to take cornell notes all day. He kicked me out of the program for getting a D in the class. I am not a note taker, and if I ever do take notes, I refuse to take them in cornell note form. Why? I don't need someone else to tell me how I'm going to learn faster. I think at that age, people more or less have a rough idea how they learn best when they take notes.


My Chemistry teacher in High School. She was the biggest bullshit teacher ever. Her entire teaching method was geared more for dumbasses who didn't learn shit. What would happen is that instead of a normal class where tests in High School can be about 50% of your grade, it was more like 20%. The rest went to this stupid ass notebook where you had to take notes and make pretty drawings about Covalent and Ionic bonds.

She can covalently eat a dick, I hated those interactive notebooks. I ended up failing the class, with it being the only other class I failed in High School. I also failed IMP-3, but the Integral Mathematics Program classes were bullshit to begin with. They would jump between different kinds of mathematics without really keeping a nice structure. It was my fault for taking those weird classes anyway.

Currently I have an astronomy teacher that isn't so bad actually. She's only the worst teacher I'm having so far in my freshman year of college because she's Iranian, and she studied in Australia. So if you can imagine for an American, an Iranian native speaking whatever english she picked up in Australia, and then trying to teach Americans..

Yeah. She's not a mean lady or anything, it just eats up a lot more attention to listen to her than is necessary for an hour and a half.

When she says three, it sounds like tree, and when she says Sun, it sounds like sawn, and she constantly says "okay".

Yeah.

[Kash]

Communication difficulties?

Poor Lectures?

I can tell ya pain. First off, just to let ya know I've had too much school. Large Universites of 50K students and midsized colleges of 10K students or so. I qualify myself as an expert in teachers and their styles.

Worst class ever. I'm taking it currently. No, it's not for a degree. They don't even give credit for this damn class. It's called FireFigher I&II. It's the first and second course a Fire man would take. I don't really want to take the damn class, hell, I don't even want to be a fire man, but there is an obscure rule in my state statutes regarding having to take the class inorder to beable to approve Fire inspections.

That's what I have to do. Be able to sign off on a structure as having it's fire inspection. One might think that they would have to take an "Inspector" class and certification, oh yes, one does, but first they have to bilk out into taking this other class. As if that wasn't bad enough...

It's not taught by teachers. It's taught by civil servants who know nothing about teaching. They're probably pretty good firemen, but they wouldn't win any awards for inspiring students with thought provoking lectures, labs and coursework. Ugh, it's so bloody painfull for me to have to sit and listen to them struggle along attempting to present the material. I really pitty the guys that are going to have to use this information to save their own lives in the middle of some fire.

It couldn't get any worse if the coursework were mandated by come committee run by the state. Oh wait, it is. Textbook by beaurocrats, presented by civil servants.

[Stu]

Worst class? Ethics of Healthcare. "So, are you a Utilitarian or aren't you" was the basic premise of the class, plus the prof was a HUGE pro-abortionist, so if you didn't agree with the actions of any woman who ever had an abortion in the history of mankind, you were wrong. We had to turn in 20 essays, and he graded only 4 of them. I turned in 16 essays. Guess which ones he graded.

Best classes? Chaos Theory, Numerical Methods, and Philosophy of Science.

[DragoonPlatoon]

I have had two terrible experiences, one in the past, one currently sucking my life away.

First was Integrated Biology I. Its a highschool freshman intro class. And I very nearly failed, because the teacher hated my SISTER, who was so incredibly perfect in school that I cannot possibly comprehend it. My sister is one of those girls who was popular, and always did super well in school (4.4 thanks to honors classes). My teacher hated her because she was exactly what my teacher WASNT in high school: Popular. She tried to give me zeroes on almost every asignment, and only finally gave me semi-fair grades when I complained to the Dean. Towards the end of the semester she hit her head on the television at the beginning of class and had to get stiches. Karma sucks, dont it bitch?

Right now, my Japanese teacher is the WORST teacher ever. She is from japan, which one would think would be ideal for teaching japanese. WRONG. You could not be MORE wrong. She doesnt know english. Period. Asking questions is out of the question, she doesnt understand what we are asking, and we dont know enough to ask in japanese. Its a four hour class, and we will only cover ONE chapter in the book (Japanese for busy people), and the chapters are only 5-10 pages long. Most of that time is her calling on people who didnt study and letting them struggle through the quiz questions. Worst of all, when she does anything, she does it in slow motion, like shes underwater.

Nothing is more frustrating than trying to teach yourself japanese from a textbook, then going in to class and being confused by lectures given in broken english and super-advanced japanese. RAAAAAAAAAAAAAWR!!!!

[Invisible]

Algebra I. I absolutely hated that class, but oddly enough, now I pretty much live off of math and logic. The reason I hated it was because of the homework every night. I mean, come on, a 13 year old boy can't handle that much work!

I also couldn't handle the concept behind it for a long while. I ended up with a C. It wasn't until Geometry that any of the stuff in Algebra started to click.

[Pierrot le Fou]

I've had a few bad classes.

One was a poli sci course I took for my major. I had already taken several 300 level courses and the like, but there was some silly requirement of all these 100 level courses. It was taught like High School history by a young teacher. You read a textbook, answered questions on the textbook reading, and he was anal about it.

The book was dull, uninspiring, and read like an encyclopedia. The questions were what you'd expect. He expected 3-4 sentence answers. Now quite frankly, I don't like writing bullshit. But the questions required 3-4 sentence answers according to him, despite the questions being for the sake of seeing if we read the thing. Basic shit on the amendments and executive privelege and other garbage. I would write one phrase summaries so that he knew I read the thing, but I didn't feel like bullshitting.

So he calls me into his office, and says, "You keep writing 1 sentence responses. I keep telling you to write 3-4 sentence responses when I hand them back. Why don't you do it? Clearly you're intelligent enough to do it." And I essentially said, "If you want me to write a 2 page essay on each chapter, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Regurgitating information that I already know for a course that I am taking solely because it's a requirement is just a waste of my time." So he made a deal with me that I could write essays that covered the topics of the chapter, and I was content...

...until I handed the first one in. I get comments back about how I didn't include A B and C which were all the stupid review questions I was writing this to get around not doing. He essentially expected me to do the same damned thing in essay form. I was livid. Not a fan of that prof I wasn't.

Another class was my 'Christian' Mysticism and Intro to Catholicism, both taught by the same ex-nun professor. By 'Christian' she meant Catholic. Not, y'know, non-Catholic Christians. So it was almost the same material as the intro course. And that, well, sucks. Anyway, I was a third-year religion major by that point, and had taken plenty of courses on the Bible and Christianity, so I was still looking forward to the class discussions at least.

I get to the first big discussion, raise my hand and ask about the text in relation to Bible verses, and she stops me. "Now Pierrot, don't bring the Bible into this. Rely on the text that we read." I asked her in class, "Doesn't the Bible relate directly to the text, Christianity in general, and Catholicism?" Her response? "Yes, it does, but not everyone in the class has read it, and therefore I would appreciate it if you didn't bring material from outside the reading into our discussions."

I went to her office after class and said, "I'm sure you're a great professor, and that you know what you're talking about in regards to Catholicism. However, I don't see the point of me continuing to take a class in which I am not allowed to apply what I've learned to what I'm learning. What's the point of having knowledge exist as an island separate from everything else? You can fail me if you want, but I'm not going to come to your classes any more as they are a waste of my time."

The same year (it was a bad semester, my GPA didn't top 1), I was taking Intermediate Japanese II, with a professor I didn't like. I hated kanji. Despised it. And yet that's what she went over in class. Now if this was a lecture class of 20-30 people, I could understand it. It was a small class of 4. So I represented 25% of the class, and kept asking her to let us study kanji on our own, since stroke order, readings, and meanings were all in the textbook. I asked for conversation in class since that was the one thing we couldn't get outside of class.

She refused. To spite me, she changed the test format. Previously we had a grammar section, a vocab section, and a kanji section. The grammar section would have sample sentences and the like written in hiragana, and we'd have to conjugate the verb or whatever. Y'know, just testing grammar. The vocab was all in hiragana (or katakana) as well, and we'd have to write the English meaning, or vice versa (translate English to Japanese). To spite me, she made both those sections include the kanji. So even if I knew the grammar point, she'd write the verb in kanji so I didn't know what it was, and fail me if I screwed up the kanji portion (she had us copy the entire sentence). And she was a stickler for stroke order.

Vocab became essentially the same as kanji. She would write the English and we'd have to write the kanji, or she'd write the kanji and we'd have to write the English.

Basically, if I didn't know the kanji, I'd get a 20% or so on every single test, even if I knew the vocab and grammar backwards to forwards. I ended up failing that class as well.

Now all these examples up above don't really bug me. I know I'm a horrible student. I'm selfish, self-righteous, and I think I know better than my professors. I can deal with that. I don't blame them for dealing with me as they did (because, as we all know, I can be a stubborn prick much of the time). It still makes the class rather crappy in my opinion (or rather a non-issue as I typically just stopped going).

Those aren't my worst classes though.

My #2 worst class was linear algebra. I took it on a lark my second semester freshman year because, well, it seemed like something interesting (higher level math) and I had a free period to take it. I had really enjoyed the prior logic class, and my professor for that told me to give linear algebra a shot, so I took it pass/fail. I just didn't understand it AT ALL. It was WAY above my level of comprehension. I mucked through with a C-, but I utterly BOMBED the final. Much of the class did, but we had one prick who kept screwing up the scale. Ah well. I hated just not getting it.

My #1 worst course was high school AP Chemistry. We had no actual class, so it was an independent study. The professor was awesome for normal chemistry, but didn't help AT ALL with AP. I just didn't get it. It was me and another girl (who ended up at harvard, is the parent of two harvard-educated astrophysicists, and was our valedictorian). She got it. I didn't. And it irked me. I went in for help, and the professor (who was awesome at explaining) would just chuckle at the fact I didn't get it, and ended up just pretending I never took the course (far better for me). I ended up getting a 2 on my AP Chem exam (how I managed that, I don't know).

Basically, my worst classes are when I WANT to be able to do something, and I apply myself towards it, but I fail. It's so frustrating to me. I can tolerate being able to do something and being bored by it. It's a different kind of dislike. But just not being able to do something I want to be able to do and am willing to apply myself to do is just intolerable.

[FOBulous]

I think school overall sucks.