Thursday, February 19, 2009

: on six-hour classes.

Seriously? Seriously. Seriously? SERIOUSLY? Seriously! 

Like, come on, people. I think the grad-school planners must have figured a way to manage the monotony of teaching the same material year after year: mean-spirited nastiness. Because frankly, I can't think of any other way to describe a six-hour long class. Painful? Mind-numbing? Abysmal? Any of those would work too, I suppose. The fact that the material is actually interesting is negated on an inverse correlation to time-spent in the same seat.

But anyway. So here I am: numb-butted from sitting in the same chair for four-and-half-hours, when it's announced that we will be doing group-work. Ah, what joy is mine. This means listening to people who like to listen to themselves give irrelevant judgements on strategic board management; specifically, board-education planning. The next 30 minutes was spent counting backwards from ten in my head over and over again to calm my irritation as I listened to my groupmates try to yell over each other about anything and everything that they thought would best showcase themselves whilst mostly ignoring the scope of the assignment. For reals: I find your resume wholly useless to this task. I'm sure you are incredibly experienced in your various areas, and do your jobs very well, and stuff and things. But pleaseeeeeeeeee. So what happens? I every-so-gently try to steer back to the assignment, and get lectured like a kindergartner. So I work out the presentation by my lonesome while they take turns interrupting one another, which I read off to them three minutes before deadline and then they SERIOUSLY all say, "Wow! You nailed that. You need to be on a board, NOW." This statement was followed by a soft 'POP'- the sound of my head exploding.

Ahhh, grad school. I love you, but I don't have to like you right now.

Other things that are just AWFUL:
1) Having to google-search terms that my professor drops like acceptable English, during lecture, while taking notes.
2) 50-page reading assignments emailed the day before class.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Seriously? Seriously.

Thank you for this articulate exposition on life as a grad student. I wholly resonate with it.