A professor I have this semester (who shall remain nameless) for one of my classes has really started to bug me. No guys, it's not Jean.
For this particular class, we have had several books to read for lecture as well as several assignments to complete for lab. After each book and each assignment, we are supposed to write a 500-word summary of the book, or for lab, a one-page critique of how we thought our assignment went. This comes out to be 10 short papers on top of our other 5, much larger papers.
It gets worse. The end of the semester is approaching. Now we have to take those 5 summaries we wrote on each book and write one big one. His summary of the assignment is "to write what you learned in lecture... 2,500 words." In addition, we must do the same thing for lab... "Write 1,500 words on what you learned in lab."
Here's how I interpret this: My professor wants to hear how great he is by having us kiss up to him in 4,000 words. Did I mention he never grades our summaries and I'm still waiting on grades for 2 of my 5 main assignments? Why should I do my work if he doesn't? And he never leaves comments for the grades I have on the first 3 assignments.
My point to all of this is... does editing matter to him? How much time does he dedicate to making sure we know our stuff compared to how much we are supposed to tell him what an excellent teacher he is? I want to know why I got an 85 on one paper compared to a 100 on the other. Did I have typos or misused facts on the first?
I guess I will never know. This is why it is important to know what mistakes you made and how they need to be corrected; so you can always improve!
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Sounds a little like my J415 class last semester, but I don't think you should be so upset. As much as the assignment sounds dumb, you should view it as an opportunity to show off all your writing talents. You get to spew your opinion on it, so it doesn't take nearly as much detail as a news story. I did it last semester, and it worked.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I hate it when I get a grade on things and have no idea why I got them. For my history class that I am in right now, I just get a grade but no real comments on why I got that. And I hate that because then you do not really know what you should do to improve on your next paper.
ReplyDeleteI think even better than this kind of teacher are the teachers that constantly make grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors in their syllabuses or do those things while correcting papers. I've had several teachers like this along my 4 years here, and I've had friends who've shown me errors their teachers have made. I can't help but laugh when I see things like this.
ReplyDeleteHmmm, I can't guess which class this is for. Haha.
ReplyDeleteReading those books for lecture really did suck on top of the reporting work.
I completely agree with you. I found "reading" those books and writing about them to be pointless. And I don't understand why a huge paper has to be written about a class that you didn't learn much from the teacher in... But it sounds like you learned something about how reporting classes often operate. It seems that student teach themselves how to report and write, with professors offering casual advice more than they actually teach. And in writing, the way to teach is through editing, not saying, "What did you like most about Mr. Journalist's new book," or writing no comments.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what class you're talking about... =P
ReplyDeleteI took the class last semester and in the beginning, he never commented on my work. I didn't understand why until I finally realized that he wanted to read our opinions - something that I wasn't really used to offering up to people. I'm so used to writing news stories where my opinion is completely left out of the picture. The one positive thing I can say about the class (I have many more negative things I could write about) was that he challenged me to value my opinion more.
At least it's over! =)