Ranting

     I borrowed the title of this post from a friend, who keeps a blog just for posts like these.
     I am absolutely not cut out for the college life. I have absolutely had it up to ^^^^^ here with uncaring, incompetent professors who are just teaching to get a paycheck. Do they not realize that our success in their classes determines our future success? Our future job? Whether or not we get scholarships?
     I'm not a perfect student. I admit to cramming for a test, skipping a class, and once or twice barely making it through class without dozing off, but overall I'm a good student. I come to class, I pay attention, I take notes, I actually want to succeed. But I'm convinced I have had just about the worst collection of professors three different colleges could offer. Coming from a family of just plain good teaching people, most of which don't need a degree to be, I can spot a poor one a mile away.
     When I had kidney stones and mono, even though I had a running A in every class, I had professors tell me I either could fail or drop out, no option three. And this was all the way in April, three weeks from exams. No getting money back, no credit for any of my classes. Way to try, Alyssa, but no we will not be working anything out, and no you won't be coming back.
     I've had a professor who talked to human skulls, in African clicking languages no less. The first day of chem lab, my Chinese teaching assistant forgot himself and wrote all our notes in Chinese. I had a design studio teacher who came to class every day high, and graded us based on his current mood instead of our effort or talent. I had a teacher who would count you absent if you left his three hour long lecture even to go pee. One of my piano teachers never remembered I had already taken for twelve years, so I spent a semester beating sticks together like a first grader.
     Last semester, my accounting professor refused to believe the reason everyone in his class was failing was because he never went back over anything we were confused about. I even asked him one day 'Sir, I feel about as dumb as a rock in your class. I take notes, I study, I do your homework and all your practice problems, and I even read the book and do all the practice stuff in there. How do I go about not failing your class?' He looked at me straight faced and said 'Obviously, you need to spend more time practicing.' I think every single person in that class groaned and smacked their face on the table.
     This is my current 'star' of professorhood: my stats teacher. She is an obsessive question asker. By that I mean her lectures go like this 'Today we're going to what? Take a what? Quiz, on what? Standard deviation. And then we're going to UH OH! Start chapter seven on what? Permutations and...? Combinations.' No joke. It took me two weeks to learn how to filter out the actual information from the questions.
     She also pretty much just teaches for the paycheck, and really could care less whether we get the info or not. In her 'other life' she's a real estate appraiser. She's so busy she can't keep office hours, how she gets by with that I have no clue, so to ask questions you're supposed to email her. Well, there are rules for that: Don't email after 6, or she's not going to get it until the following day. During the week, it'll take her twenty-four hours to respond. And on the weekend, she doesn't check it until Monday. As far as her 'help', she refuses to answer questions about any homework or practice problems, no matter how poorly she glossed over the subject in class, because 'If I help you with the homework, you aren't really learning, are you?'. Well, if I don't understand it and I get every problem wrong, I'm sure not learning anything that way either!
     The kicker with her is this. We take tests on scantron, just like half of every other college class. But she told us before the first test not to bother checking for any errors in grading, because 'I don't make errors.' Really?!? You're GOD?
     What set me off today was my online class teacher. I figured taking a class where I was basically my teacher would be the perfect solution to this awful professor streak...well, no. My midterm is tomorrow for this class, and not only has this teacher not provided us any notes to study from all year for our chapter quizzes, she's made all our old tests inaccessible so we can't use those to study from either! I'm going into this midterm tomorrow with the full expectation to fail, because there's no way I can learn and retain enough useful information to pass an economics midterm just from studying eight textbook chapters. That's like trying to learn calculus without actually doing any practice problems.
     That's all for my little rant of the week. I just needed to let all that out, vent a little. Haha if it didn't mean about two more years putting up with more ridiculous teachers, I'd almost be tempted to become one myself, just to show all these future college kids what a decent teacher is like. But...I'm too close to graduation to throw myself back to the lions now!