Now I don't remember if I've ever gone into detail on my schooling and whatnot, but I'm now officially a Communications major here at the good ol' University of Massachusetts. I'm also unofficially an Education minor. It's a Catch-22 system, where you can't be a minor until you have completed all the courses, and it never tells you what courses you need to take online, because you are not a minor. It's a dumb and flawed system.
But what's more dumb and flawed is one of the classes that I've needed to take. Now I won't go into specifics of when I had to take this class, or which class it is specifically, but let me tell you about it. This class had a promising title, offering to teach us about international things, implying that the general scope would be scattered, you know, internationally. Turns out international, in this context, stands for "Africa, India, and China."
Now, I wouldn't mind studying Africa, India and China, except that's all we did. I was under the assumption that if our teacher was from Great Britain, we might actually take interest in the U.K. and Europe, but apparently I was mistaken. My Bad.
Anyways, this class was painful to go to. Not only did we have the class in a room that always had the heat blasting from 5 gigantic radiators, even during the fall when it was already high 70's, but the class was rarely taught by our actual teacher. Most of the time, we'd walk into class, and we'd have a guest speaker, talking about something irrelevant, and non-consequential to the class. Then a few times, we'd walk in to class only to find that all 8 of the TA's were going to parade up to the front of the class and tell us about all their time spent in the peace corps in, oh wouldn't you look at that! Africa. The few classes she actually taught? Yeah, she just stood up there and talked at us. It was painful.
So that's what happened from a "teaching" perspective for the first few classes. From a "student" perspective I did the following:
- Read a book
- Listened to my iPod
- Played PSP
- Played Trivia/Solitaire on my iPod
- Played Mahjong on my Laptop
- Read the Newspaper
There was no wireless in this building for some godforsaken reason. Who knows why. Perhaps they thought the heat would make us pass out before we tried to use it. Perhaps they were right.
I will take this time to tell you the sole, shimmering gem of wisdom I've gleaned from this class. Having all that time of sitting in class allows one to accomplish tremendous feats. I mastered the alphabet. Backwards. Yes. Through repetitive writing, and filling two pages of paper, I, Jim Redding, have conquered the alphabet both forwards and backwards. I feel accomplished. I also wrote a short screen play for a Star Wars spoof created by my bro-host Kevin and myself. We are thinking of selling it to Robot Chicken. They seem pretty cool.
After the Midterm Reviews, where everyone slammed her for having an awful class, she decided to merge the second and third papers of the class into one final paper. At this point I need to mention the discussion section of the class. The class only met once a week, with a discussion section immediately following the class itself. Two and a half hours of class purely on one subject is brutal, even in the best of classes. This was living in a hellish netherworld where time falls to a standstill and you are prodded with a pointy stick for what seems like eternity.
Now my TA was nice enough. Arguably too nice. Hailing from, oh weird, AFRICA (specifically Nigeria), she was all about being our friend, and us being buddies. So the first couple of classes, we'd go in, and instead of you know, having class, possibly getting through everything so we could get out early, we'd sit down, and have to find a neighbor and ask them, "How was your day?"
Cue the prodding.
This is the last place any of us wanted to be, and we were forced into niceties with strangers, that nobody really wanted to be there with. This eventually escalated into "Friendship Groups" which consisted of 5 people sitting around and asking each other how our days were. This was quickly replaced with us asking each other why they had made the horrible decision of taking this class.
This also might be a good time to note, while after the midterm beat-down, our teacher started teaching, and actually used PowerPoint, we weren't graded or tested upon anything we learned in class. The entire grading system is based on homeworks, done using readings provided to us online, and turned in to discussion. We took a few weeks off after we figured this out, skipping the class and blending in with the crowds as we filtered off to discussion. It was, unfortunately, all too easy, and still horrifically painful.
I have explained to you my rage, and agony I have experienced for participating in this class, but this does it no justice. Should you ever be in a similar position to that of my own, be wary of international classes. I beg of you. Should you ever stumble into a class where there is a promise of "International" and "Learning," be wary. Be very wary.
