Thursday, December 8, 2005

Hot for teacher (as in red hot MAD!)

Have I mentioned that I am taking online classes? I don’t think that I have, so I am now. Of course, I can’t say which college I am enrolled in, but let’s just say that it’s probably the most popular one out there. One of my classes is called Internet Technologies, which is, basically, “how to use the Internet as a research, reference and study tool for your schooling”. Needless to say, it’s rather boring if you already know how to do this (see Google), but I have learned a couple new tricks and how to use the online library that is included with my rather costly tuition. Nonetheless, the instructor for this class has been able to get under my skin and I’ve never even verbally spoken to him. Our only contact is through email and he’s still managed to piss me off. Not only has he pissed me off, but he’s pissed off S as well. What has he done you ask? Here’s a list:

A day or two after we turn in an assignment, we receive the grade. A couple days into the new week, we then receive a summary of our grades for the previous weeks’ assignments with some comments. A few weeks back, he gave me a grade of 30/30 on the assignment, but on the summary, it was listed as 10/30. Of course, I wanted to know which one was right, so I emailed him and very politely asked which one was correct. He emailed back a few hours later saying, “OOOPs. my error. should be 30/30 and I will change that.” He didn’t say, “I’m sorry”, or apologize in any manner. This alone I felt was not a big deal until the next issue.

On my summary for week Five, which was just a couple weeks ago, none of the point values were filled in, just left as zeroes. Again, I emailed him to let him know of this situation and I joked, “Or did I do that poorly last week?” The response I received on this one, nothing. The only thing I received was a return email with the subject line reading, “Week 5 Summary Corrected”, but nothing in the body of the email, no apology again. I’m slightly ticked at this, but as long as it’s not affecting my grades, I guess I can let this slide, until this week’s problem.

We have an assignment due tonight, that I have yet to begin, but read through on Monday. Here is the assignment:

Correct the misconceptions of “Joe Student”, who believes he can work full-time and pursue his online degree without modifying the study habits he used in high school.

Offer suggestions to help Joe succeed as a distance learner.

I don’t quite fully understand this assignment because if “Joe Student” was a good student, who had acceptable study habits in high school, why would he think it won’t work for him in this scenario? So I emailed the instructor again, 120 words worth, with a number of questions and this is the response I received concerning my email, “Joe is anyone; any student grades are unimportant in this assignment.”

What? How can grades be unimportant when talking about study habits? Don’t good study habits lead to good grades? I’ve posed these questions, along with this whole situation to S and a few people at work and the response I’m getting is, “It’s time to just put some BS down on paper.” Unfortunately, I don’t even know where to begin! Any help on this would be appreciated, but this assignment is due by midnight Central Time, so if you could be expeditious in your response, I’d be very grateful to you.

1 comment:

Juggling Mother said...

Do you need good grades/to pass?

If you are just doing it for un & interest & don't care about your grades, writ n essay about Joe Student who did well at school, went to work, took an online course, breezed through it without any effort/moderation of his lifestyle. It will P off your teacher, and might make him/her think about woring his/her questions better next time. But you'll get crap grades!

if you need good grades, so what we all do - write what they want to hear. You're not supposed to think for yourself on these things - not until at least PhD level - and then only if you agree with the other profesors:-) Joe student is an average person, who never botherd much at school, 7 is now trying to "better himself" by learning this new fangled IT stuff. it'll be total rubbish & get you an A!