Sunday, May 20, 2007
An Unfunny Joke
This semester, I have spent most of my Saturdays attending the gravest waste of time that I’ve experienced since a few years ago when I last took education courses at Brooklyn College. I don’t know why classes for teachers taught by teachers have to be so atrocious in every respect. I feel that the attitude unconsciously expressed by the professor is: “We all have a lot of other, more important stuff going on in our lives, so let’s just show up, kill some time, I’ll give you some joke assignments and you’ll turn something in and everybody gets an A.” I hate this crap.
The course was supposed to be 6 credits in geology at the graduate level. The problems with the course are twofold. First, the student population is completely split in two – half of the class are career teachers with little to no knowledge of science who are fulfilling a distribution requirement for their Masters, which has become necessary thanks to No Child Left Behind, and the other half are earth science teachers who are trying to become certified in their subject area, a difficult venture as New York State only recognizes certain geology courses (such as the farce in which I am enrolled) as valid, whereas the infinitely more challenging geology classes I took at Hamilton don’t count for a sack of bureaucrats.
Regardless, part of the problem with this class is that half of us could ace the Earth Science Regents while blind drunk, and the other half would require a few months of intensive coaching to eke out a passing grade. The other problem is the professor, who has done honor to the term “incompetent”. It’s hard to decide which part of his incompetence to focus on. The man routinely walks out of class for up to an hour at a time to “make photocopies”, leaving us with the same worksheets that he assigns his high school students, which the teachers of earth science scoff at because it’s the same basic stuff that we teach our middle school students, but which thoroughly confuse the others, because they’ve never been taught the material. When he does attempt to teach, he routinely confuses the most basic principles of science, as well as confusing most of the students, with his claims that oceanic crust sinks below continental crust “because it’s lighter” or that, as cool air moves to a warmer area, it cools down.
Worse, the course gives no sense of the breadth of the material – it would be difficult enough to cover the entire discipline in twelve meetings even if he didn’t dedicate five of them to discussing how carbon dioxide affects climate change. The entirety of this surreal experience could be summarized in a single anecdote: the professor wanted to show us an episode of “Scooby Doo Adventures” where the Mystery Machine crew go down to Antarctica to combat global warming, despite the fact that he had clearly demonstrated a week earlier that that we could not use the DVD player because we didn’t have the right cables. This is supposed to be a graduate level class in geology; it leaves me feeling dirty – like I’m simply trading time and money for credits. During his desperate fumbling with the DVD player, I walked out of class, got on my bike, and met my friend Esther at the Botanic Gardens for a resplendent afternoon amidst the cherry trees and the blooming tulips. When I returned two hours later, nothing had happened. It may be a joke class, but it’s no longer funny.
The course was supposed to be 6 credits in geology at the graduate level. The problems with the course are twofold. First, the student population is completely split in two – half of the class are career teachers with little to no knowledge of science who are fulfilling a distribution requirement for their Masters, which has become necessary thanks to No Child Left Behind, and the other half are earth science teachers who are trying to become certified in their subject area, a difficult venture as New York State only recognizes certain geology courses (such as the farce in which I am enrolled) as valid, whereas the infinitely more challenging geology classes I took at Hamilton don’t count for a sack of bureaucrats.
Regardless, part of the problem with this class is that half of us could ace the Earth Science Regents while blind drunk, and the other half would require a few months of intensive coaching to eke out a passing grade. The other problem is the professor, who has done honor to the term “incompetent”. It’s hard to decide which part of his incompetence to focus on. The man routinely walks out of class for up to an hour at a time to “make photocopies”, leaving us with the same worksheets that he assigns his high school students, which the teachers of earth science scoff at because it’s the same basic stuff that we teach our middle school students, but which thoroughly confuse the others, because they’ve never been taught the material. When he does attempt to teach, he routinely confuses the most basic principles of science, as well as confusing most of the students, with his claims that oceanic crust sinks below continental crust “because it’s lighter” or that, as cool air moves to a warmer area, it cools down.
Worse, the course gives no sense of the breadth of the material – it would be difficult enough to cover the entire discipline in twelve meetings even if he didn’t dedicate five of them to discussing how carbon dioxide affects climate change. The entirety of this surreal experience could be summarized in a single anecdote: the professor wanted to show us an episode of “Scooby Doo Adventures” where the Mystery Machine crew go down to Antarctica to combat global warming, despite the fact that he had clearly demonstrated a week earlier that that we could not use the DVD player because we didn’t have the right cables. This is supposed to be a graduate level class in geology; it leaves me feeling dirty – like I’m simply trading time and money for credits. During his desperate fumbling with the DVD player, I walked out of class, got on my bike, and met my friend Esther at the Botanic Gardens for a resplendent afternoon amidst the cherry trees and the blooming tulips. When I returned two hours later, nothing had happened. It may be a joke class, but it’s no longer funny.
