My Crazy Thoughts
my thoughts on various topics.

1. If you are going to announce that we can't use graphing calculators on an exam then announce at some point before 2 hours before the exam, when I'm already on campus. Also, when you see myself, and a number of other first year students, sitting in the office study area working out calculations and clearly preparing for the exam WITH their graphing calculators, please let us know about this. It is not nice to send an e-mail and then immediately run out of the office and lock it before we recieve it. Also, you did NOT tell us ever that we couldn't use them, you said we couldn't have any programs, and during the first exam when you checked our calculators for programs you didn't act like it was a problem. Also the professor of the course said that we could have scientific calculators but we couldn't have programs, I realize that scientific and graphing are different NOW, but the important part of the statement was that they couldn't have programs, my calculator didn't have programs, and I would have been more than willing to show you this. At least don't tell me AFTER it is too late to do anything about it.
2. Don't move a presentation up when you specifically tell the people at the main campus that it is not moved up. Especially don't do it during a week when we have 3 exams, and presentation and a quiz already scheduled. Don't wait until the day before things are due to then cancel that presentation. Look before you leap or something like that.
3. Don't act as if everyone is retarded and you are clearly correct. We realize that you are well educated because you are our professor, please realize we are well educated because we are here. Obviously we are capable of reading. Don't act as if everyone must not have watched your lectures because we don't know what is really going on. If someone tells you that all the people they have talked to at a campus are not sure of what is going on, please do not act like we all must not have watched you lectures.
4. When I send you an e-mail and post a question to the discussion board please e-mail me back, even if it is just to say that question is not on the exam. Especially if the answer is something as simple as M-1sec-1. I am not able to go to your office monday morning to ask the question in person, please take this into account before you ignore my e-mail.
5. When someone is mugged in the middle of the day on campus because the campus is in the ghetto don't act as if everything possible is being done because you called a security agency to see how much it costs to hire a couple more security officers. Again we are not stupid, we know that if we were on the campus of a university rather than just a hospital in the ghetto the incident would have been all over the newspaper, and there would have been immediate changes made, other than an e-mail being sent telling us to walk to our cars with other students.

And to end all this fun with a little bit lighter, I would just like to say how absolutely grateful I am the the second year student who lent me their calculator before the exam, and in fact offered it without me needing to ask. I can't put into words how much stress this relieved. Also, I understand that the directors of the campus did everything they are capable of to make campus safer, they alerted us immediately about the problem. I am more upset with the administration from the main campus acting as if there is not problem. I like being on a satelite campus because the people who work their seem to actually care about how we are doing. I think a lot of the stress comes from always feeling like we are out of the loop and not getting the information we need. The head bone is not connected to the neck bone. So when you make announcements like the one tonight after the week we have had, we simply can't help the uprising.

I'm going to now try to take a zen like approach to my education. Everything is okay and will come out even when it comes to carma. Or something like that.

posted by Malissa at 9:38 PM