Tuesday, November 2, 2010

The other thing about Cell Biology

My faithful readers will remember last week when I posted about my cell biology class.  Everyone else can scroll down to last week and pretend to be a faithful reader if they want.  No judgment here.

Well, it seems that I am not the only one complaining about the class.  Yesterday, the professor (the "head professor", so the one who wrote this last test we took) came to class and said that she's been getting lots of negative feedback.  She then explained that we were all dumb and need to work harder.  She told us that this class is a graduate level class, and is all about critical thinking not just regurgitation like we are used to, and that can cause some students to struggle.  But the solution is for us, the students, to buck up and work harder.

This made me think about two things.  First, when you argue, there are the buzzwords you use and there is your actual argument.  These two do not have to be related.  You may notice that my criticism of her class was "in grad school we should be thinking critically not regurgitating, therefore you are a bad teacher," and that her defense was "in grad school, you should be thinking critically not regurgitating, therefore you are all lazy and dumb."  We both think that those particular words- critical thinking and all that- back up our particular position.  Of course, I am right.

The second thing is something that really bothers me.  That is that the problem is always someone else's fault.  I would have been happy with a compromise of "hey, guys, I could have worded my questions better, but you still need to put more time into this class.  I'll try to be clearer about what I want if you will try to do better work."  Some sort of shared blame.  But there was no sharing.  She said "You are complaining about my test, therefore you are all dumb."  Nothing wrong with the test.

Anyway, I thought I should follow up on that previous post.  I just have to make it through another few weeks of the class, and then I'll get to complain about something else.

2 comments:

Bradwich said...

Obviously a class full of college graduates is going to be full of idiots. Plus, she's probably got a graduate degree of some kind, so she's infallible. Which means that someday you'll be infallible, too.

David said...

I can't wait to be infallible. I'll be all "the sky is red" and somebody will be all "that's not true" and I'll be all "hey, man, PhD." Then they'll be sad.

I'm a Mormon.