And Now I Whine About School

I’m really irritated. Not by politics this time. By my damned professor. I’m paying $675 (I tweeted $800 earlier, but that was without verification and I was wrong. My other class is actually $900.)) for this class whether it’s online or on campus. This one happens to be online. An online course requires us to be more responsible with our time and we’re expected to do most of our work on our own. That’s fine. This isn’t the first online course I’ve taken and I’ve done pretty well previously. But this professor I’ve got…

The class is for web scripting. We’re supposed to be learning JavaScript and AJAX and, supposedly, some PHP. I was looking forward to that. But the first couple of weeks we created two different websites without special scripting. We were just "learning" XHTML and CSS. We don’t have a text and our prof simply directs us to w3schools.org. That works to a point. And mostly only if you know what you’re doing. Thankfully I earned 100% on each of my first assignments.

We went straight from basic design language to JavaScript. Her instructions were simply to design and code an XHTML valid web page with 5 pages and linked to a valid CSS page. Fine. I just copied my previous CSS and changed some stuff. Then we were to write a currency converter which would convert currency from U.S. Dollars to one of 5 other currencies or from one of 5 other currencies to U.S. Dollars. I don’t know JavaScript very well and was having some difficulty. So, of course, I asked for help.

My first email was pretty detailed about what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. My problem was getting the code to work. I tried to figure out what all of the different websites I googled were telling me, but it was too much and I was just getting bogged down. She replies to me “Don’t use a checkbox. Use a radio button instead.” Didn’t address my problem, I thought, but maybe that’s all that was wrong. Nope. I was having a problem getting the value from an option menu and wanted to know how to go about that. So I wrote another email. 

A couple of days go by and I get another short reply “Don’t put a function on the radio button”. Still didn’t help. I tried for hours to get some help and I’m pretty sure no one knew what the hell I was trying to say. So I wrote another email, asked her if she could please explain to me how to go about doing what I needed to do and then asked if she could just recommend a book I can use for reference as the one I was using obviously was lacking in something. Four fucking days later she tells me she rewrote my code (without the explanation I was looking for!!!) and that I was graded a 75%.

Not even a little bit of explanation. Obviously I’m a code master and I’m highly skilled in JavaScript—because I’m awesome like that. I obviously didn’t need her help and was just doing my very best to bother the shit out of her. Obviously I was NOT fucking missing something that probably should have been staring me straight in the eye. But her job is to help me work through this shit and understand what it is I’m doing. 

Yes, I can copy someone else’s code. Yes, that would have been a way to do it and get it done and probably gotten a better grade. But I don’t pay to go to fucking school so I can use Google and steal someone else’s code! I want to understand the basics behind it. And, honestly, she should have at least been able to point me to a book which contains the information I need. I don’t expect her to hold my hand through the entire thing. But an explanation of what I needed to do would have shoved my ass in the right direction.

Considering the attitude of my VB professor last spring, I’m really rethinking my major because these ladies act as if I should already know what they know. But I don’t and this is why I’m a student and not a teacher. I’m a little slow intellectually these days (thank you, FMS!), but I’m not at a complete standstill. I am able to comprehend this shit. Otherwise I wouldn’t be on the Dean’s list and wouldn’t really enjoy the code behind the site. My professor from last spring finally got that wrapped around her head. And we ended up, not on perfect footing, but on better footing. And I understood what it was she was trying to teach me– eventually. This professor just doesn’t have the interest and/or time. And I’m frustrated.

Luckily, I only have a couple of more weeks in this semester and then I’ll be doing my final courses for the first half of my degree. If I finish the Bachelor’s of Science in Technology will be determined by the amount of classes I’ll have to take online from now on. I have no interest in continuing on in this university if my professors aren’t interested in teaching me what I need to know. Or maybe I’ll just change to a degree that isn’t so challenging to me. Maybe I’ll just be lazy and go the easy route.

On a lighter note, I am taking my final math course for my degree and am getting a pretty good grade in it (Trigonometry with an 87% at this point). That’s promising, yes?

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