Bad Classes

   I feel like we talk about school a lot. To be honest, it's difficult not to when school pretty much runs your life. When you're down to the last few weeks of the school year, all that pressure explodes exponentially and it's hard not to be that student that has no life outside of school.

   But on the flipside, it's also hard to take your university courses seriously when... well, when they suck.

    There's a few reasons why a course might suck. The reason I ran into the most was that the course had a bad instructor.

   I've had a few courses where the instructor wasn't even a professional teacher. In one of these, the university hired a hospital administrator to teach a class about the organizational structure of my province's public healthcare system. Sounds smart, right? He sure knew what he was talking about, but you could tell that, to him, teaching that course was just an extra thing. The result? Well, I think I only remember one thing from that class. Plus, the class had to fit his full-time work schedule, and that meant a three-hour lecture late in the evening - too late for me to ride the bus home, which meant bigger gas bills.

   Sometimes, though, even professors aren't good teachers. They're the kind that excel at doing research, but maybe struggle with the teaching part of their job. This is difficult because these professors tend to have a hard time getting down on a lowly undergrad's level they ramble about really advanced stuff while you're still learning the basics.

   Even more rarely (and I don't wish this on anyone), your professor will be a mess. Like, the kind that gets upset every time someone walks in late, or has to leave early, or whenever the projector isn't working. The kind that likes to point out often that it takes work to prepare a lecture, or to mark assignments and tests. The kind that dismisses a class early because how dare we not do the readings this one time, while any other prof would have just said; "Well, if you don't understand, that's your fault."

   Also rarely, you'll have the high-and-mighty professor. The kind that thinks they're way more important than anyone else in the room and get mad when they feel like they've been slighted. Those ones are the worst.

   The professor isn't always to blame, though: A university is a business. They're there to make money. If you go to university and wonder why you have to take so many electives; my answer for you is that the university is making extra bucks off of you. This is my last school year of my bachelor degree, and about 8/10 of the classes I took were electives, and I still don't have any reason to believe that taking these extra courses is going to help me in my professional life. These courses are probably great for the people who are interested in them, but since they have nothing to do with my degree and I'm only there for the credits, they're not great at all.

   So what do you do? How do you avoid these bad courses, and how do you deal with one if you wind up in one? The short answer is: You can't predict which courses will be bad, and you'll just have to tough it out.

   You can avoid bad elective by planning out your classes ahead of time; remember when I said you should plan out all of your courses right when you start university? This is one huge reason why that's important. Third- and fourth-year classes usually have prerequisites, so if you're just looking at them in your third and fourth years, you're probably too late to get into them. If I had known this when I started university, I'd probably be taking more creative writing classes (because they're fun) and more low-key science classes (because those would have actually applied to the career I'm chasing). Instead I got stuck with English, political science, and philosophy courses. But hey, even when you wind up stuck in a course you didn't want, keep an open mind: sometimes the class will surprise you and you'll like it a lot more than you thought you would. This happened to me more than twice during my degree.

   What about bad profs? Well, there are websites like ratemyprofessors.com where students can leave public reviews of their teachers, but there are obvious problems with it: what other people have to say about a professor may or may not be anything like how your experience with them will be. Reading reviews from sites like these, I agree with positive reviews about profs I liked, and agree with negative reviews about profs I didn't like. Then I look at opposing reviews and wonder how in the world they could think that about Dr. so-and-so. They might give you an idea of what to expect, but you can't really rely on it. Likewise, you can ask your friends that have had classes with them before, but the same problems apply: your experience could be completely different from theirs.

   So when it comes to bad profs, you just have to tough it out. If their lectures are boring and not helpful, then try spending lecture time reading and reviewing the textbook and the lecture slides instead. If they're bad at relaying instructions, badger them for details! If they're unstable or nasty, sit in the back. There's no universal solution, and sometimes it will feel like there's no good solution. But if you work at it and use your resources (there's always plenty at university) at least one workable solution will come up.