narking on about something no one else cares about.

[lemanya]

I have several favourite pasttimes. One of them is reading, another is writing (though we all know how that goes) and another- is bitching about my university until someone tells me to shut up.

I went to a lecture the other day. This isn't so much omgyouwenttoalecture??? because I generally do attend them, but I haven't had an honest to god proper lecture in like, four weeks due to holidays and public holidays and abrupt cancelling and staying home because I have an assignment due I should've started weeks ago, but didn't and hey! I can totally get the lecture notes off the internet (which I have not done. yet).

All of the above constitutes the following: why the hell am I going to uni? I'm surprised I'm getting good marks! Clearly, I'm naturally awesome.

ANYWAY.

I went to my lecture the other day, which was on perception. Normally I'm like yay, perception! because thinking about how what we perceive and how we perceive it creates our own reality yadayadayada it's all very philosophical and I lap it up like spilt chocolate milk on a clean sanitary surface. I love it. But at the moment, we have a guest lecturer for the rest of semester, who's a specialist on auditory perception, which is kinda cool, but he can't teach for crap. About halfway through yesterday's lecture, I gave up listening, and instead composed the following:

THINGS I DISLIKE ABOUT UNIVERSITY.

+ Circling the parking lot (there's three of them) for half an hour for a parking space only to have the first available spot be in the sun. This happens frequently.

+ Lecturers who consistently have trouble with the lecterns. It's the same system in every hall, and they deal with this system at least once a week. You'd think they'd get it, or the university would run workshops for them.

+ Lecturers who disconnect the main system in order to hook up their private laptops because that's where their lecture power point is stored. It's called a USB flashdrive, professor, and it'll take a lot less time to boot up.

+ Lecturers who have absolutely no clue how to hold an audience's attention (case in point). I don't care how much of an expert you are, if you can't keep my interest, I ain't learning anything.

+ Lecturers who lean in too close to the microphone and cause horrendous feedback, which they can't ever seem to hear.

+ Lecturers who don't speak into the microphone at all, and expect us, while we're sitting in a 500 seater lecture hall, to get all the content. Worse is when they start by leaning in to the mike and saying "can everyone hear me okay?" and when we all nod or say yes, proceed to talk everywhere else but the microphone.

+ Cancelling a class at the end of the week because the beginning of the week had a public holiday which affected the same class on a different campus. I can work out a scheduling system around this, why can't you?

+ Cancelling a class/lecture and only giving notification via the companion website. Not even an email, not even a note on the door, and a fail in the system causing some students to not even receive the popup announcement. Like me.

+ Lecturers who rush through the content without ample time for us to write. The reason I'm sitting here is so that I don't have to download the notes- otherwise I wouldn't show up at all.

+ Long tangents from the content. I don't give a flying fuck about your early misconceptions in the field, or whether your grandfather's annecdote is apt to describe the situation. Just tell me what I need to know in order to pass this class.

+ Phrases like "Understanding concept Z is an extraordinarily difficult task". DON'T TELL US THAT, IT'S NOT CONDUCIVE  TO MOTIVATION.  And if it's so difficult to understand, WHY THE HELL ARE YOU  EVEN BRINGING IT UP? 

+ Videos that are useless. The worst part is when they're not all together useless, just useless in the context of their use. Either show the video, OR display the notes, but don't do both. I'm not a child, I can read a simple paragraph and understand it, I don't need an acompanying video saying exactly the same thing to what's on the board.

+ Lecturers who lecture by reading the notes word for word. Thankfully this isn't widespread. But this auditory guy right now? The powerpoint is not composed of summaries that he expands on (which would make writing on my part easier, because there aren't so many words surrounding the main theme of the point), oh no... It's his whole speech, word for freaking word, and he reads it straight off the screen (complete with corny punctuation). Even his segues are written in there:
        "blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
         blah blah blah things we don't care about blah blah blah
         blah blah blah blah blah...
         the three main aspects are pitch, frequency and timbre.

         for now, we'll focus on pitch." cue next slide. This last sentence is something you say, as a conversational extra, and not have written in the notes. 

+The fact that the student centre (renamed "Student Central" recently [and oh how trendy that title is]) is at one end of the campus, and not the middle. this may be a little nitpicky, but this "Student Central" has the cafeteria, the bookshop, the general store, the coffee lounge, a lecture hall, bathrooms, the security centre and the student services office. It's even right next to the library. For such an important place, shouldn't it be easily accesible? It's a bitch when I have to walk ten minutes to the other end of campus just to buy a goddamn pen.


/rant.