So, I think everyone on here has realized by now that I'm a tidge lazy at times, especially if I don't actually want to do the thing I'm supposed to do.
Well, it applies to school even more than here. And it really applies to my CS350 class, which is my webdesign class. Honestly, my boyfriend knows more about webdesign than my teacher does, and that's sad. The projects are stupid, the class is boring, and the teacher doesn't care if you show up to class or not, so long as you turn the labs in and take the tests.
So I'm not going to class anymore. I haven't been for three weeks now. It's the best feeling I've had in my life.
But that's not what I'm grumpy about.
We're on our third lab assignment. It was due today. So I (being the lazy bum I am) wait until last night to get started. I merrily chug along, get caught up a few times, then realize "Why am I trying to design something from such vague instructions? I'll just go ask someone who took this last Spring."
So I do. I get an answer. Everything is good. I know what I'm doing now, how to make the calls, how to build the pages, etc etc. I throw it all together today over lunch, get it done in half the time it would have taken me through trying to bash it out without help. (An hour with help and useful examples. Cause, I'm sorry, you can't learn any programming language, even HTML and especially JavaScript, in a vacuum, which is what our teacher is trying to make us do, using just his slides and the few resources he's given us). So I merrily troop to my next class, knowing I can get an internet connection there, so that I can try to puzzle my way through PuTTY by myself so I can upload it and be done.
All's well and good. It's due in a half hour. Chug, chug, chug. I get the hang of PuTTY, piece of cake.
Ten minutes before the due time. Submit. Yay! All done. Look down at my taskbar. Huh? Email? Okay. Probably just Amazon.com spamming me again.
Check.
"CS350 Lab3 postponed until Monday."
Whhhaaaaaat?
Bull! Two people (that I know of) go complain to the teacher, and the lab gets postponed because, "It seems everyone is having trouble with this lab, so I've pushed the due date back until Monday."
Everyone? Everyone?!
I'm only submitting it this close to the deadline because I'm a lazy bum! AUGH!
...
So yes. I'm not a happy camper. Because I wasted precious studying time for my Asian Religions class to finish a lab that got postponed at the very last minute. Despise. Despise. Despise.
...
Oh, and I guess if anyone wants to take a gander at what I've been having to do, here's the main page: http://www.cs.siu.edu/~crichards/frames.html
The project I'm complaining about is the Guessing Game project. Anyway. I'm out. Need to keep studying.
Minor griping about school
Moderators: Mystic Dragon, Xalia, Shard, JKatkina
Heh 
Well, now you see why I lack the interest to involve myself in a college level course on something like this too: I already know it, and already know how to find out what I don't know..... I freaking hated school *so much*. SO. Much.
I do heartily recommend setting up a nice letter condemning the teacher for his lazy ass teaching technique. Point out what you know to be true: no one is learning because he's not actually *teaching*. it's teachers like that that really piss me off. I know plenty of good teachers. He's clearly not one of em.
Well, now you see why I lack the interest to involve myself in a college level course on something like this too: I already know it, and already know how to find out what I don't know..... I freaking hated school *so much*. SO. Much.I do heartily recommend setting up a nice letter condemning the teacher for his lazy ass teaching technique. Point out what you know to be true: no one is learning because he's not actually *teaching*. it's teachers like that that really piss me off. I know plenty of good teachers. He's clearly not one of em.
Author of Repurposed
kshau-protectorate.com
kshau-protectorate.com
-
Guest
-
StarFyre
- Ancient Dragon
- Posts: 3246
- Joined: Wed Jul 06, 2005 10:44 am
- Location: Middle of Nowhere
- Contact:
It's not so much that he's lazy, it's that he doesn't care about this stuff in the slightest. His specialty is server side database coding, not client side, and nothing beyond coding database structures.
What really pissed me off about the last minute deadline change is that there's usually a policy of doing that either a day before or three hours before at the latest, otherwise, the project is supposed to be due. I know it sounds like a stupid thing to be griping about (the teacher/teaching style is a more understandable target), but eh...
Blanket statements like "Everyone seems to be having trouble" just annoy me anyway...
As for getting off my own ass... I have actually been spending most of my free time trying to get my second Assembly project coded for CS320, which is a little more important than CS350 (in that, if I fail 320, I can't continue on in my degree until I've passed it.. if I fail 350 somehow, all I've done is add an F to my grades and need to take another 300 level class sometime before I graduate)
What really pissed me off about the last minute deadline change is that there's usually a policy of doing that either a day before or three hours before at the latest, otherwise, the project is supposed to be due. I know it sounds like a stupid thing to be griping about (the teacher/teaching style is a more understandable target), but eh...
Blanket statements like "Everyone seems to be having trouble" just annoy me anyway...
As for getting off my own ass... I have actually been spending most of my free time trying to get my second Assembly project coded for CS320, which is a little more important than CS350 (in that, if I fail 320, I can't continue on in my degree until I've passed it.. if I fail 350 somehow, all I've done is add an F to my grades and need to take another 300 level class sometime before I graduate)
-
StarFyre
- Ancient Dragon
- Posts: 3246
- Joined: Wed Jul 06, 2005 10:44 am
- Location: Middle of Nowhere
- Contact:
Not really... we can call the faculty down on TAs (and have been doing so a lot lately), but calling the faculty down on tenured, research professors is a lot of hoops and the stigma of teacher's-bane. I've seen the results of that in other departments, no thanks. That, and no one else would back me up on this. Its only because I started this semester with quite a bit of knowledge on the subject (and the knowledge of what a good teacher of HTML/etc is) that I can point at the teacher and say, "You know practically nothing about this, why are you insisting on teaching us in a vacuum?"
*sigh* That, and our college is absolutely paranoid about plagarism. Doing what I've been doing (looking at sites like AListApart that show code and code implementation) is lumped in with "illegally copying". Which means our only references for this material HAVE to be his slides which give very simplistic examples (a far cry from the rather complicated code that went into the Guessing Game... go have a look at the Javascript if you'd like, though I probably should go back through and comment it better) or the book, which isn't much help at all.
Thus, the plagarism hue and cry would be called against me if I brought it up, even if the rest of the professors in my department would be like, "Uhm, yeah.. you need examples in order to write code", the board which would give the final judgement on a tenured professor wouldn't see it that way. -_-;;
*sigh* That, and our college is absolutely paranoid about plagarism. Doing what I've been doing (looking at sites like AListApart that show code and code implementation) is lumped in with "illegally copying". Which means our only references for this material HAVE to be his slides which give very simplistic examples (a far cry from the rather complicated code that went into the Guessing Game... go have a look at the Javascript if you'd like, though I probably should go back through and comment it better) or the book, which isn't much help at all.
Thus, the plagarism hue and cry would be called against me if I brought it up, even if the rest of the professors in my department would be like, "Uhm, yeah.. you need examples in order to write code", the board which would give the final judgement on a tenured professor wouldn't see it that way. -_-;;
O_o Crazy. In our web design program, all of the teachers encourage us to look at other sites to see how it's done. That's the best way to learn, in that field -- since it's always changing and evolving, it's impossible to teach the subject without examples.
XP Booooo. At least there's only 2 months left?
XP Booooo. At least there's only 2 months left?
-
StarFyre
- Ancient Dragon
- Posts: 3246
- Joined: Wed Jul 06, 2005 10:44 am
- Location: Middle of Nowhere
- Contact:
That used to be how they did it here, too, but, see...
Alright, I'll actually give the minor recent history lesson of SIUC. Last year around this time, we got a new President for the SIU system, Glenn Poshard. Most people like him, he's actually trying to get the university back on track (instead of spending tons of money on a new stadium when some of the departments we advertise as "good" don't even have buildings dedicated to them (CS mainly, and we're supposed to be cutting edge CS department)). All in all, Poshard was well recieved, seems like he knows what he's doing, etc.
Then people started looking at his major paper.. y'know, the one you have to do to become a PhD. Now, he did it back in.. 1982, I believe. The plagarism laws are completely different now than they were back then.
Somewhere around later September, early October, the s*** hit the fan. Full out review, question posed to the board if he should be fired, stuff like that. For about three whole months, we had to listen to the constant bitchfest in the DE (college newspaper, the Daily Egyptian) about whether Poshard should be fired or not. We had to listen to article after article either slamming Poshard or Poshard's attackers. It was all over the tv, radio, local newspapers...
It's all cooled down now, thank the gods. But it's left a mark. About a month ago, some professor, I think from Rutgers, ran a survey of all colleges in the USA, asking what they thought about plagarism. Apparently, he'd ask somewhere around 3000 people in every school, though email, to take this survey which was on a rutgers website. The usual numbers who answer tend to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 2500 of the 3000 polled will answer.
In Carbondale? 100 answered. And of the 100 who answered, all of them said they were terrified that this survey, which was anonymous except to ask which university you were from, would get back to their teachers and the results used against them. He emailed the ones who didn't take the test, and got the exact same response from those who emailed him back, answering his question about why they hadn't taken it. They didn't want to stick their hands in that nest of hornets. Why? Because plagarism is one of those subjects here, now.
It's the 600 pound gorilla in the living room, so to speak. We don't want to talk about it, but it's there. If we breathe even the thought of plagarizing (mind you, plagarism has been expanded to mean not only copy/pasting from other sources and then not crediting them, but also using concepts, words, thoughts, ideas, and in general anything that anyone in the past has done before. I'm not kidding.) we get hustled off and never heard from again. Okay, so that's a little dramatic, but we do get a Talk from our teacher. And if it happens again, we get to have a nice little rousing discussion with the Committee of Plagarism... and things like looking at outside sources to learn how to program won't fly.
Unfortunately, unlike it writing where there's at least thirty ways to say a single sentence, there's at the most three ways to write a single, short program of the type we're doing now.
Which makes us in CS really, really twitchy that someone will notice us. Someone not of our department, that is, since the teachers know our issue. But because our department is in the middle of lobbying to move from the College of Science to the College of Engineering, we're under a bit closer watch now than before.
In short -- paranoid admin makes paranoid teachers make paranoid students.
Welcome to SIUC. If all my friends weren't here, I'd pack up and head somewhere else.
Alright, I'll actually give the minor recent history lesson of SIUC. Last year around this time, we got a new President for the SIU system, Glenn Poshard. Most people like him, he's actually trying to get the university back on track (instead of spending tons of money on a new stadium when some of the departments we advertise as "good" don't even have buildings dedicated to them (CS mainly, and we're supposed to be cutting edge CS department)). All in all, Poshard was well recieved, seems like he knows what he's doing, etc.
Then people started looking at his major paper.. y'know, the one you have to do to become a PhD. Now, he did it back in.. 1982, I believe. The plagarism laws are completely different now than they were back then.
Somewhere around later September, early October, the s*** hit the fan. Full out review, question posed to the board if he should be fired, stuff like that. For about three whole months, we had to listen to the constant bitchfest in the DE (college newspaper, the Daily Egyptian) about whether Poshard should be fired or not. We had to listen to article after article either slamming Poshard or Poshard's attackers. It was all over the tv, radio, local newspapers...
It's all cooled down now, thank the gods. But it's left a mark. About a month ago, some professor, I think from Rutgers, ran a survey of all colleges in the USA, asking what they thought about plagarism. Apparently, he'd ask somewhere around 3000 people in every school, though email, to take this survey which was on a rutgers website. The usual numbers who answer tend to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 2500 of the 3000 polled will answer.
In Carbondale? 100 answered. And of the 100 who answered, all of them said they were terrified that this survey, which was anonymous except to ask which university you were from, would get back to their teachers and the results used against them. He emailed the ones who didn't take the test, and got the exact same response from those who emailed him back, answering his question about why they hadn't taken it. They didn't want to stick their hands in that nest of hornets. Why? Because plagarism is one of those subjects here, now.
It's the 600 pound gorilla in the living room, so to speak. We don't want to talk about it, but it's there. If we breathe even the thought of plagarizing (mind you, plagarism has been expanded to mean not only copy/pasting from other sources and then not crediting them, but also using concepts, words, thoughts, ideas, and in general anything that anyone in the past has done before. I'm not kidding.) we get hustled off and never heard from again. Okay, so that's a little dramatic, but we do get a Talk from our teacher. And if it happens again, we get to have a nice little rousing discussion with the Committee of Plagarism... and things like looking at outside sources to learn how to program won't fly.
Unfortunately, unlike it writing where there's at least thirty ways to say a single sentence, there's at the most three ways to write a single, short program of the type we're doing now.
Which makes us in CS really, really twitchy that someone will notice us. Someone not of our department, that is, since the teachers know our issue. But because our department is in the middle of lobbying to move from the College of Science to the College of Engineering, we're under a bit closer watch now than before.
In short -- paranoid admin makes paranoid teachers make paranoid students.
Welcome to SIUC. If all my friends weren't here, I'd pack up and head somewhere else.