* under construction -- xx means needs work
What Teens Can Do Instead of Going to a University
Most adults convince teens they need to have a university degree or they will be total failures in life. They scare them with the idea of getting no job which implies they would be homeless and begging on the streets to live. Actually though, there are lots of things people can do without getting a university degree. Here are a few ideas.
Here is a site that looks very useful
http://www.escapenormal.com/2011/02/23/top-6-resources-for-cheap-or-free-travel/
Start a Website on Teen Suicide
Start Some Kind of Small Business
The 6 Most Worthless University Classes I Ever Took
And besides all of this there are so many volunteer programs around the world that I couldn't even begin to list them. Just do some searches on google for "volunteer work" and a country you are interested in.
When I was in Ireland and staying in Galway for about a month, I went over to a nearby island called Arras Island or something like that. I stayed in a backpackers hostel for one night there. If you don't know what a backpackers hostel is you have really been missing out. Here is a little about backpackers hostels, in case you haven't been well educated in all your years of school!
Anyhow when I was there I started talking to the manager of the place. He was one of the most easy going, helpful guys I've ever met. And I can see why. He had one of the best jobs in the world. Here is how it worked. Twice a day a boat would come over from the mainland. When it did, he would have to be in the hostel to check in the travellers. Then they would all go off and explore the island and he could do whatever he wanted. His boss lived somewhere else and just came to visit once in while. He didn't have to pay anything for staying there. And he also got a salary. Whenever he wanted to leave for a while, he would just find a traveller to manage the place while he was gone. He didn't even have to pay them. Backpackes are always on low budget and happy if they just have a free place to stay for a while. So he was able to take overseas trips twice a year. He is one of the few people I have ever met in my life, who has actually travelled to Greenland, for example. Another benefit of being a manager of a backpackers hostel is that you meet interesting young people and you exchange email address with them and you end up with free places to stay all over the world. So to me this is a pretty sweet job indeed. And you don't need a universtiy degree.
By the way, while I was staying in Galway I met a lot of young people who had just finished their university degrees. Most of them were looking for work in Galway because it was a cool place to hang out. They had been there for a few months. Guess what kind of jobs they were getting? They were getting jobs in restaurants and bars. lol. Yep, after four years of studying in some expensive university, they were happy if they could get a job serving food or drinks. Nearly all of them had no idea what they really wanted to do in life. So basically they had wasted four years and a lot of money.
Most of them had gone on to college because that was what was expected of them. Their parents pushed them into it.Their highschool teachers pushed them into it. Most of them didn't do anything to help anyone else while they were in school. Most of them were getting stressed studying for tests and then partying on the weekends, in other words, drinking a lot - wasting more money. Some of them were doing drugs as well.
So my question is, why bother with going to a university if you don't know what you really want to do and you just going to end up taking whatever job you can get. Oh and a lot of these poor kids had huge debts they had to pay off from their school loans!
Teaching English is a big business around the world and there are lots of jobs, part time and full time. You don't need a uni degree to do it. You just need to speak English! By the time you are 14 you can do that plenty well enough to teach better than 99% cent of the English teachers in Asia, Eastern Europe, South America, etc.
It can actually be a lot of fun to teach English, too. You can sing songs, tell jokes, act out plays, listen to music, watch movies, and generally be very creative. The more creative the better, in fact.
In Lima, Peru a very poor country, people are paying private tutors 20 US dollars an hour! And you can live in Lima for about 10 dollars a day, pretty easily. So that means you only have to work a half hour a day, if your math is any good at all!
Start A Website on Teen Suicide
Most of the websites on teen suicide sound alike and they are not written by teens who have actually been depressed or suicidal. If you create a good site which really helps people you can probably get enough donations to survive and keep it going and improving.
You don't need a university degree to be a writer. You just need to start writing and keep writing. And not give up. And you don't need to find a publisher. You can puiblish your own book, like I did with my book.
A lot of people make the mistake of going to college to study writing, instead of just writing! You don't need to study writing. I never did. And yet I'd say my writing is just fine. I write from my heart. I don't worry much about what people think of my writing or if my grammar is perfect. Have you heard the expression "Dance like no one is watching"? Well I say "Write like no one is reading." That is how you will learn to free your innerself, the part of you your parents and teachers probably never encouraged you to let out.
Start some kind of small business
If you go to a poor country, you can start a small business with very little investment. You could have a tour guide business in Ecuador or Peru or Asia for example. People who go on tours want someone who speaks English well and most of the local tour guides don't. So you can hire one and then go on the tours with them. You will learn the local language this way too.
You can also start an Internet cafe in another country, or a bookstore, or a coffee shop. You don't need a college degree for any of this.
Backpackers hostels are some of the coolest places on earth. They are cheap places to stay with other, mostly young, travellers. You typically sleep in a dorm room with from 3 to 5 other people. There is a common room where you can sit around and talk about your travels. You will meet people from all around the world and people who have travelled all around the world.
You can almost always offer to do some work in a backpackers hostal in exchange for a free place to sleep. I met a girl from Belgium who travelled all around Australia like that. Sometimes she even got paid, like the time she helped paint a hostel. When she left Belgium she only had enough money for her flight, but by working various jobs she stayed in Australia for one year.
Here are some of my favorite backpackers hostels...xx
Here is another interesting site about volunteer work- the WOOFING site.
from http://www.transitionsabroad.com/publications/magazine/0509/volunteer_in_europe_youth_hostel.shtml
Staying in Europe for Free
Volunteer at a Youth Hostel for Room and Board
by Lisa Cordeiro
For years I tried to think of a way to live in Paris. But the
expense and the near-impossibility of getting a work permit
discouraged me. Then a miracle happened: I found a way to live in
Paris for free.
I stumbled onto my situation after a disastrous evening on my
first night in Paris. I didn’t have a plan when I left the
bus on a cold, rainy night and wandered the city for hours
looking for a place to stay. All the youth hostels and affordable
hotels were booked, and I couldn’t afford anything more
extravagant. I was cold and miserable hiking around with all my
belongings in a backpack. So I decided to go to the nearest
hostel and beg mercy—or at least get a recommendation for
somewhere else I could go.
A large sign at the hostel confirmed what they told me over the
phone— they were completely booked. However, I also noticed
a small sign reading “Waiter/waitress needed for two weeks
in exchange for room and board.” I had no waitressing
experience, I wasn’t fluent in French, and I didn’t
have any working papers. Hesitant, I asked about the position.
Next thing I knew I had a room in Paris and a meal waiting for me
downstairs. Best of all, I didn’t pay a penny for it.
Types of Jobs Available
I worked as a waitress and a cashier while most of the other
volunteers worked the reservation desk. On alternating evenings I
either waitressed in a restaurant or worked as a cashier at a
buffet food line. This left my days free for sightseeing and
exploring the city.
As a volunteer I didn’t receive a salary from the hostel,
just the room and board. But I did receive a few meager tips each
night. Every hostel’s needs are different. The one where I
worked had a bar and restaurant, but many do not. And you never
know, special circumstances may come up where a few extra bodies
are needed, such as more help housecleaning or accommodating a
school group.
Benefits and Drawbacks
You’ll meet wonderful people, both from the country
you’re visiting and travelers from around the world. You get
to talk to locals about what it’s like to live in their
country and see it through the eyes of a resident. With fellow
travelers, you talk about the places you’ve visited, where
you’re heading next, and pass on tips about what to see and
what to avoid as you learn from each other’s experiences.
And you may even land a few places to stay on your upcoming
travels. I received several invitations for a place to stay from
the travelers I met. Likewise, I offered them a place if they
ever came to my town. I still stay in touch with my roommate at
the hostel from Quebec City, the waiter from Columbia, and the
receptionist from Brazil. I was able to learn a little about each
of their cultures while we sat around eating, drinking, and
having a grand time.
Another advantage to volunteering at a youth hostel is that there
may be reciprocity with other hostels. Other volunteers were able
to use their days off to travel to another destination and stay
in the local hostel for free.
If you travel to experience new cultures and meet new people,
then volunteering is a wonderful experience you won’t soon
forget.
Getting a Job
Michèle Obert of Eufed, The European Union Federation of
Youth Hostel Associations, says that for volunteer opportunities
or student summer jobs you must contact individual youth hostels.
There is no central database listing the hostels that need help,
so it’s best to call or email individual hostels in the city
or country you would like to visit. Tell them your dates and ask
if they need any volunteer help for that period of time. Let them
know about experience you may have, such as customer service,
waitressing, or cleaning.
It’s best if you know some of the language of the country
you’re planning to visit so you can communicate with other
workers and native visitors, but you don’t have to be fluent
in it. I found that I spoke English much more often than French
since many of the travelers to France knew English but
didn’t necessarily know French.
Not all European countries, such as Switzerland, allow visitors
to volunteer. England and France do allow visitors to volunteer
for a period of up to 90 days without any special work or visa
requirements. Check with the consulate or embassy in your
country.
Lisa Cordeiro has found several ways to live abroad for free. She
served in the Marine Corps in the early 1990s in Okinawa, Japan.
She volunteered in a youth hostel in Paris and then returned a
few months later to volunteer as an au-pair. She currently lives
in Boston and writes about her travels and Marine Corps
experiences. Read more of Lisa’s adventures in her book
Parris Island: A Woman’s Memoir of Marine Corps Boot Camp
and in Europe from a Backpack, both available at Amazon.com or
through www.lisacordeiro.com.
Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria
The other day I went to the university with Georgi, who is a mountain guide. We went to see his friend who is a professor there. As we walked thru the halls he said "This is a strange place." She quickly said, in a defensive tone, "Why is it strange?" He could tell that she felt defensive and he didn't want to get into a conflict with her, so he didn't say anything. Then she said it again, "Why is it a strange place." I could tell he still didn't want to argue or debate about it so he just said "There are a lot of bricks."
I knew though, what he really meant. It was dark and gloomy inside. It was all bricks and concrete. Nothing like the nature he is accustomed to. But if you spend enough time inside institutions you start to forget what nature is like. You start to get accustomed to being inside walls. So it doesn't seem strange to you any more. But that doesn't change that fact that it isn't natural to be inside buildings like that. Later, when she couldn't hear, I said "You are right. It is a very strange place."
Then we went to talk to some English professors. I had the idea of offering to visit their classes and I wanted to tell the students I had some job opportunities with them. First we went to a secretary and she told us to talk to some teachers. It is hard for me to write about this now. It is hard to find the words to describe it. The coldness. The deathly quiet. The lack of emotions. The air. Stifling. Oppressive. The formality used by the English teacher. The lack of facial expression by the other professor sitting next to her at the computer. They looked like someone had stolen their souls, their life. It is hard to imagine them being in front of a group of 18, 19 year olds. I can only imagine them slowly poisoining them with their deathly emptyness.
Only one of them spoke to me. The other never said a word. Neither asked me any questions. The woman just said to leave my phone number with the secretary. She said the department head would have to make the decision about whether I could visit the classes. She said the professors were not allowed to make such decisions.
So I am wondering, if there is no democracy in a university, how can there be democracy in a society? How can the voters be prepared to make decisions if they have never been included in decisons before? If university students are not given a voice, and neither are their professors, then what does that say about society?
I have been told that children and teenagers are "too young" to make decisions, or to even be asked for their opinions or how they feel about things, but here we are talking about univesity students. The professor didn't say "I will ask my students" and let them decide. Why is that? And what does this say about society?
I suspect that many people will defend the professor and the university and say "That is just they way it has to be" and they will give lots of reasons to justify the lack of democracy, or even participation in decisions. My friend Georgi even said something like "If you let the students decide who the teachers would be, they would never be able to agree." But is that true? I will agree that decisions are made more quickly when one person makes them without consulting others or letting them have any input or letting them discuss things and then vote. But is that better for the world? It might be much easier for the university to operate if they don't include teachers or students in the decision making process, but is it better for humanity? Or just better for the university adminstrators?
An example of a university student plagiarizing me
I am not very impressed with universities. Most people who are there seem to be more interested in getting the piece of paper so they can get a job and make more money than if they didn't have the piece of paper. They don't seem very interested in learning for the sake of knowledge, making the world better, personal improvement, being better parents. Grades are very obviously the most important thing in most universities. Lying, cheating and plagiarizing is common in order to get "good" grades. Here is an example I came across today of someone who had copied material from my site and submitted it to his schools literary magazine.
Why would someone do that? How did he feel when he did it? How will he feel when he finds out that I found out and made a page about him? I am guessing he will feel defensive, maybe hostile or vengeful. Who knows. Maybe we will find out. But I really want to point out that universities are not necessarily making better human beings. When the university finds out he is likely to get punished. The university will probably be most worried about its own reputation, as Indiana University was when I went public about being sexually abused by Maurice Garnier. There probably is no one at the university who really cars about Bryan. I probably already care about him more than anyone there. I felt offended by what he did, but I also care about him. I realize he is a product of his environment. His parents probably pushed him to go to a university, or it was just expected. No one probably has really ever cared about Bryan. I don't know if he realizes that, but I am guessing that no one has. If they had, he wouldn't need to go on the Internet and copy someone else's writing and then try to take credit for it the way he did. He would have enough self-esteem and enough of a conscience not to do that. So actually, I feel sorry for Bryan. I felt hurtful when I created the page but now I feel more sympathetic. I also feel sympathetic towards Maurice Garnier. His life must have been pretty messed up for him to do what he did. And it probably has always stayed messed up. He can't be a very happy person inside. Dysfunctional societies produce needy people. Needy people use others. Bryan used me. Garnier used me. Maybe I am using Bryan now to make a point. I hope someone at least understands that the deeper point is not to punish Bryan or hurt him any more than he already has been hurt (whether he acknowledges he has been hurt or not), but it is to show that the university system, and the entire traditional forced education system is a big mess. The wrong things are important. Learning is not the most important thing. I am not even sure it is the second most important thing. I'd say winning is more important. For example winning basketball games. And money. And people's status and power. The students are being used at most universities. The university system itself is used by those in power to maintain the status quo. This is one thing that is no different, or hardly different, whether the university is in a communist, socialist or capitalist society.
Generally speaking, universities do not make us more free. They further train us to be part of the system, whichever system we are born into. And they train us to train others. Thus the system perpetuates itself. Where do you learn to be a teacher, for example? In a university. It is basically a closed system. You enter as a 5 or 6 year old, and you return as a teacher, school director etc. The only way to be a teacher or school director is to stay inside the system, follow enough of the rules to be accepted and approved of. It truly is a closed system. The Internet, however, can open a path out of it. If you are planning to go to a university, think of it as a mouse in a drum that spins around. If someone opened the door, would the mouse climb out? I believe studies will show that if you trap the mouse inside long enough, he will be "normalized" to the spinning drum. At that point walking around on his own will be too odd and it will frighten him too much. So he would either not venture out, or he would return to his familiar environment of the spinning drum.
S. Hein
March 4 2008
Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria
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The 6 Most Worthless University Classes I Ever Took
September 28th, 2011 Dracophile Leave a comment Go to comments
I graduated with a degree in Communications from a university
I’ve opted to redact the name from (you’ll see why
later) with cum laude honors in May 2011. It’s a degree I
hate, a degree I never plan on using, and a degree that was a
mistake and now every time I look at the damn thing all I see is
the phrase “I should have done this differently”. I was
very apathetic toward my college education, so much that I’d
frequently skip on buying textbooks and never once did I ever
study or “cram” for a test. There were no late 3AM
nights studying for the big biology exam or rushing to turn in an
assignment because it was due in 15 minutes. I just did not give
a shit. I drank Red Bull ironically, not because I had places to
go and things to do… and through all of this I managed to
graduate with a GPA of 3.5. Either I’m some kind of
self-defeating genius, or this campus is just where people went
when they couldn’t get into the colleges they dream about.
Pictured above: How I "studied" for tests.
Either way, whatever the case is I went to college and completed
it. I didn’t pay attention to a damn thing I didn’t
find interesting which means that for most of the classes I took
I was there physically but not mentally. I took over 50 classes
while enrolled, almost half of which were taken in conjunction
with some form of weekly psychiatric counseling. While my Office
Space approach to not giving a damn somehow worked in my favor
there were still classes I took that were insurmountably
worthless. Here’s six [required!!] classes I took that were
utter wastes of my time and money.
Student retention is serious business in the college scene.
Universities operate because they charge exorbitant tuition rates
and own bookstores that operate on GameStop’s “charge
the customer $140 for something and give them $10 for it when
they trade it in” business model. Of course, it’s not
the colleges’ fault that by the time the semester ends your
biology textbook has had 17 new editions released and is
completely worthless. That’s tangential, but the point
I’m getting to is that colleges and universities devote
entire budgets and committees to coming up with ways to keep
students at their schools, that’s how they can stay in
business. More students == more money.
Unfortunately, photoshopped black students are still worth $0.
My alma matter had this wonderful little program of
“triad” and “tetrad” classes with which
sounds more like an Asian gang and Tetris marathon than any sort
of serious academic system. You took your core curriculum classes
in “packs” of 3 or 4 like you were bundling insurance
from Progressive or something and the last class in these prefab
groups was always a 1 credit hour class titled “First Year
Seminar”. FYS was a required class for all non-transfer
freshman students and it existed to give new students a chance to
“acclimate” to college life. In reality all it did was
piss people off and probably didn’t help in the whole
“retention” category of things.
First, the class was mandatory for virtually everybody regardless
of whether or not you wanted shit spoon-fed to you, and secondly
you had to pay for this course. Yep, this uncategorized,
worthless, non-transferable 1 hour class was required. Twice. You
had to take two semesters of this bullshit (hence the title
“first year”) and all they did was sit you in a room
and talk about what you were doing in your other triad/tetrad
classes. It was nothing more than a “hey how’s it
going” course where you were placed in a room with 20 other
new students in an effort to try and get you to make some new
friends at the university… because we need a fucking class
for this after having been through twelve years of public school
doing the exact same thing.
Here’s an actual assignment we were given in this
“course”: draw a picture of where you’d like your
college education to take you (a.k.a. “what do you want to
be when you grow up”). Here’s another: “make a
list of songs that you think summarize your life and
feelings”. I’m dead serious. What is this? Second
fucking grade?
It goes without saying attendance in this class was less than
perfect across the board.
I took Macroeconomics Principles because I read the first five
letters and defaulted to Godzilla porn and let my dick do the
class registration. No, that’s not the reason at all. It was
a required course and that’s that. One thing that rings true
for virtually every core class is that it’s guaranteed to
suck because the instructors are notoriously apathetic about
their course and students. They aren’t there to make
personal connections with you because they just don’t give a
shit; their class is simply full of students who may or may not
have any interest in the material whatsoever and are only there
because it’s a required class. The professors have better
things to worry about and the students have better things to do,
like playing guitar in the university cafeteria (and by that I
mean repeating the same three goddamn chords while singing shitty
Sublime covers to ditsy and easily impressed high school
cheerleader has-beens).
This guy goes to every university.
This particular professor went above and beyond the “not
giving a shit” theory and dared to not give two shits. Not
only was he an impersonal twat, he never physically handed out a
single assignment and required everything be done online. He had
a special website for submitting essays and a special website for
taking weekly quizzes. Yes, two different websites. Everything we
did, including our final exam, was done online. Using online
sites is fine and dandy… if you’re taking a goddamn
online class from a television commercial. If I’m paying you
— more mind you — to sit in a physical lecture room
instead of at my laptop in my shitty apartment I kind of expect
you to at least Xerox us something. Anything. Give us a paper
with words printed on it so we can put it in a notebook and say
“oh this is for economics”. Learn how to use Powerpoint
and put something on the projector, and if you’re too lazy
for even that then at least type something up in fucking Word and
throw it up on the screen. Sitting at your desk like a jackass
and reminding us to sign up and use a website we will never use
again just so your lazy ass can play FreeCell all day (for all I
know) is the worst possible way to teach someone. You could teach
a preschooler all of his colors wrong on purpose and still be
seen as a better educator than this guy.
The best part about these “handy” online sites is that
they graded everything for him automatically. Yes, this cheap son
of a bitch didn’t even grade his own assignments. All of the
quizzes were either multiple choice or short answer, which were
graded against a database of phrases and common answers to gauge
whether or not they were correct. Even more hilarious was the
essay website which basically did the same thing with an entire
essay. The instructor didn’t read a single essay unless
there was a glitch in the matrix and it spat back a bunch of
garbage or an incorrect grade. The website read the essays for
him and scanned for basic phrases and their proximity to one
another, term/synonym frequencies and ratios, and usage of
“vocabulary words” from the textbook chapters. If you
knew how to cheat the system you could have submitted a block of
“Lorem ipsum” text with key phrases thrown in there and
receive a passing grade.
I’m not saying I did that myself, but I’m also not
saying I didn’t.
The first two entries in this list came off of the core
curriculum roster, and honestly if I wanted to I could fill the
remaining four slots of this article with bullshit throwaway
classes like US History to Civil War and State & Local
Government, but like I mentioned in the economics entry, all core
classes suck. Video Production was one of the first
degree-specific classes I took meaning that from here on out my
courses would have less students in them and more direct
interactions with my instructors. I was looking forward to
finally getting some quality education now that I had completed
the worthless First Year Seminar gauntlet of double tetrads
(honestly “gauntlet of double tetrads” sounds like the
name of the obstacle course from American Gladiators).
Basically the same thing.
Then I met the instructor.
Public Speaking was another required core class that I had to
take, and there is some relevance to this statement. Its
instructor was honestly one of the most idiotic people I’ve
ever had the displeasure of being in the same room as. She was so
clueless and ditsy that the closer you stood to her had an
inverse effect on your ability to assemble coherent thoughts, not
because she was attractive or anything but because she was so
incomprehensibly retarded and her field effect was akin to a
radio tower of stupid. Wherever she went she was followed by
personal subtitles because the only sound that ever came out of
her mouth was “DURRRRRR”. She was in charge of teaching
the video production course. Joy.
The objective of the course was for us to learn
“professional” editing techniques with Final Cut Pro.
With this bozo teaching us I’d have been grateful if she
taught the class how to turn on the fucking computer. Our first
assignment was to create a short 90 second video about anything
we wanted so she could gauge what we already knew about editing
videos. Just to spite her, I turned in this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qoyjznonmDE
Implied subtext: Zoolander.
Basically the endgame here is that I didn’t learn a damn
thing in this class that I didn’t already know; it was an
easy “A”. My most memorable experience with this
course, however, has to go to the only time I approached the
instructor with a problem. After class had dismissed I approached
the teacher and wanted to ask her a question, I started with
“I have just a quick question, I live off campus and have to
commute to get here so I can’t edit all of my videos in the
lab directly, may I edit the ‘basic’ stuff at home and
bring those pieces to assemble here in the editing lab?”
She looked right at me and replied, “Oh, well, yeah if you
have a question you can email me and I’ll get back to
you.”
I nodded and said “that’s great but we’re
presently standing five feet away from each other and it’s a
simple question that I’d like to have an answer to since I
just asked it.”
She cocked her head like a dog watching someone jerk off with a
raw chicken and after a brief moment wherein I can only assume
all three of her brain cells tried to come up with a response she
just repeated her previous answer and walked out of the lab.
"What the fuck do you think this is, a SCHOOL?"
Seriously, for someone who’s supposed to be teaching a
public speaking class (let alone video production) could the
university have possibly found anymore more socially retarded
than this winner? Why the hell would you want to hide behind the
veil of computer-mediated communication with your students when
one of them is literally in same room as you asking you a simple
question in real time? You’re an instructor at a university,
it’s time to put your big girl pants on and grow a pair.
Metaphorically.
Because if she actually had a pair… then I guess I can
understand why she wants to minimize the amount of face-to-face
interaction in her life.
I write. I hope this article makes that obvious; if not, we have
ourselves a problem. If I had to put together a document that
listed all of my qualifications, like a resume… or
something, under Skills I’d have two things:
“writing” and “dinosaurs”. Not paleontology
or anything, just “dinosaurs”. “Technical
writing” is a form of writing that can best be described as
boilerplate, generic, and tiresome professional writing. I took
three technical writing classes: Foundations of Professional
Writing, Writing in the Professions, and Writing in
Computer-Networked Environments. Yes, those first two sound like
the exact same class (spoiler alert: they were). Truth be told
all three of them were essentially the same class, and I realize
I’m cheating by bundling three classes into one entry, but I
did this with good reason: The curriculum for every technical
writing class was written by the same instructor.
If there was ever an example of an instructor being so
disconnected with their students this was it. This professor
didn’t just idly sit in their office or anything, she was
actively engaged with her students but her exuberance was
completely nullified by the simple fact that nobody knew what the
hell was going on. She’d talk to us about our projects and
then the very next week when she asked us how they were coming
along she’d have something completely different to say and
tell us we were doing it wrong. I’m dead serious.
I had three technical writing classes but she was the instructor
for only one of them. We had this bullshit group assignment that
was cast upon myself and two random students to continue this
“quality assurance survey” that was being done each
year. All we had to do was get other technical writing students
to fill it out and our job was to interpret the answers.
Wrong kind of survey.
The problem with this assignment, despite its brainless
difficulty, is that when it came to the open-ended opinion
questions regarding the tech writing program all of the students
ended up using these fields to take pot shots at the instructor.
No joke. I’m going to cease explaining the shittiness of the
curriculum and let these survey responses, which I’ve held
onto all this time, speak for themselves. These are all real and
unedited responses collected from this survey:
Q: How do you feel your class(es) in Technical Writing could be
improved?
“[The instructor] is really scatter-brained. She
doesn’t update her schedule when she changes dates and the
class gets confused.”
“For a allegedly professional course, the class I am
enrolled in is largely disorganized. There is a lack of structure
in the classroom and an overall feeling of hostility.”
“Let all instructors create their own curriculum instead of
having one person write it all. It confuses other professors and
hinders the educational benefit derived from the classes.”
“Our instructor didn’t even get to teach her own
curriculum, it was some premade nonsense from another instructor,
and it was also a DECADE old. Everything was outdated, links to
examples were broken, and most hilariously of all an example
document we were given about POTATO FARMING was seven years newer
than the damn course plans.”
Q: What is the purpose of your community-based project?
“I don’t know. I’ve asked for clarification many
times and I get a different answer each time. Your guess is as
good as mine.”
“I really don’t see a purpose because it has nothing to
do with school work, so why are we wasting our school time to
work on something that doesn’t even relate to school.”
“I don’t know. We don’t understand the assignment
and it’s the middle of November. We have no idea what we are
supposed to do, and some of us are in fear of failing the class
because of this stupid fucking thing.”
Q: Have you been emotionally effected by your “service
learning experience”? (SLE = Group Assignment)
“Yes, but not by the project rather by our professor. This
class has been a yo-yo like experience from the beginning. We are
asked to collaborate yet when we speak to our partners we are
punished and scolded like little school children.”
“Yeah it’s stressful and very confusing and I
don’t like it at all. It’s made me feel okay about
skipping tech writing class on a number of occasions because we
hardly do anything.”
“No, all though i been pissed off throughout the class
because the teachers doesn’t even know what needs to be done
on the portfolio so how are students going to know.”
Q: What personal values do you feel this class has strengthened
in you?
“I’d like to say “patience” but I can’t
quite bring myself to really say so.”
This is some serious fangs-out shit right here. We asked a bunch
of students their thoughts on the class and almost all of them
responded with “this class fucking blows p.s. the instructor
is retarded”. Putting our survey results together proved to
be the hardest thing I’ve ever done because it’s not
like we can turn in a document to the person who wrote the
curriculum that destroys everything she’s put together while
making potato farming jokes. (Seriously though? Fucking potato
farming?) In the end we weaseled out of it because I went into
the survey site at the last minute and purposefully broke all of
the open response questions to only record “ ”
as an answer regardless of input to demonstrate that none of them
ever recorded a valid response.
We have no idea how it happened. We swear.
The above diatribe kind of encompasses all of the tech writing
classes in general, but it doesn’t let me fit in my favorite
tidbit about the instructor. The university I attended was
comprised of several buildings where classes were grouped by
theme or subject. The building designated for the English and
composition had this problem with feral cats; the outside of the
building smelled like a cat with a bladder of novelty (or fetish)
proportions just pissed all over everything. This was a problem
because someone kept feeding the cats and because of this the
cats associated this building with free food and ended up camping
out in the trees and bushes surrounding it (while peeing
constantly). I’ll give you three guesses as to who kept
feeding the fucking cats and the last two guesses don’t
count.
Contrary to popular belief there’s more to taking a Spanish
class than watching Telemundo and grainy VHS copies of Muzzy and
ordering food in Spanish from the local Mexican restaurant, an
act that’s made only mildly offensive because it’s for
“educational purposes”. College-level Spanish is
nothing like high school Spanish. Okay, that was a lie; it’s
basically the same thing except the rooms don’t have any
goofy Spanish posters, there’s no Muzzy, and there’s no
field trips to Taco Town. The only field trips you get are
“get your own damn tacos and be to class on time”.
Foreign language teachers are, in my experience, some of the best
instructors you’ll ever have. They have such colorful
personalities and they’re always energetic like they
perpetually just snorted a line of coke, and I think it might be
because every time you say something to them they mentally hear
it twice, in two different languages, at the exact same time.
They’re not exuberant, they’re just batshit insane and
they’re always one “me gusta” away from painting
the walls with their feces.
This.
I don’t hate my foreign language teachers, though. Between
high school and university I took four years of Spanish and
because of how fun and involved my instructors were I ended up
learning and retaining quite a bit of knowledge of the language,
so how come Spanish I & II ended up in this list? Because my
university forced some retarded standards on the class that
brought down how enjoyable it was. Learning about accents via the
instructor’s mascot “Dieresis the Rattlesnake” was
fun, but practicing our Spanish in the campus language lab was
total bullshit.
The language lab was a room that could best be described as
looking exactly like the call center for an international
technical support company serving Mexico. There were computers
and headsets everywhere and people were busily sitting at their
machines typing every once in a while and taking breaks to say a
few lines in Spanish and repeat them several times like the
person on the other end was either deaf or stupid. The
assignments from the language lab were required, worth 10% of our
final grades, and were present in both Spanish I & II.
I have a bit of an impediment with speaking aloud. It tends to
get worse the closer I am to a telephone or a device that serves
the same purpose as one. It’s a bizarre and strange phobia,
but welcome to my life. In the language lab I was wholly capable
of answering the simple test questions on the computer screen,
but when it came time to recite things verbally that’s when
it fell apart; the software was simply programmed like hell. When
it orders you to recite a phrase it will beep without warning and
give you barely enough time to speak until it beeps again when
you inevitably screw up and the timer starts over. There’s
no pause, it just keeps beeping until you say it and say it the
right way.
This didn’t sit well with me, as wearing what amounts to a
phone headset and being instructed to speak puts me in a weird
position. The microscopic window of speech time didn’t make
it any better, either. For an assignment that was only supposed
to take 20 minutes I ended up sitting in the language lab like a
moron for almost an hour. It was easily the most embarrassing
thing that I’ve ever done. I abandoned the assignment
mid-way through and never returned to do another lab project for
either semester.
This is it, and I don’t mean that phrase in the context of
being the final tour of a deceased pop star, this was the worst
and most worthless class I ever enrolled in. Everything about
this course from enrollment to completion was a play-by-play
journey through Dante’s Divine Comedy… except, this was
a caricature of Hell comprised entirely of outdated copies of
Adobe Photoshop and InDesign.
It all began with a simple roster conflict; to start us off I
believe this course had the handbook number “ARTS1301? or
something to that extent. The actual number doesn’t matter,
but the assignment pattern here does; a class ending with
“01? was naturally the first in its category. When I was
accepted into the university I was accepted under the stipends
and clauses of the 2006 class handbook where “01? signified
“Graphic Design I”. As per my degree plan I was
required to take “ARTS1301? as one of my degree-specific
courses. Graphic Design II was one of the last classes I ever
enrolled in, and during the five years it took me to get around
to completing it the college restructured their class codes.
“ARTS1301? was no longer the first graphic design class;
“ARTS1301? was now Graphic Design II. (“00? was now
used for the first class.)
No, really. Y U NO HAS?
I immediately brought this to the attention of my degree
counselor and in summary what happened was that they could have
overridden the mistakes… if it weren’t for the fact
that all the level 1 classes were full. Since this was a computer
lab class it’s not like there was an extra chair I could
take, I was stuck with the advanced class. However, I had graphic
design experience so I figured there’d be some catching up
but it wouldn’t be killer. Big mistake.
Our instructor was, without a doubt, the most unprofessional
person I will ever meet. She was such a hypocritical bitch
it’s not even funny (actually yes it is or else I
wouldn’t be writing this). It all began with our first
assignment: creating a logo and new advertising package for a
local company. This was a real assignment, as in this company
would eventually use the “best” logo on their
stationery and all of that crap. The company she picked was some
construction business whose existing logo, I shit you not, was
designed in fucking Jokerman font. Before we ever met these
people and were handed business cards with their existing logo I
honestly thought I was being fucked with and that this was just a
hypothetical exercise and there couldn’t possibly be someone
retarded enough to think Jokerman was a suitable font for
anything other than a kindergarten fiesta.
The owners of this company just did not give a fuck, they were
late to every single class meeting they were supposed to attend
which I guess is to be expected when you’re talking about
someone stupid enough to use a super-serif typeface on their
goddamn stationery. On the day of our final presentation to these
dickheads we were sitting in a comfortable office meeting room at
the university, and I asked to go first because I had a
photography appointment at the local aquarium; I was to be taking
pictures of dolphins for my photography class and I was psyched.
Were the owners of the construction company late? You bet your
ass they were. I couldn’t stay for the whole class, but I
stayed in the office room for a goddamn hour and they were still
no shows. I said “screw it” and walked out of the
classroom. I had better shit to do, and by “better
shit” I mean fucking dolphins.
Miss THIS for some stupid second-rate construction company? No
fuckin' way. Blow it out your ass.
The people from the construction company could have at least
acted like they wanted a free fucking logo. Unprofessional, and
pathetically so.
Perhaps the construction mishap wasn’t directly the
instructor’s fault, but then again she’s the one who
found these jerk offs. This person was the worst teacher ever,
she never demonstrated or explained what she was doing, she just
assumed we knew everything, and I realize this was an advanced
class, but more people than just me were lost in her
“instructions”. After wading through the bullshit of
Retarded Construction Incorporated our next assignment was to
create a brochure for a local business of our choosing. This was
just an exercise, they weren’t going to use it, so we were
free to be creative (no Jokerman). She gave us almost seven weeks
to make this brochure before giving us our second assignment.
Care to know what that was? A complete 14-piece advertising
package (billboards, flash ads, banner ads, business cards, etc)
for a local business of her choosing.
By the time we “finished” the brochure we had two weeks
left in the class… to make fourteen fucking pieces of
advertising. If the brochure took seven weeks to make this
project, by her timeline, would have theoretically taken almost
two years to complete. Mercifully, this was a group assignment
and we were able to skate by with making two samples and drawing
the rest by hand and explaining the design ideas (because not
learning how to use InDesign was totally the point of this
class).
This “professional” graphic designer was adamant about
us being to class on time, yet she herself was upwards of thirty
minutes late on numerous occasions (sometimes just not showing up
altogether), and at one point even brought her loudmouth
crotchdropping kid to class with her. What the fuck? Fine. I
understand you might have things to take care of in your graphic
design job, which I’m sure is just totally fucking busy and
time-consuming because it takes hours to place white Helvetica
text on a solid color bar, but if you can’t have your shit
together to leave at the door when you go into “teacher
mode” then get the fuck out of the classroom. You don’t
belong here.
I’m normally a nice guy, and despite how much I hated the
first five classes of this article I was soft when it came time
for the anonymous semester evaluations for each of our classes,
but when this class showed up? I blasted the hell out of it. My
“comments regarding the class” was basically everything
you just read in this entry. I hope this “teacher” read
it, and I hope it made her miserable. Good riddance.
In summary? College might seem like a waste of time, and for all
I know it probably is, but the moral of the story is this:
“pursue your dreams no matter what they are, and just
because somoene’s name is suffixed with ‘PhD’ that
isn’t always a synonym for intelligence”. Also,
dolphins.
- Dracophile
Are you a college student? Have stories to share of your own teachers from hell? Join us on the GatorAIDS forums and kick back with other students and shoot it out!
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I often call universities "the black hole" now. This is one of the first times I used the term in my writing I think. It is from around 2007.
Aggie… Aggie is almost the perfect person. She speaks Spanish. She is smart, she is organized, she is dependable. She is caring. She is open to learning.
I want Aggie to help me. To help us. But everyone else is pushing her in the direction of the black hole. The university.
It is sucking her in just like a black hole. A huge vacuum, sucking anything in which comes near it.
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