I’m wondering if I’m expecting too much from this college experience. Today I had one class, Surveying I. I don’t plan on becoming a surveyor, however it’s a required course for all of us that wish to work in the civil engineering field. I might have to survey someday, and though we are being trained on equipment that became obsolete during Donna Summer’s “Last Dance”, by god we must take this course.
My Surveying class is compromised of 29 men and one woman. I’ve bonded with Jennifer to an extent, she’s very attractive, a little rough and what you might expect of a female civil engineer, not that I like stereotyping people, but she fits the image. Of my classmates, I’d say that I’m tied with another guy for being the oldest and many are in their mid or late 20s. There are a couple of freshmen as well. Some are stoned.
Today the professor handed out a 35 page packet on Trigonometry with the following instructions: read it, do the problems and turn in the homework next week. Now, I don’t expect him to teach us the fundamentals of trigonometry in 50 minutes, but for many of us in the class we haven’t had trig since high school. Heck, I was in the first round of students when New York State changed the traditional “Trigonometry” class to “Course III”, which was an advanced, unique blend of algebra, geometry, calculus and trigonometry that focused on the latter. I don’t know why the class of 1986 was selected to be the guinea pigs for the “mix it all together” approach but I think it kind of puts me at a disadvantage. I’m already suffering from the elementary school math experiment with the class of 1986: “let’s teach them only metric!” That went over so well when the U.S. converted to the metric system and all.
But I digress.
Now, I know that for every hour of class I should spend two hours studying and I try to adhere to that guideline to the best of my ability. But I think perhaps we should have spent some time in class talking about the contents of the packet. Instead he popped a quiz and told us we could leave when we finished that. I’m not a fan of the disinterest.
Boo.
Maybe I’m expecting too much. Perhaps I was spoiled when Miss Chontosh (high school math teacher) took time to walk us through problems and had after school tutoring sessions to coach us on the regents exams. It could be that I’m just putting too much pressure on myself and setting my personal expectations too high.
Sometimes I wonder if I should just bag it all and get a job that pays the bills and spend my free time in community theatre or something.
You are one the one ultimately needs to make the decision(s) hinted at in your last sentence. But having “been there, done that”, I know that, whatever the route, you have to kiss a lot of frogs until you get to kiss the prince. (And I do not refer to “the Artiste formally known as…”) That is to say, I had a number of courses in my road to career(s) that were ill-taught and/or hard for me to justify as “required”. Still they were and I had to endure them. More frogs.
On a side note and at the risk of angering you, it is my considered opinion that if the US would have stuck to the program, bit the bullet, and switched to metric in the 70’s, it would have been much better. Don’t blame the ones who decided to teach you metric, blame the corporations who fought the conversion. It will come here one day, not by our choosing. It someday be imposed from the “outside”.