70% is not acceptable

I just finished a math class and we only covered 70% of the material. Material I am now expected to know for my next class. Material I wanted to learn. Even if I get a 100% in the course that’s technically a C in terms of what I learned. Why? Because the majority of our lecture time was dominated by two students asking inane questions, including but not limited to:

• I don’t understand why multiplying two negative numbers yields a positive product
• How do you know which way is “up” on a graph?
• You just said X=4 in the last problem, but in this problem you said X=0.5. How did it change?
• Why does dividing by 2 remove the 2 from 2x=4?
• Oh god kill me now

(I made that last one up) Those are the kind of vacuous questions that myself and 38 other students had to sit through on a daily basis. Instead of asking to them to meet with her or a tutor, the professor decided to teach the entire course to the lowest common denominator—so to speak—letting them completely control the path of the course. And I got to pay $33 an hour to listen to painfully asinine questions for 3 months. I don’t know what the latest issue of consumer reports has to say about that particular rate, but I’m pretty sure I’m not exactly getting a bargain.

I’m not claiming to be any smarter than anyone else. That’s not what this is about. In fact, in my other class, Digital Circuits, I was probably the most academically ill-prepared student in the entire room. I had never done any programming before, yet I was handed a project worth 25% of my grade with a deadline one week away. Multiple times I downloaded the homework and didn’t even have the basic knowledge to begin it. In that class, I’m the person whose questions would have elicited sighs and eye rolls from the class. So here’s what I did:

• Went to office hours.
• Did extra reading.
• Spoke with the professor after class.
• Talked to my peers.
• Met with TAs.
• Went to tutoring.
• Asked my friends.
• Emailed many of the above.
• Occasionally I utilized a personal computer system to access a global network of interconnected computers and servers to search the contents of HyperText Markup Language files for the answers to my questions, which is nice because it doesn’t take up anyone’s time but my own.

You might have noticed that “waste everyone’s time and slow down the entire course so much that we can’t get through the material” was conspicuously absent from that list. Also, I think it goes without saying that the review I just finished writing for that professor wasn’t exactly favorable.