What should I do?

My face

I promise this isn’t just another post where I just bitch and complain about how hard one of my classes is and then go on to get a solid A at the end of the term.  This is a cry for help.  That said, I have a bit of complaining to do first, just to get you in the right mindset before I ask the big question.  So I'll get right to it...

My calc II professor is probably the worst professor I have ever had.  She is the kind of professor that singlehandedly ends math careers and fosters the kind of aversion to math that 99% of the population seems to have.   I am comfortable admitting that she has successfully ousted my previously titled “worst professor ever” outright.  An impressive task, as when I wrote his review, I included such key phrases as “The university should be ashamed to have him teach under their name” and “His contempt for students, whether he is lecturing, answering questions, or simply conversing with them, is intense and palpable.”

Months ago, foolishly thinking I would have a choice as to which Calc II class to take, I looked around and found a shocking concentration of poor reviews for her class.  “It’s calc II," I remember thinking.  "It isn’t easy.  People bitch about hard classes.  No big deal.” But now I see how wrong I was.

Since I’ll be referencing it later, here is the most poignant review:

“[name removed] is the head of the math department and her teaching style shows that she is not afraid to lose her job.  She goes out of her way to not accommodate students who deserve better, and even though she makes mistakes on the board, she has very strict standards for formatting.  Her method of communicating those standards is to knock points off without telling anyone in advance how to do it right”  -- ratemyprofessors.com

The first few weeks, we blew through material at a blinding speed without any explanation of how to do the problems, which formulas to use, or why any of it works—just example after unrelated, confounding example for two and a half hours twice a week.  It was obvious that her preparation for the class was minimal, as her errors on the board were frequent and severe, with many problems ending at a dead-end situation and her moving on with a quick “Well, you get the idea.”

Unsurprisingly, and indicative of the quality of our instruction, the first test was a complete failure.  The class averaged 61%, and call me crazy, but I think that says a lot more about the instruction than it does about the students.  This fact, however served only to anger her, as she spent the first half hour of the next class delivering an sloppy tirade, in which she said that we deserved to fail, that we are one of the worst groups of students she has had, and that all of our previous math instructors were failures as well if we had made it this far.  Funny, since the ONLY problem I didn’t lose points on was the one that didn’t involve material from Calc II.  However, I did get the privilege of being called out and berated in front of the entire class for using my calculator on the test, even through we were advised to do so and I got one of the highest grades in the class because of it.   Also, as if the review above were some sort of perverse prophecy, I got the correct answer for every question on the test and received a C.  

Now, with the test behind us, we are back on the warpath, blazing through example problems without even the slightest of explanations.  There are probably still glaring errors, but now the class can't understand the problems well enough to spot them.  I guess that once we have the next test it should be pretty clear whether this teaching method is working out. 

I could really continue on like this for hours, but I have a serious question:  What the fuck am I supposed to do?  I am so frustrated by this entire class.  What I am describing here isn’t ok, but no one is doing anything about it!  I hate coming to class.  I’m pretty sure it’s obvious how frustrated, angry, and confused I am during “lecture” given intensity of my stare/scowl and volume of my sighs and groans.  Every day I have to attend this class, I leave feeling completely defeated and discouraged and I know I am not the only one.  Every rational part of my brain is screaming at me to go to her office hours, but then what would I say???

What should I do?  I mean, I have to go to her office hours… I have to say something, but I’m so upset about virtually every aspect of the class that I wouldn’t even know where to start, and I am afraid that my well-intentioned frustration and desire for a better education might come across as disrespectful.  Especially if I burst through the wall like the kool-aid man, rip some of my hair out, get all frothy-mouthed, and start throwing things, which is all very liable to happen.

So here's the big decision: do I:

A) Do what’s right.  Talk to her.  Voice my concerns, for the betterment of my education and the educations of others?

 B) Smile, and nod, continue to get screwed, and hope I can make it through the term without having aneurism or a sudden SIDs flare-up?

Jokes aside, I would love some advice.  What would you do?  Is there any way to professionally bring any of this up in office hours?

Sorry sir, but that's the official PSU policy

When I first started writing this, I had just made it through the first week of Fall term.  Sort of.  I had successfully endured the passage of time, but I was buried in coursework. My financial aid was over 4 weeks late, and I was generally just having a really hard time transitioning back to college.  I think going from a month of near-constant socialization, with no real obligations aside from not burning down the house, to having lectures to attend and frequent, difficult coursework with looming deadlines is just generally a difficult transition to make.  Fortunately by now, my head is now slightly more in the game, because as I post this, I’m solidly in the middle of the term.  As in: Calc midterm was on monday, Circuit Analysis was today.  Hopefully they both went well. 

Financial aid:

After a long and ridiculous battle, they decided to pull their heads out of their asses and give me my loans, which had been withheld for over a month because of some new mystery form I was supposed to sign but had no knowledge of, since the financial aid office never told me about it.  They were quick to tell me that they told me about it, but they didn’t ever actually… tell me... about it.  

Now, I like a false accusation now and then as much as the next guy, but I really loved hearing the words “Oh, we sent you three emails about that.  This is your fault for not checking your email” from—and I swear I am not joking—every single person I spoke to at the financial aid office throughout this multi-week ordeal.  I get notifications on my phone for every email I receive and this was the first time I had heard about these, but being too nice for my own good, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and checked my pdx.edu account on their server (even if I delete the email from PSU from my personal email, it is all archived on this server.)  Unsurprisingly, there was nothing there.  So after that, I nearly had an aneurism every fucking time someone told me it was my fault for not checking my email.  DO NOT tell a computer engineering grad student that they didn’t check their email. 

Lab Switch:

Due to a clerical error on my part, I signed up for a Wednesday lab section for my circuit analysis class, instead of the Monday section that I can actually attend.   Oops.  No big deal though, right?  Wrong. 

At UO, I would have gone online and just switched sections, which would have taken a few minutes, tops.  PSU, however, operates in some kind of perpetual, last-century hell-world when it comes to delivering information though, so I would have needed to fill out a form by hand and fax it to them, or mimeograph it and tape it to an 8-track then deliver it on horseback.  As if that isn’t bad enough, it turns out I missed some arbitrary deadline, so I have submit a formal petition to an appeals tribunal.  That only meets on Tuesdays.  And I need formal statements from the professor and both lab instructors.  

I swear, I couldn’t even make this stuff up if I tried.   

Remember: we are talking about switching lab sections here.  No money is even changing hands.   Furthermore, I’m going to start flipping tables if it gets denied, since I couldn’t attend the Wednesday section even if I wanted to.  I am convinced that it is the official policy of PSU to intentionally waste student time until they eventually give up on whatever request they originally needed.   And I am not a fan. 

Fall 2011: Classes So Far

Microprocessors

Professor Rating: Awesome

Course Content:  Very interesting

Difficulty: Pretty Easy

This is my favorite class this term.  The professor (who also happens to be my advisor) is an excellent lecturer, and knows the material inside and out. He literally wrote the book on this subject, and it shows.  He has a way of explaining extremely complex things in very easy-to-understand ways, which is a good skill to have generally, but is absolutely required for engineers.  He really reminds me of Mr. Renner from Sisters High School: his lectures are about 50% course content and 50% wisdom about the world/industry.  Not to mention he is hilarious.   

Added Bonus: learning machine code makes you feel like you can decode the matrix.

Calculus 2

Professor Rating: Awful

Course Content:  Pretty interesting, and highly relevant to other courses I am in.

Difficulty:  Harder than it needs to be.

How to summarize this class in one sentence …  Don’t read professor reviews when you can’t transfer out of the class?  Don’t give the head of the department a teaching position?  Check your examples for glaring errors before teaching them to the class?  Put more than 10 minutes per week into planning your lectures?   That’s all good advice, but none of it has been followed so far in this class.   I don’t really know how else to put this, but this professor simply shouldn’t be teaching.  She is arrogant, absent-minded, antagonistic, argumentative—and those are just the words that start with A’s...  And I especially enjoyed being singled out and chided in front of the class for using a calculator on a quiz, after being explicitly allowed and encouraged to do so.  (“I just didn’t think you would use your calculator for ALL of it…”)

Added Bonus:  She grades notoriously hard and hates giving partial credit.

Circuit Analysis

Professor Rating: Strangely out of place

Course Content: Dense and Uninteresting

Difficulty:  Hard

This class would likely be easier had I completed the prerequisites—one of which being Calc 2—but even if it were easier, it would probably still be incredibly dense and dry: it’s all formula memorization.  The professor is clearly very well-versed in her field, and I don’t doubt her education at all, but she has a strange, oddly whimsical approach to circuit analysis.  This is a science; there are right and wrong answers, and there are correct and incorrect ways of applying an equation, yet she has this do-what-you-feel, everyone-is-different, lecture style that is totally inconsistent with the material itself.  It’s like she should be teaching interpretive dance or scrapbooking, but instead we are talking about arranging op-amps and resistors.  Very odd. 

Added Bonus:  All students are blackmailed into purchasing a bullshit software license in order to do the homework and therefore pass the class.