http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y0Q2RWNLdc
Had a bad week due to the extreme strain of too much homework, and not enough sleep. Here are a few recent facebook posts of mine that help to get the point across:
[Beginning of copied facebook posts]
...I have better things to do than wrestle with an inanely over-'useful' programming language consisting almost entirely of canned functions possessing a help file longer than the normanomicon otherwise known by the acronym "matlab". Such better things to do include doing unreasonable amounts of homework involving throwing circuits to and fro within a dimension I do not understand because the instructor tries to pack two lectures into one, and is like a ninja with algebra, which the rest of us are not. Come on, TTU professors, some of us have not been doing this for 10 years, please slow down for the love of everything that is bacon! Bacon? Where did that come from? Did that floor tile just move?!? No, just need sleep desperately. Then what are you doing on Facebook, Dustin? And why are you typing to yourself? Shut up and go to bed. Fine! So there. X| Blegh... this is going to be a long week.
...Spent 10.5 hours in the library, 8 of them on one homework problem. Three more problems to go, and it's due at 8AM tomorrow, which is 8.5 hours away. Finishing this assignment? Knowing what I'm doing? I don't think so.
Also spent five bucks on a tuna fish sandwich at Au Bon Pain. I could have bought a gallon of gas and driven off a bridge 20 miles from here for that much money. Whatever.
...It is now painfully obvious I am not capable of maintaining such a heavy workload of 11 credit hours of mid-division EE classes. This week was full of... mud, adrenaline, caffeine, marker fumes, teachers who might as well be speaking Lyran, and watching the rest of the world spin by whenever I'm not collapsed from physiological exhaustion. Enough. My mind and body cannot handle this stress level: 3rd week of school should not be like finals week. From now on, I should either take 6 credit hours per semester, or take everything twice.
System status = crash.... abort/retry/ignore? ALL THREE! .....*spark, fizzle* ....*silence*....
[End of copied facebook posts]
Thanks to the blessed weekend, I am now able to catch up on at least a little bit of sleep. However, there is just so much homework that I'm expected to do. I know my limits, and this workload is past it. If the workload doesn't lighten up by itself (unlikely), then I'll be forced to pick a class to ignore, and retake next semester, just like differential equations. Not looking forward to that eventuality.
But I have to. There were times during this week that I started to see things move out of the corner of my eye... I often barely knew what day it was... hardly made sense in verbal conversations... even had trouble recognizing some of my friends (kind of embarrassing, actually).
Sure, I could fake knowing the material and bluff my way through and accept a C or D in all of these classes; and sometimes you can do that, but it's simply not possible most of the time. Not for my major. You can't fake knowing math; you can either work the problems or not. Even if one could fake knowing the material, in engineering, it's self-destructive and self-defeating because the courses build on each other. How is one to be able to work with advanced concepts if the foundations are not laid for them? It simply doesn't work that way.
For mood music: Trafik - Hard to Resist
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n92AXAZPvoo
If one looks at my academic transcript, they'll see the almost straight A's I got from Columbia State Community College for two years before I transferred to Tennessee Tech. Then my GPA plummets. At first, I thought it was because of a lack of effort on my part, but I am a studious... student. Hard worker (almost anyone I know can vouch for this). I even have relevant job experience related to my major, so I know for a fact that I am an engineer and am gainfully employed as one; engineering's in my blood. I am already a productive member of society as-is (not many college students can say such a thing this early in the game, so to speak).
So, what's causing the GPA drop? I'm working harder than ever; haven't gotten any dumber, so what is it? It's the substandard instructors, that's what. Sure, they are fine people, and I am friends with a few of them. But they have forgotten the finer points of how to teach. You give a reasonable amount of homework so that the students can understand the concepts... not give them difficult make-work to keep them busy. Make the material accessible, understandable; don't convolute it with awkward mathese and proofs; some of us have not been working problems like this for umpteen years or so. The instructors back at Columbia State knew what they were doing. Not that I'm loyal to that college or anything, it's just that their methods made sense, the expectations from the students were reasonable, and the instructors were either competent at what they did or they got fired.
Here at TN Tech, I feel like I'm just learning how to ignore the instructors and go to youtube video tutorials in order to figure out what the heck they're talking about. And youtube is free. Which begs the question.... with almost all of the knowledge necessary for most university degrees available for free on the internet.... why do we even have universities anymore? It's time for a change in the system. The old lecture style needs to be fixed. Or something of the sort.
*Sigh*. I would normally explain each of the points I raised in more detail and give a few examples, but I don't have the time right now. Need to catch up on some sleep. And by need, I really mean "need". I don't want to find out what the hallucinatory stage of sleep deprivation feels like. Nor do I want to have a weakened immune system due to the stress. Catching the cold or flu is not fun.
But now I'm rambling. Apologies for so much complaining, but sometimes you just have to get frustrations out of your system one way or another.
Anyway, lots of other interesting stuff has happened recently, but discussion of them will have to wait for the next time I can write. Gotta get the homework done.
_BlueScreen, 20130205
No comments:
Post a Comment