I am beginning to think that my chemistry professor might be a prick. He claimed that, in 33 years of teaching, not once has a class averaged at or above a 90% on any single exam. I'm sorry, but you're not communicating that you want us to succeed, you're communicating that you're being a prick in making your exams too obtuse to actually do well on. Of course, this might also be due to the fact that he focuses on inane bullshit, like significant figures (read: arbitrary, retarded bullshit that ignores how fucking floating-point arithmetic works), frequently gets lost with meandering, idiotic fucking metaphors for incredibly simple concepts. He took over 90 minutes to explain the simple concept that, if you want to figure out how much of a part of a reaction you get for a certain amount of reagent, you need to convert to and from moles. Took you, what, 20 seconds to read that, at most? He made some idiot analogy to crossing a bridge over a river and some other shit that, honestly, just made things more stupid and confusing. He does that for fucking everything.
Contrast that to both my chemistry professors at Germanna: they never got lost on stupid tangents, taught the fucking formulas we needed to figure shit out, didn't bog down critical instruction with vague, pointless metaphors, and the only reason I got a D in 111 the first time (hence, why I'm even bothering with this idiotic bullshit to begin with) was because I wasn't in any shape, mentally, to do the work. I understood the concepts just fine; hell, I got a B in 112 to prove it. They conveyed in half an hour what it takes this motherfucker upwards of 90 minutes to two hours to fully explain.
Not only that, but he expects his students, many of whom are practically fresh outta high school, to know how to write a lab report to any skill level. I'm not sure if this old fart has even been in a high school chemistry class in the past 15 years, but I can guaran-damn-tee you that almost fucking none of them even bother teaching lab reports. Fuck, my high school chemistry class? Never touched a single piece of glassware, it was just a glorified math class.
I am being taught by an incompetent and, honestly, I'm more pissed off for the actual chem majors in my class than I am for myself. This fucker is wasting their time, filling their heads with nonsensical fluff, fucking flavour text, instead of conveying the information they need in an efficient, effective manor. I dunno, maybe I'm spoiled by being in computer science, but if a fucking CS professor pulled this meandering idiocy on their students, you'd better bet that they would be out of a job, pronto.
Funny thing is, I was led to believe that this class would be covering waaaaaaay more stuff than I did in Germanna. Guess what? The coursework is almost fucking identical. No acid-base chemistry, barely any coverage of intermolecular forces, nothing about atomic decay...it literally stops just before where I remember my 111 course at Germanna stopping. That's right, I covered more in a community college course than I am in a university-level course. And, yet, they have the unbelievable balls to not only convert Germanna's superior course to a 3-credit course during transfer, but charge twice as much for the privilege of learning less.
You wanna know what kills so many kids' enthusiasm for university? This bullshit, right here. Pointless gen-ed courses that have absolutely nothing to do with their major being forced upon them to waste their time, effort, and money, all for the sake of...what? Fucking them over? "Life experience?" Making more money? Creating more alcoholics and drug addicts? I seriously wanna know, because if this is what all liberal arts universities pull...why haven't we torched the lot of them, yet?