The online work is ridiculous and it's all run by the textbook companies. All of our exams and quizzes are through the company that sold us the textbooks and I have found numerous errors and inconsistencies in them. I spend hours combing the textbooks for the answers to the textbook company's quizzes only to have them marked wrong by the same company. When that happens, I have to challenge the question, complete with references, and send the challenge to the textbook company and a screenshot of the question and the challenge to my instructor. This week, I've challenged 14 questions. I spent five hours on one 25 question quiz. And I took six quizzes this week. That doesn't include the two quizzes I have to take but which aren't going to be graded. I sent nine emails to my instructors. All of this takes time, by the way. Lots and lots of time.
The other thing that takes time is printing out all the materials that we need to bring to class. I have probably spent three or four hours just printing out materials that the instructors want us to have for class. It's ridiculous.
The thing is, the amount of work doesn't scare me. At some point, you just put one foot in front of the other. I am frustrated at how ridiculous it is and how it reflects a kind of mindset among the instructors that I find infuriating. First, there's the inherent laziness in their reliance on the textbook companies for all their teaching materials. They can use the same material year in and year out and make us responsible for covering it all own time. Then there's the reliance on the textbook companies for the quizzing and exams. This is compounded by the fact that the quizzes are randomized for each student with questions pulled from a test question bank so that the instructor has no idea what each student is being quizzed on beyond their choosing the general subject for the quiz.
My quiz on family dynamics and communication, for example, contained questions about the medications used to treat paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia. You know, just the typical stuff you'd expect from a quiz on family dynamics. My quiz on thermoregulation included questions about bioterrorism. You know, because the first thing you want to do in cases of bioterrorism attacks is make sure that no one is running a fever.
So that's fun.
And what else is going on? Well, not much.
Saba is continuing to get better, but we had to take her to the vet this week because she's been eating grass and the blades of grass managed to work themselves up through the hole in her neck around her feeding tube. Not inside the feeding tube, but around it. We pulled out several blades of grass and noticed that there was a bad smell, so we took her to the vet who put her on antibiotics. So that was fun.
With all that we've got going on, we sidestepped putting in a garden this year, but Dave came home from the hardware store the other day with two little tomato plants. It's way too late to plant tomatoes, but we're going to do it anyway. Soon. Maybe.
This is my reward for being a good little webbis this week:
I love Seneca. He's my favorite stoic philosopher. I know most people would go with Marcus Aurelius--and when I was 19, I did too-- but for the last fifteen years or so, it's been Seneca. Have you ever read him? You should.
“It is another’s fault if he be ungrateful, but it is mine if I do not give. To find one thankful man, I will oblige a great many that are not so.”--Seneca
See?
“There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality.”--Seneca
See?
No comments:
Post a Comment