Sean B. Fitzgerald It doesn’t go something like this, it goes exactly like this.

The semester is winding down (Rant)

It's that time again. Finals. It's a time when teachers pile on projects, and tests, and papers, all in an effort to validate their existence. It's a time when students do more work in a week than they do the entire semester. Simply put, it sucks. I am in the last week of my spring semester and next week I have six finals. Six! Do you know how hard it is to study for six finals? It's like trying to multi-task for the first time in your life. Right now I am sitting on my basement floor with six different textbooks, reading a paragraph from one, then moving to the next one. Problem is, I am retaining none of it. Isn't my brain supposed to be a sponge, not Teflon? As I skim through these textbooks, furrowing my brow at terms I don't understand, I realize that I have not learned a thing this year. Not a stat, not a court case, not a ideology, not even a Snapple fact. And maybe that's my fault. But with the way professor's "teach" these days, I refuse to believe that. Every class I go to, professors are lecturing at you, not to you. Every class is equipped with a projection screen which was implemented in order to enhance the learning experience for the students. Professors use it as a crutch. Or they just don't know how to use it properly. It seems as if they attended only one workshop on how to utilize this new technology and stopped listening after they were shown how to use Powerpoint. Because that is all I stare at every day. Ill-conceived Powerpoint presentations with straight text and no graphics, videos, or audio. They might as well hand me the textbook at the beginning of the semester and say "See you at the final". I find myself jamming my brain with information hours before tests and then once the test is over, POOF, it's gone. That is because I can't absorb information when it's simply written on a page or a computer. It means nothing to me then. If these professors can't even get me to learn something by accident, why am I paying an arm and a leg to go to school? I'd honestly rather my tuition go to paying off the basketball players, because that way I would have a halfway decent team to root for as I hallucinate from studying too much. This would be made all the more easier if I was given a proper study guide to work with. All I am handed by my professors is a sheet of paper that lists every topic gone over during the course of the semester. That is not a study guide, that is a bogus substitute for saying "I'm too lazy to narrow down the more important topics so I decided to test you on everything". However, you really find out how lazy and incompetent professors are when you're given the exam. What is this? 50 multiple choice? 20 "True or False" questions? Fill in the blank? This isn't learning. It's flat-out retention. The most effort they put into the test is by writing True/False questions with double or triple negatives in an attempt to trick us. Quite the ruse! We sit there, not trying to decipher the statement, but trying to comprehend what sort of broken home our teacher grew up in that would make them give us this question. How about a question that requires some thought? Contrary to popular belief, I didn't go to college for just the "experience". Learning had something to do with it. That being said, I await the day when I graduate (December 2009), so I can struggle to find a job, a house, a wife, and wish I had the problems I do now.

Sorry for the rant.