pissedAnd then there is my biochemistry class. I have reached a point of RAGE about it. The fucker who is teaching it is lazy and does not care about the class or its students. He is a piss poor lecturer and he avoids teaching as much as he can. For example: today's class is cancelled, and instead of lecture we are expected to attend a student research fair where they are showing "Posters". We are supposed to find him and sign the roster in order to get 4 points on the final exam. Fucking waste of time. This is the only class I have ever taken at NAU and I wish I had dropped it. I paid over $700 to sit through this guys terrible lectures and read the shitty textbook that matches him quite well.
Now don't get me wrong, he's a nice guy. Smart, funny, and probably really good at his research. But he should not be teaching this class. He does not give a damn about it.
At our last class he kept us a few minutes late because he started a few minutes late. There's 15 minute break between classes. Just as the students were getting up to leave a guy in the back piped up that he had the class evaluation forms. Half the class left, not caring. The other half stayed to complete the forms, but the guy who was collecting them left after about 5 minutes. I saw him leaving and ran to catch him and turn in my eval. The rest of the class didn't chase him down, and the department will not hear about this "professor".
The reason the lectures are so shitty: he is not capable of putting his detail knowledge into a broad perspective. He can spout chemical-ese all day long, but it means nothing to a non-chemist. When he does get general, he spends half a lecture on stuff that is common knowledge to anyone who can read a news paper, for example the whole A, B, and O blood type lecture. But most of the time he is ranting about molecules without explaining where it fits in the big picture, and why we should care. AND he is very disorganized. We are constantly asking "what is that"? when he writes something on the board. He jumps around. I have learned to leave a lot of room in my notes so that I can look things up that he fails to explain.
I almost dropped the class after the first test because I didn't understand it at all. Then I got a 94% on that test, and that really pissed me off. I don't like getting an A for something that makes no sense to me. That is proof that the test is not testing my knowledge or comprehension. The pre-med students in the front row with me agree that how well you know the material is no indicator of how well you will do on the test.
I have ranted before about his crappy tests and the way he hands out points to the entire class when he makes a mistake on the test. He is too lazy to make his grading count.
I am tempted to never go to his class again. A friend tells me I should speak with the Dean about his class. Since it is the only class I have ever taken at NAU, I will not send the transcript anywhere. I will be taking biochemistry again in the fall in Portland. The only reason I didn't drop the class after the first test was because I didn't know for sure that I was in to NCNM, so I was still building my transcripts for an application to CCNM in Toronto. Soon after the drop deadline I interviewed and knew I was admitted, but it was too late.
A few years ago I signed up for another class at NAU and dropped it, because it was so lousy. That class was sociolinguistics in the education master's track. I am fascinated with sociolinguistics but I didn't have to take that class. After sitting through one lecture I knew it wouldn't but up to my standards.
A couple of college age kids moved in next door when they came here to attend NAU. They were moving from Pennsylvania. They left before the semester was out because they said the quality of the classes was painfully inferior to the school that they had left, and they couldn't justify it. They were in photography and political science. It is my impression that NAU sucks academically in most departments.