My Daily Annoyance
I only have one class that I have to attend daily during the school week, and that class is Anthropology 201: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. It’s a simple, introductory course about different aspects of cultural anthropology, including but not limited to religion, modes of production, fieldwork, and language. It runs for just 50 minutes a day, which seems relatively easy to get through. Unfortunately, when you have an insufferable teacher, it feels like a much longer duration.
Now listen, I know I do at least one or two of these rants a year about specific professors. Sure, it’s probably getting old. But I really need a way to vent so that I don’t end up in their offices, yelling belligerently about how badly they need to learn how to teach a class. Why has my anthropology class turned into a dreaded, daily annoyance?
Repetition of Extraneous Phrases
This is a common theme with bad professors. What is it that this professor says without fail over 20 times per class period? “In any case.” He uses it as a transition between slides. He uses it as a transition between bullet points. Soon, I fear he may start using it as a transition between words. And I have no problem with the phrase, I’ll use it often. What bothers me is that he uses it no matter what, even if what he’s talking about doesn’t actually apply in ANY CASE. That’s what I call annoying. I can’t stand hearing an improperly used phrase that many times a day in a 50 minute span.
Smiling When Inappropriate
They say it requires less muscles to smile than it does to frown. But I’m pretty sure it requires even less muscles to maintain an indifferent facial expression. My professor opts to smile all the time though, especially after asking the class for input. This shouldn’t be too annoying, I mean, who isn’t cheered up by a nice smile from another human being? The annoying part about it is that the man continues smiling, even when he’s asking us questions about relatively graphic and unpleasant things, such as rape and female genital cutting.
Hair Which Seems to Indicate Political Stance
Some might say that using someone’s hairstyle to determine what political views they hold is a shallow thing to do. But I disagree. This guy’s greasy hair which he pulls tightly into a ponytail screams pro-choice, granola, “not going to be brought down by the man” ultra left-wing idiot. And his choice of career would seem to confirm this. Anthropology is a field largely dominated by sissies who want to take a holistic approach to justifying archaic and sometimes unethical cultural practices. Different isn’t bad though, it’s just different, right?
Poor Assessments of Learning
The grade in the class consists of two assignments, weekly discussion groups, weekly quizzes, and a final exam. The two assignments are extremely involved, and have little to do with the lecture material. The weekly discussion groups are absolutely pointless and do nothing to expand student learning. The weekly quizzes are 15 multiple choice questions, whose answers are just about as obvious as Ryan Seacrest’s sexual orientation. And the final exam is worth just 14% of the total grade in the class. Sure, these grading practices result in a class that’s relatively easy to get an A in, but it raises some questions as to how this person ever got hired as a professor at a university.
Inability to Adhere to the Schedule
We’re now a week behind schedule from what the syllabus suggests, due to the fact that we were subjected to a rather annoying documentary about Jamaica’s economy for two full class periods. The documentary was relatively impossible to understand, as the Jamaicans speaking heavily accented and broken English were not given subtitles, and were hard to hear over the 100 different variations of “One Love” that were playing for what seemed like the entire film.
Pointless Lectures that Run Over Time
And the final thing that my professor does to annoy me every day is run over the allotted class period. This is annoying to people who have classes 10 minutes after anthropology ends, and have to go all the way across campus to get to them, like me. The worst part is that running over time could be avoided if he didn’t spend so much time on each slide, adding anecdotal and largely unrelated stories and asking for student participation, which he never gets.
The bottom line is that I really hate this class. The only thing that makes it slightly less miserable is the fact that you’d have to try pretty hard not to get an A. So I’ll take the easy A, but I’ll also take away the lesson that an annoying professor can make even the easiest classes difficult to attend.