Teachers, and the things they assign.

[Vagrant0]

Since the school year is starting up again for many people, and there wasn't something like this already done, I figured a thread like this might be a bit due. Obviously, we can't mention real names, and it would probably be better not to mention assignments from teachers you are still a student of, or have connections to.

 

Simply put, the point of the thread is to discuss things which were assigned to you by teachers which either made little practical sense for the purposes of the course, were only designed to waste your (and maybe their) time (justifying a paycheck), or were things which you disagreed with on fundamental level. And to mention if you did the assignment, or if you decided to blow it off.

 

As that might not be clear, I suppose I'll have to offer some examples.

 

On the borderline silly side of things, one of my highschool chemistry teachers, now deceased so I can't say anything too bad about them, had the notion of creating a rap about the elements or something... And wanted us all to know it... testing and all. Clearly, I didn't learn it, or care to learn it, and blew off the test. Ended up dropping the course soon after, but that was more of an attendance issue. While yeah, it might have been a useful, and at one time meaningful way of learning that stuff, as with all attempts to combine a message with rap, it was pure fail.

 

For assignments I disagreed with, I have two to offer.

 

During highschool, I took a creative writing class. Although this teacher was one of the reasons why I've adopted the policy of only listening to creative writing teachers who have actually published something, I still had some disagreements. One of the assignments was to take a poem that was in another language, one the student wasn't supposed to know, and to replace as many words in that poem with English words that sounded similar. I understood the purpose, but disagreed with the process. I felt that taking a poem, and essentially making fun of it by trying to join together words in my native language was a bit of a disservice to the author, and the poem itself. I ended up doing it for the grade, but it was half-hearted and rather poor. Had I been a bit more confident as a person, I would have probably called him on it, especially since he had published a collection of poems himself, but didn't.

 

The other one was in college, different teacher, for somewhat similar reasons. I'd had this teacher in Eng 101, which is basic composition, and had gone through the class with decent grades, largely due to my own creativity and willingness to think out of the box. One of the big things this teacher wanted to get across was the importance of learning things from the original source, rather than relying on a 3rd or 4th hand relaying of that information, since often that 3rd or 4th source tends to forget, change, or omit parts of the message. Anyway, I had signed up for his Eng 102 class, also composition, and figured it wouldn't be too different. One of the assignments given was to read a book, The Art of War... Nothing wrong with that, very insightful book. Then use quotes from that book and create a simple guide as to how it might be used somewhere else, on a similar note to business or dating manuals that have already done this. He didn't really go into any real detail about what he expected on this, and instead just left this guideline, refusing to be any more specific. Like myself, other students were a bit unsure about what the teacher was expecting. After mulling it over, coming up with nothing that I could do justice to, instead I decided that rather than quoting from the book, and twisting someone else's words to my own end, I would be a bit more anecdotal. I quickly crafted a few pages which established a bit of symbolism. It started out describing a tool, how I saw that tool being conceived and used for the purpose in which it was conceived. I then described how said tool could also be used for other things than what it was conceived for. After that, I made a suggestion that after it was repeatedly used for those other things that ceased being seen as a tool which was for both that original thing, or other things, but instead as being a tool specific to one of those other uses depending on who was using it. All of this was, in a way, going back to the previous class, and that whole "original source" stuff. After all this was laid out, I then started drawing connections between that tool, and The Art of War, without ever using any quotations. In fairness, it wasn't really doing the assignment, and was probably calling him on being a hypocrite. But I also didn't want to fall into the same sort of word twisting that is common practice, even in peer-reviewed works. I wasn't expecting a good grade, but was expecting an honest grade. Instead what I got was a rather irate talking to, with most of the focus being on the specific descriptions of the tool, and establishing the symbol as being faulty. He obviously recognized the point I was trying to make (especially since I pretty much explained it in plain English), but wasn't willing to own up to it. I ended up dropping the class and taking 102 with a different teacher who was a bit more concise and willing to allow me to do things my own way, but this incident has still stuck with me. I still regard that paper as being one of the better things I've written, flawed symbolism and all. Never did make amends, but never felt I had to. Last I heard, he had hooked up with a former student, so go figure.

 

Point was that I did the assignment to my own liking, wrong or not, and stood by beliefs that I still maintain. Needless to say, it hasn't always been good for my grade, and that integrity is only meaningful on paper, and none of this has helped me sleep better at nights, or look myself in the mirror, but that's just how I do things.

 

So now that I've shared it's your turn to offer up tales of homework past so that we may shake our heads with disbelief and wonder what our taxes are really paying for... Or, if you happen to be one of those uppity types, you could always talk about one of those assignments you've had that was actually a good idea. There might be a few teachers on the site, and I'm sure they would like to get some ideas.

[Retribution]

Not being a racist here, but endless summer reading books about blacks being persecuted. Oh, and books about people dying. This time, a combination of the two.

[Halororor]

Not being a racist here, but endless summer reading books about blacks being persecuted. Oh, and books about people dying. This time, a combination of the two.

 

Same here. We had to watch Mississipi Burning and read To Kill A Mockingbird. Both were insightful and not all that bad, but the resulting exam papers were terrible. It's purely about racism. Racism is dying out, shouldn't we leave it behind like it deserves to be? It was terrible, but it's over. The end.

 

Strangely enough, your school year is starting, ours is almost at its end :P

[Retribution]

Strangely enough, your school year is starting, ours is almost at its end :P

YOU LIE. WHAT COUNTRY DO YOU LIVE IN? XD

[Vagrant0]

Not being a racist here, but endless summer reading books about blacks being persecuted. Oh, and books about people dying. This time, a combination of the two.

 

Same here. We had to watch Mississipi Burning and read To Kill A Mockingbird. Both were insightful and not all that bad, but the resulting exam papers were terrible. It's purely about racism. Racism is dying out, shouldn't we leave it behind like it deserves to be? It was terrible, but it's over. The end.

 

Strangely enough, your school year is starting, ours is almost at its end :P

 

That's actually one of those big sideline debates in the US. Kids in most parts of the country don't really know what racism is, haven't actually seen it first hand (aside from maybe the inappropriate comment, or favoritism/profiling) so don't understand how bad things were. On one end, it's a good thing, it allows people to move on and not see skin color as a reason to be hostile. On the other end, the atrocities which were carried out in the "land of the free" don't really get recognized, and the importance of the civil rights, boycotts, marches, and similar become lost. Sure, in 5 or 10 years people kids could still probably tell you that Martin Luther King Jr. was an important part of the movement, and was a good speaker, but probably couldn't tell you much as to what was important about him. Already, Rosa Parks has been diminished to just being some African American Lady who refused to go and sit in the back of the bus, with maybe a few dis-conjoined mentions of that "boycott" word or if you're lucky, a muttered phrase "passive resistance". While yeah, some things are best to just accept as being done and just move on, this probably isn't one of them. Just like WWII, 9/11, and the finale of Seinfeld, some things are just more important than the events they describe, and should be remembered in the context that they happened. Once events are separated from meaning, they cease to be important, and cease to be a lesson for future generations.

 

As far as To Kill a Mockingbird goes... I've had it assigned reading atleast 3 or 4 times from 7th to 12th grade... Second only to A Raisin in the Sun, which was assigned almost every year without fail (with The Great Gatsby being 3rd on that list with 3 times in as many years). I know where you're coming from, and actually think it is counter-productive to force works like that down reader's throats, but that's really the fault of the Banned Books movement for narrowing down the number of stories that are allowed to be assigned to only a handful. Of course, the same books that teachers themselves had crammed down their throats, are the same books they cram down the throats of their students. But rest assured, there are far worse books you could be reading instead. I remember Ordinary People to be one of the more excruciating things I was assigned in school, although I'm sure that if I really thought about it, I could come up with others.

[Retribution]

I cry whenever I watch the finale of Seinfeld. Almost literally.

[Germandeathkittiez]

Ah I remember my 60's School of Rock class... we were gonna rock out and learn about music of the sixties! Instead we watched JFK's cerebellum get blasted out over and over, then we had to write a long, long paper about it. (I got my mom to finish the paper)

 

My Ancient Greece class... final assignment of senior year. I've just done almost everything. Great, now I can focus on that 10 page essay about the pyramids of Egypt. But wait... now we just get assigned on the second to last day of school a "brochure" advertising for tourists to go to Sparta or Athens... what kind of tourists would even go to Sparta? It was an armed military city. So I made jokes about going on vacation to Sparta and the ways you could die as a brochure.

[Retribution]

Ah I remember my 60's School of Rock class... we were gonna rock out and learn about music of the sixties! Instead we watched JFK's cerebellum get blasted out over and over, then we had to write a long, long paper about it. (I got my mom to finish the paper)

LOL. What a weird teacher.

[AncientSpaceAeon]

I love my teacher. The tasks are so easy.

Strangely enough, your school year is starting, ours is almost at its end tongue.gif

It's a month since I start going back to school.

[twilightblade]

now i gotta read a book about some asian chick getting married, then i gotta write a paper about it. F***** Hell! i hate the book!

 

ps

 

my mum is also a teacher in my school