A Lesson Learned

Teachers are our instructors of knowledge. Growing up, children quickly learn that their teachers are full of information and are always a reliable resource in our never ending world of gaining more and more knowledge to become, hopefully, well-rounded citizens.

However, once the college years roll around, students start to realize that there is definitely more than one "breed" of professor out there.

Let me explain by referring to an all to familiar incident.

Early in the semester of Fall 2008, I quickly realized that one of my teachers was extremely unreliable.

Homework assignments were never given a clear due date and for the most part forgotten about by the professor, which led all the students to feel that it was pointless to work so hard doing these assignments with no positive credit in return. Even worse, was that the professor would pretty much refuse to review any work we had done, so that we could at least know for our own personal benefit if we had done the assignments correctly or not. This, however, was too much work for our professor so our wishes were frequently denied.

This was just a foreshadow to how things would fly this semester.

Midterm number one was on a Friday of week three.

My fellow classmates and I crammed all week, and then some, for this dreadful exam we were to take.

Well Friday rolls around and we all arrive early to make sure we have everything we need and to fit in one last quick cram session.

No sign of the professor. Thirty minutes later, the neighboring professor comes out to tell us to just leave.

Great.

Monday, our teacher comes into class with no explanation and passes out the exam. About twenty minutes or so into the exam, the professor makes an announcement that he had passed out the wrong exam and that everything we have done does not count for credit and that we must start over.

At this point, all of the students were pretty pissed, to say the least.

Shouldn't the professor be more prepared? I understand things can happen in life, so I decided to roll with the punches and go with it. "No big deal," I tell myself.

Unfortuantely, things only progressed to get worse.

Throughout the following weeks, the professor was unable to be contacted [by email, phone, office hours, etc.] and refused to check any work that had been done by the students.

Any faith I once held onto regarding the course and the professor, slowly began to fade far, far away.

It is strange to think that these professors- these teachers that I grew up putting all of my faith into- can no longer be guaranteed to provide the quality teaching skills that students actually need [whether they realize it or not].

I sure wish things get better for the rest of the semester. If I'm going to be in this class two days a week for three months, I sure hope to get something out of it- not just a weekly headache from all the frustration.

If anything, I'll know exactly what I would NOT want to be like if I was to ever become a professor!