Wow...

[kane_magus]

Today has been crazy, so far.

For some reason I can't really explain, I woke up with a feeling that I can only describe as pure rage, barely repressed. I quickly calmed down, but it caught me off-guard. I don't know what would have caused it, unless I had some crazy dream that I don't remember now. Even though I'm no longer as... pissed off as I was when I first woke up, it has still been having a subtle effects so far.

For example, as I was walking to the Park and Ride, the bus showed up about 3 minutes early. Even though I managed to make it to the P-R in time to board the bus, the... wrath that I was feeling earlier this morning briefly resurfaced. I'm not entirely sure what I would have done had the bus left me. Probably nothing, honestly, except quietly wait for the other bus that would have immediately followed this bus that would have also brought me to school on time, albeit by a different route which would have required an annoying but slight bit more walking from the bus stop to school.

...

Well, given my already bad mood, image how I felt when I got to math class today and the teacher launched into a full 75 minute rant about the midterm we took on Monday, and how we all suck because most of us apparently failed. I made a 13/20, which is passing, so while I'm not happy about it, I still apparently did somewhat better than most, I guess. Well, there was one guy who somehow got a perfect score on it. The amount of praise that the teacher heaped on this one guy at the beginning before he launched into his rant was pretty disgusting, to be honest. "Alexander the Great" I believe the teacher called him, on more than one occasion.

I actually took notes during his rant, partly because it was something to keep me occupied and avert some of the aforementioned unexplained anger, and partly because I had nothing better to do, really, considering that the teacher wasn't actually teaching anything.

Some points that he brought up:

• Except for a few of cases where he gave 4 points (for a two-part problem) and 3 points for a couple of other problems on the last page, he only gave 2 points per problem. Therefore, if you made a slight arithmetic error or something, even if you did the rest of the problem properly, you still lost half or all credit for the problem. He won't give more points per problem because then we would be "too dependent on partial credit". Also, he said that if he had given us more points per problem, we would have, somehow, actually done worse instead of better. WTF?
  
• Our handwriting collectively sucks, apparently. He confirmed this with one of our English teachers, so it must be true. Therefore, we fail.
  
• Some of us apparently used methods and notations different from what he taught in class. This was unacceptable. Therefore, we fail. Even if we got the problem right. We still fail. Doesn't apply to me, personally, but I can see how this might have screwed some others over, for whatever reason.
  
• It's not the teacher's fault that we all suck. He can't understand why it happened.
  
• Some guy cheated, it seems. The teacher knew because he felt the "vibrations". Whatever that means. I think he was just trying to be funny, I guess.
  
• Apparently, he had a stack of blank paper on his desk during the midterm for us to use as scratch paper, since he didn't want us to use our own paper. Did he bother to TELL us about this during the midterm? No. But whatever. You didn't really need scratch paper on that test anyway.
  
• NO EXCUSES!!!!!!!1!!~~!2!@!!~!
  
• Calculators are bad. Maybe he should give the grade to the calculator instead of the student.
  
• He couldn't figure out how to keep Excel from rounding up half points when he was grading our exams, so he was forced to give us more points than he felt some of us deserved, it seems.
  
• L'hopital's rule is apparently of the devil, since it wasn't something that the teacher explicitly covered in class. Therefore, if someone used that during the midterm to solve a problem, it was wrong. Even if it was right, it was wrong. At least that was the impression I got, since that didn't apply to me.
  

After the 75 minute rant, he spent an additional 30 minutes during the "5 minute break" dealing with the complaints of individual students. I almost began to fear at one point that one of the students was about to start a fistfight or something with the teacher over this stuff... o_O ...but he eventually just said whatever and walked away, leaving the teacher to deal with the next student in a long line of students waiting to speak to him. When there was about 5 minutes left before class was supposed to have ended with no end to it in sight, I just left. I'm not sure why I stayed there as long as I did, honestly. Biggest waste of 2 hours ever, though I admit it was morbidly amusing at times.

In conclusion, a lot of the respect that I gained for this particular teacher on a previous occasion simply evaporated today because of this.

On a semi-related tangent, here are a couple of poems that were written by this same teacher, found on his personal website, which is linked from his Digipen website. Why am I linking them here? I don't know. Leave me alone!

Comments

[alessar.livejournal.com]

The entire class needs to schedule a group visit with the head of the math department. Your notes would be helpful.

[yamen.livejournal.com]

You should ask Zach about his crazy dream last week where he got super-pissed off at me.

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

We used to refer to L'Hopital's rule as "El Hospital's Rule", which sounds a lot better.