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I did read your post. My experience has been very different.
In my experience the professors do make an effort to add to the educational experience. They just don't always do it the way you would like them to do it.
Maybe the types of classes you take makes a difference. I am a music education major and I never want to skip my music classes. The professors are accomplished conductors, performers, and teachers. I am there to study music. The lectures and books add to the experience but the real live instruction cannot be replaced in music.
I have a ton of books on voice training but my voice teacher taught me to sing. There really are some classes you really can't skip.
jabm67, LOVED the bit. I am printing that out for my middle school child. We have told her that in life your going to be stuck w/ bad bosses & managers so get used to it by learning to deal w/ what may be a "bad teacher". She has done very well w/ teachers that other students AND parents had issues with. You sound almost too easy compared to many of my profs. Even in my large lecture hall classes they took roll and counted absences.
Since my major was in the arts field I had mostly "studio" or "lab" type classes that were small and the work consisted of projects throughout the semester and the professor would instantly know if you were not there. In this environment we had much more interaction w/ the professors so they knew you by name and face EASILY! You HAD to attend those classes or else you could EASILY miss some very important details as there were no textbooks for them.
Online info for the lectures.............. wow how times have changed. Back when I was in school the ONLY computers we as students worked on in my field of study was the one year of AutoCad that was required. LOL!!! Showing my age The MOST high tech we got was the art history teacher would make the slides she showed in class available during certain times to view. You only saw the slide and not the info that went along w/ it given out in her lecture.
I'll never forget this one girl that I had in a few classes. She was in an English Lit class in a smaller room w/ a class size of about 30 and a lecture hall w/ about 50 students. In each one she would show up JUST IN TIME and had to sit front and center. The BEST was she ALWAYS had SOMETHING to eat like an apple and would EAT IT! She would sit there right smack in the middle of the lecture and get out her brown paper bag, open it up, pull out an apple and proceed to eat it w/o even paying attention to what was going on around her. The English professor was GREATNESS the first time this happened. He just stopped and looked at her in disbelief and waited till she was done and the entire time she had NO CLUE!!! When she put it away he then asked her if it was good.
As for cheating, I NEVER cheated. Every now and then we would have a prof that would let you use an index card to put any information you felt would be needed to use for the exam. Most of the time we realized that was not even worth it. Invariably you would have chicken scratch so little it was worthless and not even relevant to the exam. I as well as others witnessed a girl in one English class cheating for the final. She literally took out a regular sheet of notebook paper FULL of info and put it under the test after the prof handed it out. We all just stared in disbelief.
Cell phones. While these were around to a MINOR degree back then they were built in to your car and not "mobile" by any means. This would bug me as a student now if they went off in class. What was more common for some of us art students would be our large art supply box getting bumped on the floor in a lecture class and something accidently knocking your battery operated eraser on. It would start vibrating in your box and caused a bit of a disturbance w/ people thinking it was something else going off in your art box.
I originally attended college some ten years ago. Now I am back in school and I must say that I have yet to experience what the OP is going through, but I have noticed some changes; mainly cell phones going off during class to which some students have the gall to answer then proceed to have a conversation with whom ever is on the other end, and along the same lines, students carrying on conversations with one another while class is in session. I am not sure if this is something that is prevalent to this day and age or just my current location. When I first went to school in California, students remained quiet while the teacher was speaking unless they were participating in an open dialogue with the class/teacher. I also remember the same respect a few years ago in Minneapolis. Now, here in Maine, students just seem to flap their gums when ever they feel the whim.
I miss the college days...more freedom than high school, but none of my least favorite "adult" responsibilities such as dealing with bad bosses (they don't grade your papers, they sign your paycheck$!) etc.
When I was in college most of my professors would be flexible, forgiving, and easy to work with for any student who was obviously trying their best. There were no hard*sses, only those who delighted in not helping the students who cut class and then panicked the day before a paper was due or a test.
I did cut classes. Sometimes, I could get the A without attending much, and the professor didn't take attendance so why not? NOW I feel it's a waste to pay for a class you don't attend. Live and learn.
But I had a lecture class of almost 200 students, and not only did the professor take attendance each and every day (he had a TA do it!), he *assigned* seats to make this easy on thr TA. Whatever seat we sat in on the first day was our seat right on. This sucked. It was an intro Earth Science class and it bored me to pieces. He counted off your grade for the absences too, and we also had labs on another day. Yuck yuck yuck.
I had a European cinema class I adored. You didn't want to miss that class, you couldn't possibly keep up with the exams which were based on films and clips shown in class plus there was a journal required. It did have its boring moments and I despise group work in a class like this. This professor would drop you a letter grade if you missed more than 3 classes. But he was briliiant man, he also taught German (language) and other film classes.
I took a Russian Literature class, the teacher was from Russia and had a thick accent, and there were only 6 students. It was enjoyable, lots of class discussion, but I am glad we read Anna Karenina instead of War and Peace. She was merciful and only had us watch the movie War and Peace. I felt she was too coddling and easy on us at the time. We got away with anything. Looking back, she was very good at getting us interested in the material, there was no need to force it on us, I mistook this for being to easy. at the end of the class I had learned more than I realized.
I had a sociology--Pop Culture class whose professor was the MOST arrogant, liberal freak. It was half cool, half boring. He ticked me off when he gave me (an English major who did well on really toughly graded papers) a *B* on a paper about the tv show Seinfeld. I asked him what needed to be improved to earn an A (we had the chance to rewrite our papers for a higher grade) and he totalled my paper. I chose not to rewrite it, still got an A in the class, and decided not to take his 1960s class.
Coolest class ever was a children's lit class, only drawback was it was in a huge lecture hall so not much room for personal discussions. It was an easy A for anyone who did their reading and loved the books, and attended each class, but it was also an opportunity to learn SO much. It was hard to get into because the children and young adult lit classes were in high demand from education majors.
Worst class I ever took as an English major was a Technical Communcation class which was about 2% English majors, 95% engineering majors, and 3% Computer Science majors. Simply terrible. English majors and engineers do not mix on group projects involving writing!
In most of my classes, most people had good attendance. Attendance was worse in the huge lecture classes of 250 people. Intro to Criminal Justice, Intro to Sociology (boring!), etc. Attendance was about 50/50 in the Intro to Biology and College Algebra. No one missed Cinema or literature classes.
It's true, Community College is like extended high school. However I took my into History classes and English classes there and lucked out, my 2 professors there were awesome and had Phd's. They didn't want to have to do research at large universities and said community college was like teaching high school.
You know what I hated about college is how in every field there are classes and professors known for being the ones who are easy to get through. I feel it was for athletes and bottom barrel students to get their classes they'd never be able to pass with a decent challenging teacher. It was shameful for those who cared about learning but good for those who just wanted the grade.
I had a math class like that. Grade was based on 4 tests and no final. The tests were all the same, they had 20 questions and were multiple choice, and had 4 answers and not any of the "none of the above" trickery. It was so easy to make 100s on those tests without even paying attention in class plus the professor held a test review and spoon fed you what was to be on the tests. He would literally hand out a practice test and that would be the exact makeup of the test, just different question of course. He was not someone you'd take as a pred-med or chemistry or engineering major but he was someone for English, psychology and other majors to get their math credit out of the way.
I can't understand why you would pay for a class and not go.
Because when someone pays me $19/hr to further myself in my career, and my class is along those same lines, but I can learn the material at noon, or at 2am... compared to the fact that I can only work from 8am-8pm... I can tell you what time is going to be devoted to learning my school material, and what time is going to be devoted to increasing my work experience.
Because when someone pays me $19/hr to further myself in my career, and my class is along those same lines, but I can learn the material at noon, or at 2am... compared to the fact that I can only work from 8am-8pm... I can tell you what time is going to be devoted to learning my school material, and what time is going to be devoted to increasing my work experience.
What kind of classes do you take tht the professors add NOTHING to the process? I am not at a prestigious university by any means, but our professors are very devoted to helping us and passing on information that is just not found in books. Maybe the nature of music is different, but even in our academic classes (like theory, history) the instructors really helped the learning process.
What kind of classes do you take tht the professors add NOTHING to the process? I am not at a prestigious university by any means, but our professors are very devoted to helping us and passing on information that is just not found in books. Maybe the nature of music is different, but even in our academic classes (like theory, history) the instructors really helped the learning process.
I'm not saying I skip the entire semester, but if the course is Intro to Logic, and we're working on Symbolic Logic, and I have the rules down. All I really need is practice. If there's going to be 3 days of practice, I tend to go faster than the class anyone. So, I go to maybe 1 day.
Review sessions are critical though.
Also, Economics was the same way, Intro to Good & Evil, Statistics can be, etc.
I learn very very quickly. And I can usually use logic and such to figure out a lot of problems through process of elimination or basic common sense.
Edit: This works for when I already have a grasp of the subject. Once I get it, I get it and I don't need that repetition others need. For instance, I dropped Comp Sci 160 (Java programming) twice, because I couldn't make the morning classes, and without going to those classes, I didn't have the information necessary to learn the material.
I am a current Senior at a private, four year university, and personally I think it comes down to how you view school. Some students view it as education, and others as job training. If you think it is job training, you will only go to enough classes to get by, if it is education for the sake of learning, you will do much more. Personally, I never skip class, but I don't see a problem if someone does. The student is paying for a service, and if they choose to not go, it is their money they are losing. I have a little over a month until I graduate from college, and one thing I learned is that college isn't what it used to be. A college education today is equivalent to a high school education 25 years ago. If you want to really get anywhere with a career, you simply have to have at least a master's degree. I was just hired by a fortune 500 company in their IT department, and was told point blank that no one is even considered for management unless they have at least an MBA.
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The MOST high tech we got was the art history teacher would make the slides she showed in class available during certain times to view. You only saw the slide and not the info that went along w/ it given out in her lecture. 
I chose not to rewrite it, still got an A in the class, and decided not to take his 1960s class. 
