OK. This is not a good school that I go to (Cornell). This is pure self-absorbed ranting, and I've discarded my ability to discern the relative merits of things, ok?
I have two classes that really suck(ed(thank god)) shit. Swahili and Syntax. I'll start with Swahili.
Last Thursday in Swahili, we get our final exam assignment. We have to take a 28 page exam on Sunday, an hour long oral on Tuesday, and then hand in essentially an 8-10 page essay on Thursday/Friday. The essay has to be in Swahili. I've taken 14 weeks of this class, 28 classes. Even accounting for the stupidly fast pace of this class, isn't having to write a 10 page essay in a foreign language in your first semester of the language bullshit? I study like 8 hours for the 28 page exam on Sunday- I've virtually memorized everything taught to us this semester, and it still takes me 3 fucking hours to do the exam, just in order to write the information down. My hand was numb for a few hours afterwards, I was scribbling so quickly. The oral exam is nothing- I do spend about 5 hours prepping for it, only to find out that 1.) all my preparation was worthless because the topic I get is something I couldn't have possibly prepared for and 2.) the topic is so simple that I don't really need to prepare. And, now this essay. Takes me a good 8 hours or so. If not for the online Swahili dictionary so I could look up words (I don't have 150 Swahili words in my vocabulary, much less 1500) I would've started shooting motherfuckers. Another bastard thing about Swahili is that the words themselves are fucking long, and they express a lot, so one word in Swahili is a lot more than one word in English. Sikujasikulize = "I shouldn't have listened to myself". So 1500 words in Swahili is like, 3000 in English. Then, this essay has to be about myself, 10 pages about myself, so I start writing about all this painful/annoying relationship failure shit stuff from high school that I never talk about, and I have to figure out how to express all this shit in Swahili, while not sounding like shit, while not writing fucking pap, blah blah fucking bullshit. So, you say, "Well, my good man, that's what you get for taking an intensive language course", right? Man, this isn't fucking intensive. This is what this fucked up school passes off as the easy language. I have to take two goddamn years of Swahili just to cover half of the language requirement (most languages take 1). Grr...it's bullshit. Oh, and the other ass thing is that, at most schools, (at least at Brandeis), the nice profs were nice when handing out work, and the cock professors were cocks. But, here, all the professors are cocks, whether they're nice or not- my Swahili mwalimu is a king motherfucker, and he still dicks me for exams.
OK, so, yeah, Swahili is ass. In any conglomeration of worst fucking classes ever, Syntax would be the crown prince. My French class in high school is Syntax's sandwich bitch. Imagine a class where you get graded like you were in a math class, where even the slightest, most miniscule lack of specificity = point loss. Then, imagine you weren't in a math class, but a linguistics class, where it's impossible to be specific enough, because syntax doesn't work like fucking math. Then, imagine that the TA of the class was wrenched forth from the bowels of Satan for the specific purpose of tormenting a bunch of hapless linguistics majors with her complete misunderstanding of every single fundamental rule or precept of grading that has ever been established, ever. And then picture this class, and fuck up everything else that could be fucked up about a class. There you are. Extra credit is worth half as many points as the test combined, someone in the class got a problem wrong, and lost more points than the problem was worth (yes), people openly bitch to the professor and the TA about their shortfalls as teachers and as human beings, and they laugh it off. My girlfriend, who is the smartest/hardest worker in the class, gets 50-60% on homeworks...I tend more towards the 30% range. The takehome we had to take on Tuesday (in the midst of that Swahili shitstorm, and all due during the study period (3 days where according to university regulations, work is not supposed to be due)) consisted of almost half new material, which we had to teach ourselves in order to even begin to understand the problem. It took me a good 6 hours to complete the exam, and that's with corner cutting and Jessica's help - she took maybe 10+. The Prof is a nitpicky fuck, yet there were at least 5 typos on the exam, each of which merited a separate corrective e-mail to the course listserve. She in boldfaced letters wrote "I WILL NOT ACCEPT EXAMS AFTER NOON DEC 7th, (which she would do) and GRADES MUST BE TURNED IN BY DEC 8th". The latter part is rampaging, cock-smashing bullshit- she has a week to turn them in- she lies in order to justify her bitch stance on late exams to herself or something?
And I had to go to the house of this woman, and drink her fucking cider (which was good), just because the final grade in the course is going to be so entirely dependent on whatever random whim happens to be coursing through her brain as her pen passes over my ID number that I can't dare offend her by not showing up.
This is all done, though...so now I'm set. And, listen, I know Engineers and Premeds go through this all the time, but I haven't yet been indoctrinated into some sort of bullshit work ethic which would compel me to study 12 hours a day (like 2 of my housemates do), and liberal arts professors aren't supposed to be robotic work dispensers. So, whatever... I really wish I was at UMass, or Brandeis, or fucking whatever - coasting with an A GPA at one of those schools would get me into a better grad school than the B-/B I get coasting here- and truthfully, the academic advantages aren't that great. I learned more about literature sitting at Thornton's reading DH Lawrence because I love his shit than I do being forced to read stuff (which I still enjoy) here.
And, all of the housemates work way more hardcore than I do, or are taking easier classes, and they "can't" drink beer, or play Bond or SF with exams going on - so I've been drinking soda for the past two weeks, and it sucks. All in all, soda is weak ass fucking shit. I don't know how I drank the shit for so fucking long.
Alright, that's it, apologize for the length, for all grammar mistakes, I'm entirely aware of how foolish bitching about things like this is, I do realize I'm well off, and all that shit.
Stone