In Continuum.

It's true, my blog has been grossly neglected by me for some time, and I only really have the school to blame on this one. There are times when this blog is left to gather dust because I haven't the faintest clue on what to type. Inspirational dry spells tend to attack when you least expect it, and no writers should expect themselves to be rid of it at all. That is, of course, you are not second-rate writers like Danielle Steele who writes books as if she is writing her grocery list. Dry spells are threatening to a writer, but I suppose it is like a hibernation period where you emerge to become something better entire. Or, at least that is what I hope to get out of a "mind break", if you know what I mean. Such a desperate situation comes and goes, and you never really know until you are five lines into a blog entry and you find yourself stuck with a blank page ahead. This time around, however, I do have a couple of things on my mind that I'd like to say, things that I'd like to share with the readers of my long and boring blog. The problem comes when you have school intervening creative writing at the same time, and made worse when you have a certain lecturer teaching you at the same time. 

You, you are a lousy lecturer, that much I'd say. I am pretty sure everybody knows who I am talking about, and there isn't a need to spell out his or her name for you. No, we are not bringing up the whole Rosemary fiasco any longer, but this is another lecturer who just cannot do her job very well. She is a real disappointment, because she started out to be promising. This is the third time she is taking us for a module, and I must say that she has only been going downhill ever since her strong start. She hasn't been the greatest of lecturers, in fact she has been in league with the worst. Having a heavy workload is part and parcel of being a college student, that I understand. Still, there has been so much work and presentations that you can't help but wonder if the horror ever ends. There is something for her every single week, and the work never seems to end. The worst part is that not all of these work are graded, and yet she wants you to hand them up. I suppose they affect your participation grades one way or another, and she just wants to see who is doing the work and who isn't. It is OK if these take-home assignments don't take up too much time. The problem is, however, they almost always do. We end up neglecting all the other modules just to meet deadlines. 

It is bad enough that you have a lot of work to deal with, but the biblical amount of work can be made significantly easier if you actually bother to give us clear enough guidelines. The problem with this lecturer is that she never gives very clear cut guidelines, fearing that it would limit what we do too much. It is thoughtful in a way, but then it becomes a problem when you keep giving us instructions on pretty much every aspect of our assignments, and these instructions are so vague that she could have saved her breath altogether. Her instructions don't usually help with our work, and we are usually left to do things in our own way, and then we have to ask her if she likes it. I mean, if you are going to be so vague about what you want most of the time, then don't complain when what we do isn't to your  liking. She likes to control things, and this love for control comes in conflict with the fact that she wants us to have some form of creative freedom. She controls everything from the number of spaces you need to give in between the words "with regards" and your name in resumes, and I am not sure if people actually count the number of spaces you make. I understand that a resume needs to look professional, but there are just little nit-picking things that bugs the hell out of me. 

So, vague instructions, I hate that. I hate it when we have to fend for ourselves, when we are set out free without anything to play around with. That is what she does, and it has been causing quite a lot of problems. It isn't helped that almost everything is graded, everything from outlines to outlines of outlines, and she picks on the way you present like the fact that I like to put my hands in my pocket at times. Everything distracts her and she dislikes that. She is like this light sensitive flower who'd die in the sun, or something like that. She does seem like a genuinely nice person, but she also seems like she has been on some kind of drug for too long. She almost always sound sedated, and her words are almost always long and drawn out, which causes us to seem sedated during her classes. It isn't helped by the fact that her jokes are usually not very funny, and she repeats them over and over again. Question, how many times have we heard about the time when she attended the Toast Masters and was asked to describe the color yellow? Or that thing about not having your name typed in a font that is too big on your resume, because it'd make you seem as if you have a big ego? Yeah, we have all heard those a dozen times, but it is not stopping her from repeating it after every speech in class either.

Underneath that plastic smile, is a ruthless lecture who will not hesitate to fail you, and we are not even talking about borderline fails here. When you are getting 24 out of 50, that is a borderline fail case. You didn't really fail, you just didn't quite make it. There is a difference between an awesome fail and an epic fail, although they are both fails. You could fail and still feel good about yourself somehow, if you are that kind of optimistic nut. Then there are the kind of fail that makes you feel shitty about yourself, and you can't help but think that the lecturer was just out to get you for the sake of failing you. Maybe she just doesn't like you very much, who knows. It is not possible that you score lowly in every assignment that you do, and you start to see some kind of pattern sooner or later. Now, an epic fail in this case would be, say, a 15 upon 50. Now, I didn't get 15 upon 50, in fact I did pretty well for that assignment myself. A friend of mine scored that for the group's outline, and let's just say that I was rather enraged by that piece of news. You don't deal out this death card as a lecturer, it's just cruel. 15 upon 50 is not the same as 24 upon 50, even though both are pretty low by any standards. It's just evil, and you really didn't need to give them a grade to dampen their confidence if you are going to give them a second shot at it. 

I know her, she is does things in a strange way. She gave me one of the lowest grades for my presentation in the last semester, and that caused me to drop from an A student to a B student. I didn't think my presentation was all that bad, which was why the news of my grade came as quite a shock for the most part. She approached me at the beginning of this semester, and she actually apologized for giving me a low grade. Wait, so if you are going to give me a pathetic grade for my presentation and apologize afterwards, why give me a pathetic grade in the first place? It's like saying, I'm sorry that I am robbing right now but, give me your money anyway. It doesn't make any sense, though I think she made amendments to my grade and eventually pushed me up to an A-. Still, I didn't really accept her apology, and I think her excuses were pretty ridiculous. She was saying something about how she wasn't really feeling well that day, that she was really distracted from my presentation, and that she was in a strange sort of mood. 

OK, seriously, you are a lecturer from the United States, sent all the way here and probably paid pretty well - get a grip of yourself and be professional. Set your emotions aside and do your job, because that is what we are expected to do in school, aren't we? You break up with your girlfriend, you crashed your car into a tree, you lost your pet dog in the neighborhood. All these are not valid reasons when you screw up in your exams, they are not going to accept them. They only look at the results, and not why you've screwed up in the process. Similarly, you are expected to set aside your emotions or whatever the problem was and do your job in assessing me, as a student. Don't give me excuses later that you weren't feeling very well, because that is not what you do when you are trying to grade somebody. I just thought that apology was ridiculous, and completely out of nowhere. It's not like I actually brought it up to her in the first place, I just accepted that I probably screwed up in ways that I couldn't see. I mean, I know it when I screw up, they don't usually come as a surprise. That one, however, came as a surprise, but it's not like I was particularly upset about things either. She brought it up, and gave me a stupid excuse about why she screwed up. I'm sorry but, I really don't care. 

So, she is worse this semester, though she never was like this in the past. She used to be the friendly and approachable lecturer, the kind of lecturer you'd like to have a coffee with or something. Then she became this vindictive middle aged woman, and then right now she is just ruthless and unreasonable. Vagueness has been a trait for her, though we never complained earlier before. Of course, I am not saying that we are going to start a petition against her this time round. I am just going to avoid her classes from now on, starting from the next semester onwards. I am going to avoid her, because I don't think she is exactly qualified to be a lecturer. She knows her stuff though, she really does. The problem comes when she looks at you with that plastic look, and you can't help but wonder what she is thinking at times, or if she is taking you seriously at all. Maybe it is all the marketing experiences that she boasts ever so often in class, and you know how you have to patronize customers when you are in that field. You cannot help but feel somewhat patronized when you are asking her some questions in regards to certain assignments, as if she's just entertaining you for the sake of doing so. 

There are lecturers who are awful right from the very beginning of things, like she whom we do not mention. Then there are lecturers who are just downright disappointing. They start off as being kind, being nice, being the kind of lecturer who remains on the fence of things, which is as good as it gets. Then she takes sides, she goes to the wrong side of the fence, and she turns into a lecturer that murders students with horrendous grades just because she doesn't like you very much. I haven't been a victim of her just yet, I think there are people who got it worse than me. Still, I am going to try to avoid her classes from now on, run away and hope she doesn't catch up. Because once she does, she is going to chain me down and make me listen to her old jokes and long lectures all over again. And you know how that is like, every morning class we have with her. You feel like putting pens into your ears and stab your eyeballs out. At least the blood and the gore entails more fun.