In Continuum.

So, there is one word to describe today's last COM125 paper: epic. When you have five questions to write on with twenty marks each, you know you are not going to stop writing for the next two hours. The last time I did something as wild as that was in high school when we had to do the pure geography paper, and the papers for that subject usually lasted for two and half hours. Yet, it was not all about writing back then, and we had some time in between to rest our fingers and to get our thoughts together. This time, though, we had two hours of straight writing from the beginning right till the end. I hardly had any time to take a break and say to myself "This is crazy", though I thought the same thing many times over. It was just writing, writing, and writing, and I hardly had the time to care if the word "communication" ended up looking like "commmmiatio" because of my handwriting. When you have an already atrocious handwriting, you don't hurry yourself to write a lot. The end result is an answer booklet full of words that you can't even read yourself, and spaced so far apart that one line probably has about, like, five words. That is kind of what happens anyway when you are writing long essays. The spaces in between the words get bigger and bigger, with the words becoming more and more indecipherable.

The first ten-mark question, I wrote about two pages of materials. The last ten-mark question, I wrote about three quarter of a page. Yes, as I progressed further and further into the paper, I realized the need to write to-the-point stuff instead of the longwinded writing style that I usually prefer. The end result is that my ten-mark answers got shorter and shorter, with the contents becoming more and more precise. I was amazed at how some people were able to finish under an hour. There was this girl who sat behind me, whose name I don't know, finished it at eleven and marched out of the venue. Either she did a fantastic job or she royally bombed her paper from every which direction. Either way, I think the majority of the crowd shared the same sentiments in the sense that it was probably the most writing that we've ever done in recent memory. I still have a red mark on the side of my ring finger at this point where the pen pressed down on my finger though, and I was just glad for everything to be over at the very end. I didn't even feel especially elated by the end of it though, I just collected some documents from the office and made my way home because, well, I wasn't feeling very well. I haven't been, but I am getting better.

So let's see, the verdict. Well, the lecturer of the semester goes to Mr. Armstrong. Here we have a man who can teach, and has a passion to teach, and he infects the class with the same amount of passion to work for something too. He may not necessarily be in my top five of all-time, but he is definitely close though. He gives you the kind of grades that you deserve, nothing more and nothing less, with solid reasons to back up the numbers as well. He doesn't just give you a grade because he feels that your overall performance hasn't been "to his liking". Nothing is graded "to his liking", but what he deems as being a good or a bad material. He is one of those lecturers that give you a grade and you feel good if it is a good one, and understands if it is a bad one. By that, I mean, he gives you constructive criticisms to help you along the way, and he takes the time to try to mark every single assignment. Of course, this semester, he was kinda swarmed with stuff. Taking three modules and so many classes is no joke, but I suppose you must applaud him for the dedication to work. I mean, he came to work after not sleeping for the whole night due to a sprain in the back, think about it. The award goes to him, so good on the man.

Then we have Abby, the guy that everybody is on the fence with. Here is the thing, people are going to agree that he is cute, he is funny in a very lame way, and he loves his teaching job - facts. Yet, you cannot deny that on the other side of the spectrum, we have a man who doesn't really know how to teach, or what he is supposed to be teaching about in the first place. Aside from all his silly banters and jokes (which aren't very funny to me, but appeals to a few), he took on this module without really knowing what to teach about. You know the incompetence of a lecturer when you have nothing from him to study about before the papers. You don't really know where to start, and you are just for the most part confused about where to begin. It's funny how the name of the module is called "Introduction to the Internet", and yet he spent a good portion of the class teaching about learning skills. We are not even talking about internet tools to help us in our education at this point. He started going on and on about how we shouldn't look at the results but the process of our studying, how it is all apart of the growing mindset and whatever. Wait, how does that pertain to the internet? Well, probably because he got everything off the internet, but then I can also find out about Jessica Alba's bust size through that, should we also study that?

That class didn't make any sense, but at least the rest more or less did. Still, his classes were always about him talking and then the class returning him with this silent stare. The same class goes to Bob's as well, and I don't really see a problem there for the most part. It isn't an exciting module to begin with, but he doesn't really make much effort to make it interesting. As much as he has knowledge over the subject itself, I don't feel that he translates his knowledge to the students in a very effective manner. It is an irony to me, when you speak of the learning mindset, and then have us go through an exam that is the basis of how we'd be judged - grades. You talk about how we should have a flexible learning method when it comes to the act of learning, and yet you have articles and notes for us to memorize. Everything comes in contradiction when you observe it in proper, and you see less and less logic as you go along. You can appreciate his lame jokes (about Firewall being a wall on fire), but we paid good money for more than these pointless talks in class. We paid for substance and quality, and those things weren't necessarily what I found in that class.

Finally, we have everybody's favorite lecturer. I think the Bee tried very hard at the very beginning, but gave up halfway through the semester. You could see that she was trying to be nice, but then her marking methods and the way she taught completely caused the students to go against her. I must give her credit for the ability to draw out very clearly what she wanted for the research paper. As much as people complain about how she has double standards when it comes to grading, at least she has a guideline for you to follow, you know. Like, part one she wants this, part two she wants this, and part three she wants that. There were no such guidelines for all the other modules, and I found myself being terribly disorientated for the most part. Still, her bad attitude really turned off a lot of students, not really because she yelled at us a lot, but the high horse that she sits on and the aura of superiority she thinks she has over everybody else. A lot of people compared her to Rosemary, and some even think that she is much worse. While I think Rosemary is a worse lecturer (at least the Bee lectures), the Bee is obviously the worse human being. It'd probably be easy for me to pick who I'd rather have a lunch with though, because one of them is going to be more engaging and, let's admit it, have less drool at the edge of the mouth.

So, comes the end of the semester. I am glad that everything is over, and that I get a short break of sorts before the summer semester begins all over again. I am happy with the classes that I have picked, and that everybody is more or less together yet again. In between now and then, I have two major gatherings, and I will be looking forward greatly to those. In the mean time, time will be dedicated to myself, the significant other, doing nothing, and anybody who wants to hang out with me. I am free, so make your appointments! See you when the summer comes around the corner. Oh wait, speaking of which, what's wrong with the damn weather these days? Everywhere outside my house feels like the damn furnace. It is pulling on my nerves quite I bit, if I do say so myself.