This Just In: Competent Professor Found!

I underestimated my classes this semester, and overestimated my willingness to do homework; so I ended up dropping out of my Calculus class which left me with only 11 credit hours. In order to keep my financial aid I need to maintain a least 12 hours; enter the 1 credit hour GS 175: Information Strategies.

While going over the syllabus my professor states that she wants to make this "more than just a one credit course". This is code for: I'm going to assign a lot more busy work than is necessary. Sharkey says that we are going to spend the entire course preparing for the final project, which is to create a 7-minute movie documentary about a chosen topic. What does making movie documentaries have to do with proper methods of gathering information? I don't know, she didn't care to explain.

Then came a miracle, the class was too large and had to be split; half the students (including myself) were assigned to a new professor. I have been to the edge of hell and returned to find a promised land!

My new professor, Alexius, says: "this is a one-credit course, let's treat it as such". What she is lecturing over, what we're working on, is actually about information strategies. It is even threatening to be useful! I just finished giving a presentation with my group on using Academic Search Elite, which is a article database hosted by Purdue University. I told the class about how you can use difference specifications to limit or expand your search results and Alexius added informative commentary on Boolean qualifiers; it was enlightening! While another group was presenting information on library catalogues they weren't sure what the Library of Congress is. Working in a library, I was able to explain what it is and how it's different that Dewey Decimal; and the other students were genuinely interested in knowing! It's like I've stumbled into this tiny little world inside the university and it's ... education!

We spent the rest of the period discussing what types of research would be personally useful to us; next week Alexius will assign a specific topic to each us of us based upon what will help us learn what we want to know. She then announced that it would only be necessary to meet once a week to do the work she's planned.

I'm floored. It's like I'm actually being educated, and I don't have to bend over backwards and take it up the ass to do so! It's sad that such a competent professor is so surprising.