How I spent 15 minutes on Friday morning
For those who haven’t heard, I had a horrible Latin professor this quarter.
Fussbudget is a new professor, having transferred to the Classics department from another institution. She is one of those incredibly tense people, about 40 years old or so, with a knife-narrow face and a bit of an inferiority complex. She’s the opposite of confident, and sometimes that can manifest as a negative attitude. Overall, she was kind of like a skittish puppy.
Well, we got to write our class evaluations on Friday. There are a whopping 9 people in the class. About 15 transferred to the other Latin 100 class, taught by awesome Professor Romulus. Alas, that one wouldn’t have allowed me much time for work. Oh well. Anyway, the 9 of us mutually agreed to leave blank the potentially incriminating box at the top of the eval page. You know, the one where you mark boxes that affirm your status as a 4th-year female undergraduate in the humanities, or the token male in the class (poor Rob), or the token post-Bacc student or graduate student or classics major… with 9 people in the class it’d be pretty obvious who had which opinion.
Fussbudget brought coffee cake and mentioned conveniently that she’d be holding extra office hours just before the final. Oh, and she pretty much tailored the final to our specifications.
We gave her 3 out of 5 for the bribery.
Well, the class was fairly organized (Romulus’ doing — he wrote the syllabus for both of the LAT 100N classes) and the homework would have had a great deal of relevance to our translations (again, Romulus’ doing) so we marked the class itself with a 4 of 5.
Then we let loose with our critique of the professor teaching us. Helpful? Well, she tries to be. Reviews homework? Alas, no. Confident in the material presented? Nope, sorry. She actually said at the beginning of the quarter that she loathes Latin prose. Why teach it, then?
At the bottom of the page there’s space for us to write our notes. I settled for a breakdown of the time generally spent in class.
10:00 – 10:15: We wait for her to arrive. Some of us complete the homework due today.
10:15 – 10:20: She arrives, arranges her books and such on the table, and occasionally spends another 5 minutes handing back homework. “D” describes completed homework, “DW” describes homework done well, although there’s little aid given for mistakes. The homework is not reviewed in class.
(Friday quizzes 10:20 – 10:30)
10:20 – 10:30: Confusing review of the previous session’s translation. If there are questions, the answers are vague and unhelpful. Sometimes we get some interesting tangents, though.
10:30 – 10:50: Consisting of awkward translations of that day’s assigned passage, sometimes including tangents and explanations of grammatical constructs that would have been useful last week when we were trying to figure out the homework or study for the quiz.
Next quarter I’m taking Medieval Latin from Blanca. At least she’s competent in the material and doesn’t overtly detest it.
Oh well, I’ve only two classes left to satisfy my combination language requirement and minor. Bleah.
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