School Daze

My best and worst educational experiences at UMBC are different in the details, but boringly similar at their base; both share the common denominator of the instructor as the deciding factor in a good or bad class.

My best class involved an instructor who zipped into the room like a pinball, talking a mile a minute, immediately engaging the class. She spoke loudly and enthusiastically and constantly stalked the classroom. It was hard to not watch her. From the first, she made her expectations glaringly clear, brought up talking points and solicited every member of class for an answer. No matter what they answered, she found at least one thing the person said that she could highlight as a good point. Her tests included detailed study guides and one essay portion that was take home and could be written open-book. Her whole goal was to see every student succeed. You could see she took pride in her students' success. I believe her teaching methods helped me consistently got A's, as did most of her students.

My worst class was also oriented to the professor's behavior. This class was supposedly discussion, but the instructor spoke in never-varying soft voice and sometimes cut people off if their contribution was not, in her opinion, contributing to the lesson she wanted to teach. For paper writing, she gave us a guide that was excruciatingly detailed, but she refused to take questions about those papers during class time. If you didn't understand the study guide, I suppose you were just out of luck. I tried to follow the minutiae of her instructions, but consistently brought back papers with highly critical feedback. This just made me angry and withdrawn in class, which made it even tougher to sit through 2 1/2 hours of her monotone. After 2 weeks, I realized that I would get nothing out of this class, so I grit my teeth and resolved to slog through to the end. I wound up with a B, but I'm still mad about it. Oddly enough, I think this professor cared about her students' grades too. She just didn't know how to motivate.