My Anatomy/Physiology professor saved muscles and nerves for the final day; and anyone who knows anything about muscles and nerves knows that there are tons of them. So after stuffing my head for days with all this terminology, coming up with ridiculous acronyms and phrases to remember them (What are the muscles that operate movements of the mouth, you ask? Why, that would be LORDDZ - Levator labii superioris, Orbicularis oris, Risorius, Depressor anguli oris, Depressor labii inferioris, and Zygomaticus) - it's finally all been expelled, and I'm fairly certain I was able to squeeze an A out of that class. At least, I better get an A - I worked harder in that class than I ever have.
The Organic Chemistry, however, is another story. I did the best I could, but chemistry and I are not the best of friends in the first place, and my instructor this year wasn't worth much. An incredibly nice guy - I really like him as a person - but just a bad, bad teacher. Here was the daily "lecture": you know the pictures in the book? He would use those as power point slides, and that's it. He would just get up there, identify the structure, say a couple things about its use in industry (he got his PhD researching plastics and their many applications), and then move on to the next one. Several pictures he would literally say, "Oh, don't worry about this - this is too complicated." So naturally what does he test on? All of the stuff he said not to worry about! So frustrating. There were whole sections of the final which literally were not mentioned anywhere in his lecture, or in the book! There was even one section which he specifically said we would not need to know at all!
I drew the line today, though. He encourages students to work out problems on the test, so I wrote a brief letter which basically said, "It is not fair to test us on material we have no way of knowing. It's one thing to pull questions from the book, or to even ask about a topic we only discussed in a cursory way, but to give ten to fifteen questions which we do not know, were never mentioned in any way, and discuss concepts which we have never dealt with before is just too much. Please let me know my final grade as soon as possible - because I have a feeling I would like to talk to you in person and dispute it."
I'm not trying to be a jerk, but there are just some things a teacher shouldn't do. Trust me - I'm not trying to say I'm a genius and he should give me special treatment, but he should at least know for future classes that his test material is beyond anything we've discussed.
Statistics, thank God, was an online class, and thus was finished a couple weeks ago. I hate the subject matter (I call it the "mathematics of trivia"), but at least it's done and I never have to see it again.
And that's it. What's done is done. Time to move on and prepare for the GRE next month. And then, right after that, we move on to the next semester - Microbiology, A/P II, Biochemistry, and Medical Terminology. Wish me luck!
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