.: The day after... 04/05/2004 :.

I bombed my final last night. I came home bitter and frustrated. I studied all of the class videos to review everything that we "covered" in class. I took good notes. I reviewed the 700 slides for the class - that should tell you something about the quality of the instruction.... and yet as I flipped through the final I knew how to answer 1 out of 9 questions (naturally I answered the other 8 but I would say at least 4 or 5 are going to be flat wrong). Dr. Park is a great researcher but ultimately not someone I can learn from - obviously. His idea of "covering" material when compared to someone like Dr. Jonyer or Dr. Samadzedah or Dr. Chen (well frankly almost everyone else) is sickening. Not a little part of the problem is due to the fact that this was a televised course.

All of this frustration has me pondering the nature of the American education system again. Like all of capitalist society, our education system is a business. This is a damn shame. Our schools are only interested bringing in money not in education, they are more interested in pumping students through the system than teaching them anything. But is this anyway to learn? I'm not talking about "learning" were you memorize something for the test and then forget a week later. I'm talking about deep learning, the kind of learning that lasts for a life time. The answer must be a resounding no.... and so I'm in the ponderous mode again wondering what the solution to the problem is. How can the education system be improved? Certainly the idea of taking a midterm and a final must go, this system puts entirely too much pressure on one night's performance. I liked professor Jonyer's approach in Data Structures & Algorithms II last fall. He gave us three difficult programming assignments and 10 quizes. I think that this was much more fair assessment giving a better measure of the student's performance over time.

Then ultimately the root of the problem is that Universities hire faculty based on research (because they want grant money) and little attention is paid to the quality of instruction in the class room. But then perhaps the quality would be better if the poor professors weren't being overloaded with work (again because the university is greedy for money and demands a lot from their profs. ).

I could go on ranting about this for hours... I'll mention just a few more things and then stop here. Problems with Dr. Park's class

He was in Stillwater. I had to watch him over a compressed television channel. I couldn't always read the slides

Dr. Park is hard to follow. His slides are full of errors and sometimes he never did get it correct while he went through examples.

The class was once a night for three hours. This is too much at a time. I've found that I always do better in the shorter more frequent classes. (not like I have a choice at OSU though since we have such a plethora of classes to choose from - all 11)

One Midterm, one Final. Too much emphasis on these exams

Not enough homework to demonstrate the important aspects of what we were studying. Dr. Samadzedah was really good at giving us pertinent homework, Dr. Park was not. If you did the homework in Dr. Samadzedah's class you could handle the tests, no trickery, no shadiness like Dr. Park who like most Korean (?) professors that I've had at OSU like to be difficult but in order be so won't reveal what will be on the tests - don't cover the homework assignments on the tests or explain them in class, etc.