Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of a "writeback" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+writeback" bit from the end of the URL.
Classless
In the interest of jumpstarting my return to academia early, I decided to take an online course from a local community college. Amy gave me the idea, she mentioned that a friend of hers had taken several classes online that transferred back to KU for full credit. So I spent some time looking through the list of transferrable classes and found that I could take a class that would cover my Western Civ II requirement. At least, that's what I thought I found. I would later discover that they added to the transfer list a notice indicating that one must take both the class in which I was enrolled, as well as another class, offered only in person, in order to fulfill the Western Civ II requirement. Now, most people would be reasonably upset at this turn of events. I feel that in order to fully communicate the sorrow and rage that I feel, I must describe how utterly ridiculous this class had been.
When I was in seventh grade, I had a class called World History. This class was a far more competent survey of history than the community college class I just endured. We were given weekly reading assignments, and a list of quetsions to answer. What made this unique was the apparent insecurity of the instructor. Each assignment had at least one question intended to make us apply what we'd learned (read: nothing) to our contemporary lives. The questions were also frequently worded to double as a reminder of the absolute importance of the study of history and historians. For example:
Our examination of the slave trade can show how vital the study of history is to our contemporary selves in that historians show us how not to repeat the crimes of our past. Write a few sentences providing evidence to support this claim
Ug. In addition to this, he would make exhaustive use of abbreviations such as "HL" (historical literacy) that would require trolling through everything he had previously written to find a definition.
The worst by far, however, were the assignments that required that we write a few sentences from the point of view of whatever culture we read about that week, making sure to identify who we were in the process. So...roleplaying? For college credit? That was the plan anyway.
Needless to say, I dropped the class the moment I found out it wasn't going to count for anything. I had a hard enough time forcing myself to do the homework when I thought there was a point. Here's hoping that my return to actual college work will be a bit more stimulating.
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