Weekend and School Update

The girl and Sam both had busy weekends. Katie went out Friday and Saturday, playing D&D with friends first, then going to a party with her sweetie during my and Sam’s date Saturday night. Sam had a computer to deliver Saturday morning, then ran around picking up some things. He went out again yesterday, to the library for me and to the grocery store and the farmer’s market and I’m not even sure where else. Then he did an interview for his podcast last night.

This is the last week of my classes for the semester, so I did a paper for one class and created my slides for a group project presentation in the other, then had a couple of quizzes. Monday night we do our presentation online and see the other groups’ presentations. That class doesn’t have a final, but I do have to take the final for the management class, then I’m done.

Next week I start a class everybody is apparently supposed to take around the beginning of their studies since one of the assignments involves creating a “plan of study.” DeVry seems to have a lot of these “because we said so” classes, which is annoying. I’m also taking my first technical writing course at DeVry, though. It will involve more group projects, a bane of my existence.

It’s one thing to work together in a business setting, where people’s jobs depend on their performance. It’s quite another to be yoked with people who just can’t be arsed to pull their weight and apparently think Bs are high grades. I’m absolutely appalled by the number of people in the 400-level classes I had this semester who cannot create a coherent paragraph, much less write a paper.

I had the required “write a research paper” class over 20 years ago, at another school. Either the standards have fallen horribly, or Mercer had higher standards than I realized. (I won’t even bother comparing Agnes Scott’s standards to DeVry’s. It’s too painful.) Of course, if either of those schools had remedial courses of any sort, I was unaware of them. Those “teach you what you should have learned in middle school” classes are a fact of life in all the University system schools and DeVry. I know that there were some when I took classes at Georgia Perimeter so many years ago, but they seem to be more and more important now. I honestly don’t think they belong in any institution of “higher learning.” If you can’t read, write, and do basic math before you get to college, you have no business being there, because you do not have the essential tools required for success. I suppose that makes me an elitist.

It’s going to be odd going back to 100- and 200-level courses next week. By the time most students do get to the 400-level courses, the true dregs have dropped out or risen out of that status. Threaded discussions are such a huge part of online classes that you get far more exposure to your classmates’ writing than in a face-to-face class, and you quickly find out who can’t or won’t write and who has no clue about how to discuss issues without degenerating into total nonsense. That part of this semester hasn’t been as bad as others, at least. I did still run into nutcases insisting that this country was founded as a “Christian nation,” but that’s pretty much to be expected anymore.