PPOL 7410

I don't think I learned anything worthwhile and the professor spoke in a monotone that made me want to fall asleep. He comes off as condescending and his grading practices are unnecessarily harsh. He has the grader grade everything so he has no idea how we are doing throughout the semester.

I felt like this was just one of those classes that tries to grade on everything because Batten requires metrics and then also grades harshly because Batten is looking for what classes to cut, so Converse doesn't want to make it come off as too easy. But its easy material to understand, it just is. He should just give A's and stop pretending its worth more time than just class time, but instead the class average is probably a low B. Saying that we just need to know concepts for the tests but then grading on the specific theories is annoying. And grading on memorizing these theories is also annoying because there is no shot anyone is going to remember these 6 months from now (therefore failing in actually understanding how well we've internalized this stuff).

The professor is off putting in office hours, everything you have a question to is apparently on the syllabus or the answer sheet. I didn't know that we paid tuition for professors to write such detailed syllabi and to not have a conversations with their students. I also didn't know that literally no professors grade their students assignments or tests? How is Converse going to know what we've learned and how well we know it if he doesn't look at our work? How does he even know our names to take down notes on participation? I never once saw him takes notes on participation other than flipped classes which honestly made no sense. A math flipped class would be to learn the material and do the problems in class so that the teacher can help. The psych flipped class was do the reading at home to then do an activity in class and have the teacher sit back and write scores down on his computer and not help in the process. He only then teaches later with a super boring lecture, but no involvement in the process.

The lessons are honestly really boring and I have no idea how you can make them better. I can see that there has been a lot of effort into making them better but they are still boring. It just doesn't make sense to teach this material because you can't accurately grade or assess how well someone internalizes the theory. These are things we learn from actually working, and actually being in an office environment, or negotiating. But all we did was pretend in this class, obviously because we can't do anything else. Also I know you said not to say this but at least the one guest lecturer we had did a better job at being less boring; maybe it was just the specific lesson/material we were learning that made it more interesting, but at least it didn't bore me to sleep.

Lastly, the way he puts things on collab is so unnecessarily complicated! Just put the slides on line by date or title them by lesson theme - instead he has "meeting #1" etc. They aren't meetings, they're classes dude, stop trying to be different or make things unnecessarily complicated and just be a normal teacher.

Essentially the class felt like a waste of time. It was also a frustrating course to be a part of because it was boring (said that already), too long, graded unnecessarily harshly, too many childish projects, and all we did was play pretend on every lesson plan. You can't teach work mannerisms in a classroom and if you think that people are actually going to use something from this class IRL its just kind of naive.