Adventures in Online School
At the present I am taking advantage of the newer and more generous GI Bill to go to online school. This allows me to take care of children, and do some freelance work, while still working on getting a degree.
Since I used to be a graphic designer for the Army (DINFOS trained killer!) and since I seem to be pretty good at it, that’s what I have decided to study.
If you’re ever been to an art school, or been to college with art majors, you may remember that art students can, at times, be a tad flaky. Most people haven’t been to an online school, but those that have can attest, online students, and instructors can be very flaky as well. After a few semesters I have discovered that these are cumulative modifiers.
Recently I became suspicious that one of my instructors was not actually reading any of the assignments the students were turning in. Sometimes her answers just felt generic, sort of like the way that spam is written so that it sounds like they are talking about you without actually knowing who you are. Sometimes she would ask followup questions that the student had already covered. Such as “Well I like what you had to say about X, but how do you feel about Y?” when X was the first sentence, and Y was covered in depth for several paragraphs.
And so I decided to do an experiment in an attempt to confirm my suspicions.
We had a weekly project where I had to conduct research online, and then show links to the material that we referenced. The material that we found was the central part of this assignment.
I described an imaginary web site, and for the link listed:
www.ibetyouarenotevencheckingthis.com
I got full credit.
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February 17th, 2010 at 11:14 pm
Hahaha, awesome… on a more serious note, that’s one among many reasons why I refuse to take online classes. If I really care about what I’m learning in a particular class (which tends to be the case 9 out of 10 times), I want some real feedback! I want to learn, dammit!
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February 17th, 2010 at 11:15 pm
Captcha- Government Bushido
Yep, that online school follows the same course as the philosophy of Government Bushido. Pat you on the head, mumble hollow platitudes, and quietly take all your money to spend on private agendas. Any chance your teacher works for the civil government?
DINFOS??
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February 17th, 2010 at 11:35 pm
DINFOS == Defense Information School
It’s where the military sends people to learn jobs like Public Affairs, Graphic Arts, Photography/Photojournalism, and a lot of other things.
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Sgt. Slyfoxx reply on February 18th, 2010 1:59 pm:
Still educating the masses I see.
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February 18th, 2010 at 5:22 am
You should have submited some of your Psyops stuff like “Napalm sticks to kids!”. If she’s just skimming, she may have missed the actual email.
I had an English Lit teacher in a Tech college. He was the only touchie-feely neo-hippie in a college full of Vermont farmboys learning to be better farmers and techs. He didn’t understand why when we were given an assigment to write “something” we all got confused. He still didn’t understand when we explained his appaling lack of parameters for the assigmnet. Eventually I also started to suspect he wasn’t actually reading our stuff. Now, keep in mind he was the sort who didn’t think anybody anywhere had the right to own a gun and that killing animals for food is cruel (we still don’t know why he was in Vermont). So I gave him a graphic milscifi story, just to see what he’d do. He said it was nice how the characters all just seemed to come together in the end. In point of fact, the main character rather came apart at the end all over his squad.
Captcha-aid hecklers: “You suck!”
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February 18th, 2010 at 6:47 am
“art students can, at times, be a tad flaky”
Isn’t that like saying the ocean is a tad wet?
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February 18th, 2010 at 6:49 am
One semester I decided I didn’t want to deal with the stress of engineering classes and I took a bunch of random non-science major classes. One class I took was Intro to Cultural Anthropology. I wasn’t even taught by a professor but by a brand new instructor who I could tell had never really taught a class before.
Part of our final in the class was to examine commercials for evidence of stereotypes in media. (By the way this was one of those classes where all problems in the world were blamed on white men). So I decided that my report should be how viagra and enzyte commercials promote the stereotype of the white male sexual inadequacy. I wrote it completely tongue in cheek expressing how white men everywhere were shown to be either woefully under-endowed or otherwise incapable of having all their plumbing in working order.
I got an A. I love classes like that.
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Shadowydreamer reply on February 18th, 2010 1:36 pm:
Wait.. are you saying if I’m NICE to men, they’ll BUY me things?
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spcMIKE reply on February 18th, 2010 1:58 pm:
If they’re engineers you don’t even have to be all that nice to them. We are a sad lot.
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Shadowydreamer reply on February 18th, 2010 2:40 pm:
ROFL. I used to hang out at the CompSci common room .. lots of engineers. They always knew how to have fun. Of course, they also introduced me to Magic .. bastards.
David B reply on April 3rd, 2014 5:45 pm:
True for locomotive engineers, too!
CCO reply on February 18th, 2010 10:08 pm:
As in, if it wasn’t for that I would have slept more than four hours a night and passed most of my courses that semester?
I remember when I was a sophomore being angry at my roommate for having people in the room at ten o’clock when I was in bed. That was the year I learned to stay up all night playing AD&D. Good times, except sleep deprivation makes me puke, sometimes.
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Jim A reply on February 19th, 2010 6:03 am:
A friend of mine (former USMC) was taking a women’s studies course to finish up his degree. Now there was an in class discussion where the instructor was trying to show that there were derogatory terms for women than men. An exchange something like this happened.
My friend: Well there’s the C word.
Instructor: You can say it.
MF: Well I don’t really feel comfortable.
Ins: It’s okay, part of the point of this exercise is to take the power out of these words.
MF: Okay….Cockholster.
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February 18th, 2010 at 8:59 am
As a former Communications/Theater Arts double major (now working in the IT field), I can say that the most important thing one can learn as an Arts student is:
“Would you like fries with that?”
(or maybe “Will this be for her or to go?”)
Captcha: substantial corpse. Yep, I’ll definitely be leaving one of those when I die…
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Shadowydreamer reply on February 18th, 2010 1:37 pm:
Friend of mine.. Philosophy PHD.. Makes $47/h
Many employers want a degree – they don’t care what it’s in. Art works as well as an engineering degree if you’re looking out at careers where you’ll be trained on the job.
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skippy reply on February 18th, 2010 1:45 pm:
Not as sure about that. I have enough experience in graphic design to get a job, but no degree. Many employers want the piece of paper. Hence my enrollment in one of the Internets many fine “diploma mills”.
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Jim A reply on February 19th, 2010 6:09 am:
Given the choice, it is usually better to work for an employer who judges you on your skills and abilities than upon paper qualifications. Most of us do better work and are happier doing it when our bosses know enough about what we’re doing to accurately judge it. Unless, of course you suck and can’t get any better. Especially if you’re so clueless that you don’t realize that you suck. Of course few people work in fields where they can get accurate and timely feedback on how well they’re doing.
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February 18th, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Back when I was taking classes, I had to take a humanities course in order to fulfill course requirements for my associates degree. I decided to take intro to sociology, which turned out to be filled with a bunch of touchie-feelie neo-hippies… including the instructor who had a very strong affection for parrots (he had a tendency to spend half of the class time talking about the parrots he had at home that he took care of.)
Anyway, I remember one time sitting in class, and the instructor decides to take a survey of the class to prove some sort of point about socio-economic levels. He asks for a raise of hands for those making up to 10k a year, then 10-20k, then 20-30k. At the 30k point he raises his own hand, and starts to say that would be as far as he would need to go… except that I managed to catch his eye with a look on my face that said he needed to keep going. This was at a community college, so earning levels for professors there weren’t what you would see at a proper four-year college or university. The look on his face when he realized that there was someone in his class that earns more than he did was of classic beauty.
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February 18th, 2010 at 5:34 pm
Back in high school, my AP Biology teacher was…not the most qualified. Most of the time, he had us doing a lot of busy work, and one assignment we had for every chapter was to complete these huge packets of worksheets. It became pretty clear early on that he wasn’t-in fact, probably COULDN’T-check every single page from every single student.
So we took to filling them in with ‘science-y sounding’ words.
The kicker was when one of my friends asked if he could copy my work the period before it was due. He was busily copying away when he stopped and asked me (I scrawled pretty much illegibly to cover up what I was doing) “What is this word?”
“DNA.”
“Oh. What’s that one?”
“Deoxyribonucleaic acid.”
“And that one?”
“Ribonucleaic acid.”
“Did you just fill in the whole packet with alternate spellings of DNA?”
“Pretty much.”
“Oh….well that makes it easier.”
I always got full credit.
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February 18th, 2010 at 10:18 pm
I don’t know about art majors, Skippy, but from what I hear they sound similar to design students. I figured that “designos” were so strange from staying awake doing their studio work.
Then again see above; see also timestamp on this post. My record was 43 hours without sleep, but that was after finishing up a lab report with my two partners and then going to class the next day. The last two hours I wasn’t worth much; I remember nodding off in a lecture that the ceramic art instructor was giving to my ceramic engineering class. I remember seeing the kiln. One of the advantages of living in the dorms was that I didn’t have to drive anywhere; in fact that last lecture was less than 100 yards from my room.
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February 19th, 2010 at 6:26 am
lol a friend of mine fell asleep in his lecture and woke up in the middle of the next lecture the room was full except for these few seats where had laid down to sleep and so he poked his head up and the lecturer sees him and stops talking and it all goes quiet as he gets up and slinks out.
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February 19th, 2010 at 11:34 am
I’m short. but Rather buff,, so my first day at art school i looked out of place with all the 90 pound guys wearing all black and yapping into there cell phones to their friends how its unfair that Daddy bought them a WHITE VW Convertible bug instead of the black one…… but anyway
I went to AI for two years and ended up having to take half of my courses online during the second year due to them canceling allot of night classes… Those on line classes were the biggest wais of time and money i had ever had the displeasure of participating in. The instructors were next to absolute POINTLESS and the self driven (student to student “p2p”) crit was so soft pawed i felt more like i was having my art work cirit by kittens than Piers. I on the other hand.. had NO problem giving my crit,, I even had the instruct call me on my phone and tell me I caused a fellow student to cry because he felt i was being to hard on him (srly?) I’m sorry dude but if your color pallet is limited, I’m going to tell you!!
Was funny though.. there was only one other (dude) on campus and he was a Marine.. He and I use to hang out allot and just be AMAZED how these kids let every trivial thing bother them. XD
Man.. I really need to look into finishing my last year,,, Sally Mae screwed me over on loans during the credit crunch and I ended up having to drop out because I couldn’t get a lender -_-
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Shadowydreamer reply on February 19th, 2010 1:03 pm:
If I were going to be a cruel, hard-nosed, wench, I’d point out its “peers” not piers. :) Well, unless you want to be critiqued by those things that help you get onto your boat and fish for crabs. (Nonono, NOT Singapore prostitutes. OMG.)
I’ve done both in school and online, and of the two I prefered the online. Mostly because I’m the queen of slackitutde and bullshitting. I got a 4.0 from doing next to no work and got the piece of paper from BCIT that says I know what I already knew. Then I promptly went and fucked up my leg and back and never held a real job again.
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February 19th, 2010 at 5:44 pm
Well, there’re online classes, and there’s online classes. I’ve taken some classes online at a brick and mortar institution where I’ve taken on site classes. The online classes cram sixteen weeks into five or six. Psychology almost did me in.
Online rules when gas is $4 a gallon and school is 45 miles away one way. (The previous BS alluded to earlier having been earned 20 years ago (time flies) in totally different field, but it did get me off to a great start to another degree. I just got to get back into it and did in for two more classes.)
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