Worst. Class. Ever.

[starslayer]

Weird, linear algebra was one of the classes where the material was used a lot in my other classes, maybe it's because I was in Computer Science while it sounds like you guys are in engineering. A lot of the stuff on Eigenvalues and other matrix math was used in my programming courses to work on arrays & matrices and make them spit out the stuff that would make our programs work.

Most engineering and physics math at the undergrad level does not involve linear algebra, except the more advanced mechanics stuff (like coupled oscillations and the inertia tensor) and QM; quantum in particular in my experience is pretty much all linear algebra. Both of those topics, however, are unlikely to be found in any engineering curriculum. Considering arrays and stuff are absolutely fundamental to programming and computers, it's no surprise you got much more of the applications side of it.

[Sarevok]

Linear Algaebra. The teacher had a teaching style which meant you could just sit there and learn absolutely nothing if you were paying total attention to him, you could write it down and learn absolutely nothing, he came off as mildly insane and snapped at people, which I could ignore if he were a good teacher, but he couldn't teach his way out of hell. His tests were completely disconnected from the material he presented, and the material he presented seemed to have no bearing on reality, let alone the tests and assignments we were endlessly doing. I passed the class having refreshed my knowledge of the basic row operations I'd already learned and having figured out how to get eigenvalues off of a calculator, but having essentially learned absolutely nothing else. By the time he was done with you you wouldn't care that Linear Algaebra had a bunch of uses, it was all just the high-on-crack ramblings of a nutcase and fuck it, you can look it up in a book if you need it. No matter how much you studied the assigned material and felt competent on it, the tests had no bearing on it and left you feeling like you failed (even if you didn't), and there was no curve, to the point you weren't scared, you just didn't care anymore--you put all of your effort into a complete black box, and a random number came out as the result.

Meh, any course that starts by making fresh out of high school youths do Gauss-Jordan elimination by hand is doomed to fail.

There are lots of tedious problem solving involved and few obvious explanations as to WHY. That is the main problem with this course in general.

It's not that the subject matter is dry, it is far from it. The problem is that the subject matter is very esoteric. But much of it has very important direct applications. People studying engineering have a rough idea how calculus applies to real life. I think linear algebra would be better taught if it was approached from a real world perspective. Like how it is applied to 2D/3D graphics or physics.

[Bounty]

Some people here have some fucking weird classes. Archery? For credit?

---

I took two Western post-Classic art history classes, one covering the Middle Ages and one covering 1500-present. The former was a very interesting course covering the broader social and historical context, brought by a professor who could talk vividly about a subject she was clearly passionate about, and she delivered an engaging narrative that showed just how tightly art and architecture were tied into medieval society.

The latter was a pompous, self-absorbed douchebag who droned on and on and on about the psychology of masterpieces without as much as an attempt at looking at the people behind them (which is quite a feat, considering the Middle Ages prof managed this despite many of the art she discussed lacking any sort of confirmed creator), and then distilled all this into a mammoth written essay exam that was so vaguely worded your odds of passing it could be accurately simulated with a coin toss. And if you failed, no feedback for you, since "students who fail the class obviously weren't paying attention".

[The Spartan]

Some people here have some fucking weird classes. Archery? For credit?

Yeah. It was a phys-ed credit. As it turns out, I didn't need any phys-ed credits by that point, having already had SCUBA, but my other classes didn't combine for enough hours to be considered a full time student and, since it was the spring semester, it would be the fall before I started another round of classes. Which isn't really a problem except that in the interim my student loan payments would kick in and I couldn't afford them, so I had to take that one extra class.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Weird, linear algebra was one of the classes where the material was used a lot in my other classes, maybe it's because I was in Computer Science while it sounds like you guys are in engineering. A lot of the stuff on Eigenvalues and other matrix math was used in my programming courses to work on arrays & matrices and make them spit out the stuff that would make our programs work.

Ditto. Linear algebra is immediately useful to a programmer, especially a game programmer working with 3D game engines.

I think it goes without saying that math is fine when it's useful; it sucks when it has no apparent use to your life.

[Elheru Aran]

Bounty, a lot of American schools offer some quite varied PE classes. The catch? You only require at most two PE credits, and some of the classes may not always be available even if they're listed on the curriculum due to a lack of instructor availability; PE, in colleges, is almost always taught by a graduate student rather than an actual instructor, to save money. I mean, my university had like 4 different types of dance, bowling, horseback riding, hell probably archery too, and fencing was offered but rarely actually available...

Worst class? Solar System Astronomy. Not *that* bad, but... BORING. The teacher just droned on, the room was warm, it was a hour and a half long... It was a fight every day just to stay awake. And he had Parkinson's too, so he was twitching all over the place... the joke was that we didn't know we were going to be taught by a bobble-head...

[Phantasee]

I didn't take the first Astronomy course, but I took the second one, that focused on Astronomy beyond the solar system. Probably one of the best classes I've ever taken. Huge screen, room lights turned way down, and gorgeous photographs in full colour, for an hour and a half. The diagrams were similarly well-made, so it was just an eyegasm from start to finish. The professor was pretty hot, too.

[aerius]

Most engineering and physics math at the undergrad level does not involve linear algebra, except the more advanced mechanics stuff (like coupled oscillations and the inertia tensor) and QM; quantum in particular in my experience is pretty much all linear algebra. Both of those topics, however, are unlikely to be found in any engineering curriculum.

That makes sense, when I think back on it I remember my engineering friends talking about calculus, calculus and more calculus in their various courses all the time while other maths barely got a mention. I think statistics got a few mentions here & there but I can't say I remember any of my engineering friends & classmates talking about using linear algebra in their courses.

[muse]

Do seminars count as classes? If so I have a doozy, my former employer made me take a seminar on web based marketing & social networks. In a nutshell, how to rake in millions through advertising on Facebook. The entire "seminar", and I use that word loosely and in quotes was a get rich quick pyramid scheme repackaged as a marketing study. It was a fraud, a pure fraud and my employer was wasting its money and my time by sending me to this talk. By the end of the first day I wanted to punch the lecturer in the face.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Well as a result of grade school's messed up tendancy to put me in remedial classes due to having problems with aspie and adhd behavior. I once had an algebra class in Junior High with a burnt out insulting dreg of a teacher, the kind that should have retired years ago. I got kicked out of her class after one week when I proved on the black board that her test results were completely wrong on five of the twenty five questions. (Incidentally throwing the whole grade curve off in her classes.)

I've also had computer science classes in college where I printed my homework on the teacher's office printer, as part of the program, I wrote (I even annotated that bit in a rem statement too)

[Uraniun235]

"Perspectives on Terrorism" sounded like a potentially enlightening topic, but instead turned out to be 90 minutes per session of a crotchety old man getting up in front of the class and rambling on about whatever stupid shit he'd heard on conservative talk radio since the last class. At one point, as part of yet another anti-BIG-GOV'T diatribe, he ranted about how he had trouble getting from one part of the Portland metro area to another via the local mass transit system. This was supposedly to try and make a point of how BIG GOV'T SOCIALISM services can be inefficient, but his example was set during the Carter administration when the bus system was much less funded and the community smaller than it is today.


The scary part was when he started arguing that "terrorists don't deserve the same rights as other criminals" and some other students in the class nodded their heads in agreement. This was an "administrative justice" class and some of these clowns wanted to work for courthouses or even become police officers at some point.


The "final project" was a take-home essay wherein we were supposed to pretend we were briefing the President of the United States on a terrorist organization of our "choice", including where they came from and what we should do about them. He added the provision, however, that no matter who we selected, we had to assume they had the same motivation as al Qaeda because "some of you might be liberals who think we can reason with terrorists, and you need to understand that some people just can't be reasoned with and they just want to kill you".


The ultimate insult was that not only did this university see fit to bestow the title "Emeritus Professor" on this jackass, but Gary Perlstein has apparently been interviewed on multiple occasions on national television, on the basis that he's somehow an "expert" on terrorism.


I skipped half the class and got an A. Absolutely shameful.

[Dalton]

I once took a marketing class thinly disguised as a media analysis class for my MA. Most painful A I've ever had.

This is aside from the excruciatingly boring core classes I had to take for my BS, like play analysis.

[Phantasee]

At this point it is Professional Writing. Assignment 1: write a memo and a letter, copying the format and structure out of the text book example. Assignment 2: write a persuasive memo and persuasive letter, copying the format and structure out of the text book example. I figure Assignment 3 will be something similar.

Previously: BUSN 201: Intro to Canadian Business. The whole point of the class is to make a business plan as a group project. The actual class was filler. Unfortunately the instructor filled it with boring anecdotes from her life story. That is one book of memoirs that don't need to be published. All I remember now is something about her pink umbrella in Tokyo.

[Kyler]

My worst was calculus during my second year in college. My professor was this horribly ugly woman that reminded us of a troll that was from Spain. She spoke very little English, so it made learning calculus extremely difficult. I even worked with her in the tutoring center but still couldn't understand her, I had to see one of the grad students help me through the class. She also tested us on material she never taught from the book. Nearly the entire classes failed the first tested because it had 4-5 lessons from the chapter that we never covered. 20 of us from the class wrote the lean to Dean of the Math department to complain at the end of the semester, but they just ignored us.

[Norade]

My Mathematics for Infotech course kicked my ass right out of the gate and was a total write off by the end of the course. It wasn't hard, it was more that I was lacking internet for a portion of the course that was only available online, it also didn't help that my math was rusty as all hell after nearly 5 years of disuse. That and quickly taught logical proofs and doing Gauss-Jordan by hand in first year math was brutal.

Oh well, I can take it again next year and still be on track for, my two year degree so I can move to a place with more work.

EDIT: Communications was a bore last semester and is unrelentingly stupid, stupidly easy, or both this time around.The only thing I'm liking about it is the 15 page report on whatever your group chooses meaning we're doing a report on how to make a technology related project a success versus how failed projects came to fail.

[salm]

Intro into CAD/3D. In the end of the class i was the most advanced in the whole class and we were supposed to demonstrate what we had learned by producing an image. Stupid me thought that it was important to demonstrate that we had learned a wide range of functions and put them into action. But it turned out to be that it was all about style and not about substance so everybody who "stylishly" placed a bunch of blocks infront of a camera got the best grades whereas people with actual skills got shit.

[StrikaAmaru]

My absolute worst was a semester-long class in ninth grade; a mix of Social Studies, Philosophy and Economy. I don't even remember what it was called.

We already had such classes every semester since 7th grade, and they were firmly bracketed under "pointless waste of time"; they had no direction, no consistency, definitely no use, and we're still wondering how the bloody hells did that poor excuse for a curricula get past our Education Ministry (fun bit: back then the acronym for the National Education Ministry was MEN. Guess what kind of jokes we made about them.) But this year takes the cake; the teacher was impossible to hear. Not that he mumbled or spoke at a low volume; he had the thickest, most baritone voice ever to grace a human being. He may well have set a world record. You could stand right next to the man, and not understand a word he was saying. All our class started mass skipping by the third week; poor teacher must have been used to it, because we never suffered any consequences, and we all passed.

There is one silver lining to this cloud: in 2006-2007, I was in the middle of my teacher's attestation; as part of it, I had to go and teach in front of a class for 12 hours each semester. I was scared out of my mind; then I remembered that this guy was accepted and accredited as a teacher, and all my anxiety evaporated.

[xthetenth]

Huh, what's with Linear Algebra? I'm in computer science and I had a living hell of a time getting through it. There's something desperately wrong when listening in class and taking notes and all the normal ways to learn material falls flat in front of reading through the material as fast as possible the day before. For some reason I managed to do pretty well on that method, but even though the teacher tried and everything, it just didn't seem to stick until I went through it fast enough that it managed to form a glob of being related to itself, where basically I found myself going, "Oh! this is useful for this (earlier/later) thing!" The scary thing is I can't think of much of a way to make the class more obviously linked apart from some seriously squirrely and logistically impossible integration into other material, so I'm fine with it being at that level where you don't remember it until you look it up and then it's fine.

[Phantasee]

This thread is making me glad I didn't take Linear Algebra over Calculus for my math requirement.

[Eris]

Odd, but I'm apparently another one of those who actually requires linear algebra, and can easily come up with a half bajillion practical examples where it's used. Albeit, I never do it, since it's all on computers now, but the point remains, and I do have to learn it.

I'm a statistician, and the general linear models that are at the core of modern stats are all done by linear algebra. I took an entire class (General Linear Models, funny enough) that was nothing but learning how all the linear algebra worked, and how to build statistical models using matrices. Turns out that solving for least squares is silly easy to do with them, albeit it'll take you forever if you have more than a few observations. But that's why we do it all via computers nowadays.

[Qwerty 42]

I struggled when I took a statistics course to satisfy a liberal learning requirement. English was the Professor's second language, and his command of it was a little tenuous. I don't want that to sound insensitive: having needed to try to articulate myself in a foreign country in the past, I have a lot of respect for the people willing to make permanent moves that will essentially require a language change. But, he had a very thick accent that made following him challenging at times, and his preferred style of lecture was to read, verbatim, from the textbook, making for absolutely interminable class periods. And, on a couple of occasions, my questions would get lost in translation:

"Professor, when is this homework due?"

"Next week." Imagine my surprise when he collected the homework that I didn't do during the next class, which was two days later.

Then, on the final day of the course, he revealed that he hadn't actually been taking attendance and I could have skipped every single one of the lectures that wasn't a quiz. I almost wept.

Like I said, I have nothing but respect for a man willing to move to the other side of the world to teach freshman-level statistics courses. But, a whole combination of factors led to that entire course being absolutely miserable.

[Eris]

I was about to post with copious use of the smiley about things like lack of posted homework deadlines and required attendance and such, and then I got to the end of your post and realised that you were taking a freshman course. Well, I'm still feeling a bit WTFy over the lack of posted homework deadlines, but at least the attendance makes sense. Graduate stats they just kinda assume that you'll figure it out, or you'll fail the exams. I've also lucked out: our ESL professors are almost all Chinese, and I find Chinese accents waaaay easier to understand than the Eastern European accents that populate the maths department proper.

As long as I'm on the subject of things we use, not only do we have use for linear algebra, but we use hypergeometry as well. Which is like normal geometry except... except I'm being totally misleading. Hypergeometric distributions are just ones that describe the successes in n observations without replacement. It sounds so much cooler as hypergeometry, though.

But maths are sorta my strong suit it general. What's really getting me is environmental health. I'm going for my master's in public health, technically, with a concentration in biostatistics, so I have to take it, but the class is miserable. It's one of a very small handful of grad classes that actually take attendance, and the grading is capricious and brutal. Quizzes? Unannounced and all the time and searching for stupidly picky details like, "List all 12 requirements the reading gives for declaring a site radium-free" or "Name the person who discovered the principle of triviality, and the year in which they discovered it, and the names of their entire graduate research team." Please, I'm a mathematician. I'm never in my life going to need this, and even if I did, I can look it up. Oh, yeah, and group projects. So much hate.

The sad thing is I really can't complain about the professor herself. Her teaching style isn't fantastic, but she's not incompetent, and she really is a brilliant researcher. It's kind of teeth-grindingly vexing to feel like you're totally wasting this beautiful opportunity to study under someone so clever and knowledgeable because you really can't stand the class.

[Cecelia5578]

Intro to Perl last fall.

The instructor was an abusive douchebag, who...well, he flat out said students shouldn't ask stupid questions, and openly mocked said students in class. What was a first course in Perl was taught at a pretty high intermediate level, which wouldn't be so bad in and of itself, but you were sorta afraid to ask the teacher any questions.

Also, he (of course its a pasty white guy he), seemed to have an annoying view that kids these days are teh stupid, and Silicon Valley has been downhill since about 1982 or whereabouts.

[Iroscato]

My worst classes was maths at secondary (11-16), seeing as by the final term I was doing 4. Fucking. Hours of it on Fridays. I just could not wrap my head round it, and my teachers did NOT help. Here is a list of them.

A woman who took vindictive pleasure in ripping up 11 year old children`s work in front of the class.

A sweaty, mumbling old Scottish man whom I believe turned out be a paedophile.

Various temporary staff almost as young as the pupils (they all kinda blurred into one to be honest)

And finally, a lady who had an affair with another teacher`s wife, causing him to resign and her being fired. And she was the best one.

[Sarevok]

You know whats so sad about linear algebra ? Suppose one day you end up in the video game industry. You are now working with physics simulation and/or 3D graphics. You look all those elegant matrices, vectors, quaternions etc and realize

"if only i payed more attention in class. all these math is so useful and my life would be so much easier if I learned it all by heart"