Worst. Class. Ever.

[NomAnor15]

Simply put, what is the worst class you've ever had to take? Could be high school, college, job-related, whatever. And why was it the worst one? Frustrating, boring, bad instructor, etc.

Mine is easy; differential fucking equations. The material was not terribly difficult, but I had a first-year professor who didn't know how to lecture, and his "hour" exams took at least two hours to complete. Managed to pull a BC in the class, but it destroyed my soul.

[dragon]

my class was Differential Equations as well. The class started with 32 students and ended with 12 of which only 4 passed.

[General Zod]

Intro to PCs. It wasn't hard, it wasn't challenging, but it was boring as fuck since I know all the material it was covering and frankly it was downright insulting because it was more of a remedial class. I could only stand the class for a day before I dropped it. (It's required, but I'm going to try and work around that.)

[dragon]

Granted curretrny takin a online master level class for Statistical Analysis which is a pain.

[Themightytom]

I recently HATED taking an 8 week online course as part of my masters in nonprofit management degree. The professor was awesome, the content was fascinating, but... I can't understand math when it is explained to me via email. I never had a problem in a math class before, but this one I was dying with until I had a friend who was an accountant go over it with me in person.

In my other masters program, a double in school cousneling and mental health counseling, I had a horrible time figuring out what the hell the teacher wanted me to do, because, seriously, she was assigning things like "Create a musical interpretation of the assigned reading" and "Build a physical model that represents this weeks topic."

Yeah but I'm a dummy, it was a Brain based learning class. I didn't realize until about three weeks in she was deliberately assigning projects atypical to our learning style, based on an evaluation we all completed at the beginning of the class in order to show us what a student with different learning needs experienced. I thought she was a moron for the first three weeks and was trying to figure out her game, by week four I realized I was playing Checkers and she was playing chess.

[Sarevok]

Statistics and Probability.

What a sheer waste of time for some simple math wrapped up in techno-jargon.

[eion]

I'm taking it right now actually: Intro to Traditional Chinese “Medicine”. It's a daily trial to keep my mouth shut every time I hear the gallbladder talked about as the master organ of the body, or how I'm a metal personality because I'm so stubborn and need some ki work to open up my fire channels to quash the metal.

I have to take it because there are apparently a surprising number of questions on my massage therapy boards about meridians and TCM pathologies. Why? I don't know, but it's just something I have to get through to get my license and then I can forget about it forever.

[Zaune]

Some obscure IT "qualification" called the Oracle iPro, which I wrote about here back when I could still be bothered reading the Daily WTF's forums. And yes, that is my real name I'm posting under.

[HMS Sophia]

Armoured warfare. Before I took this class, I could not have imagined I would ever meet a man who could make the study of tanks dull. I mean, tanks are the whole reason I play World of Tanks, because tanks are fucking awesome. They are the shit. They are like giant armoured penis extensions made of win. But not once this lecturer got his hands on them.
No, then we had to talk about politics of wars that tanks are used in... which is just crap. Its not just that, but this stuff was barely included in the course program, when compared to theory of design and implementation of armour. Which would have been fun to learn about.

Second worst would (almost) be theories of history, but I met my (now) wife in that class, so that one was awesome

[open_sketchbook]

Composition, which was a photography class taught by a bored, droning idiot shoehorned roughly into an illustration course. We had a grand total of 1 actual lesson (rule of 3s, which I've known since I was 12) dragged out over three classes, and then spent the rest of the time getting crappy photography assignments. It was also a class that ended at 9 pm, I had another class which started at 8 am the next day, and I had a two hour commute to school.

[Themightytom]

Oh shit I forgot about Art history.
It sucked balls. Slide after slide after slide of sucking balls.
I liked art until that class.

[Alferd Packer]

Numerical Analysis. Thought it would be an interesting CS course, but it was just calculus all over again. Blech.

[Sinewmire]

Computer science subsidiary course. The lecturer showed up, read out his own notes that he'd obviously copy/pasted from wikipedia or whatever, didn't understand what he was reading and had obviously never looked at a computer before.

Someone in the lecture room actually laughed out loud at him.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

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.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Algorithm Analysis & Design.

Absolutely incompetent instructor - he wasn't even a programmer. He was a glorified IT technician, trying to teach us critical computer science theory. Even worse, he seemed to actually believe he was qualified, when he clearly wasn't. I asked him if we would be covering recursion at all, and I got a completely dumbfounded non-answer. Just about everything we ever got out of him was a non-answer. The final exam was particularly insane - a lot of the material on it wasn't even in our textbook, and it sure as hell didn't come from the instructor!

Somehow I got a B, but I learned less than nothing, which as far as I'm concerned might as well be an F.

[aerius]

I've had a lot of shitty teachers and profs in my day, but this one's a no brainer. My high school shop class, no question. The teacher had absolutely no control of the class and he'd often step outside for smoke breaks during class hours. How bad was it? I'll put it this way; some jackass in that class took a swing at my head with a fucking hatchet with every intention of trying to kill me.

[Vehrec]

It's a tossup between my University Calculus professor, and my Evolution 'current events' class that I had to take for my major. The Calc professor was the most boring man in the world-I'm a morning person, the class was at 8:30, normally one of my more bright-eyed and bushy tailed parts of the day. I fell asleep in this man's class, lulled into dreams by his voice, better than any sleeping pill I've ever taken. Other students asked me to take a tape recorder and gather samples of this in order to help them get more sleep at night. Needless to say, I learned nothing and my grades slid backwards percipitously. The Current events professor was on the other hand, horrible. No Evolution syllabus has any reason to include movies in the recitation period, especially not Freaks, Dr. Strangelove and her other choice's I've forgotten. And the actual evolutionary material was incredibly basic and often contained errors. I finally snapped in the middle of class one day and wound up shouting at her before leaving and dropping the class after a meeting with some of the faculty.

[Exonerate]

Snip

Haha. Your experience with Linear Algebra is so very close to my own. Part of it is that it's just not very intuitive - Calculus is pretty easy to relate to real-world phenomena, with the most basic example being displacement, velocity, acceleration, etc. In my Linear Algebra course I don't think there was ever an attempt to connect it with anything else. The professor would define every new term with more new terms and never manage to ever connect any of these new definitions to known knowledge. It was like building a man-made island then not building a bridge to get to it. It was always just a bunch of numbers in a matrix, and if you did a series of magical manipulations with these numbers a certain way, you'd get this set of numbers popping out. These numbers obviously had some special significance, but the professor couldn't explain it in terms to anybody who didn't already know the material. The worst part was the textbook that would skip a bunch of steps at a time in its "examples", so that avenue of learning was difficult as well. I think it was at this point I realized what a godsend TAs are. It took later courses in Vibrations and Structures to sort of develop a feel for what exactly it was all for.

The worst class I had was a Materials course taught by a professor in his 70s who decided to use an online textbook and the accompanying class management suite. Aside from the too-small-to-read graphs coupled with homework questions asking for impossible amounts of precision, he had a dreary monotone voice and the class was scheduled at 8 AM in a dimly lit room. To give you an idea of how boring he was, he once joked about his age with a remark on his personal experience in the American Civil War, and not a single person in an audience of over a hundred forty laughed. He used projector slides and when a student asked if he could make them available elsewhere, he responded that he wouldn't, so students would be encouraged to attend class. In the same session he then proceeded to go through the slides at speeds so fast nobody could possibly hope to take notes or even read them in time. Halfway into the quarter, less than twenty people would show up to his lectures on any given day, and half of them would proceed fall asleep in class. This was the one class where at the end of the quarter where I didn't care about anything other than getting a passing grade so I wouldn't have to retake it.

The runner-up class included trying to learn multiphase flows without a textbook, just 16 pages of a PDF by the professor. The final also involved fractional powers for large numbers up to five significant figures and the professor responding "What, you mean you don't know how to do it with logarithms?" when a student asked whether he would consider letting us use calculators (and no, we didn't have slide rules). Thank God he relented. Coincidentally (or maybe not), both of these classes were split between the MechE and ChemE students...

[Night_stalker]

Holocaust and Human behavior.

Originally, this was billed as a history class, which was why they got so many people joining, but apparently the idiots at my HS's administrative level decided to change it to a social science, which meant that instead of learning about the Holocaust in a historical manner, we learned about the psychology of discrimination, and how prejudice is bad, and similar things that we learned back in Kindergarten!

In a semester long course, we learned more about the Holocaust from a local college professor who came in twice.

About the only good parts was that there were no tests/quizzes, and our final is our National Remembrance day project, which means, do something big at the school to showcase how the Holocaust was bad, and that we should never let it happen again.

Proposed alternative title for class, should they continue course into next year: "Human Behavior", and then underscored in very small print, "regarding the Holocaust".

[Darth Fanboy]

General Nutrition to fulfill a gen ed requirement. One of the projects was the all to common "log what you eat" journal and keep track of nutritional value and calorie counted. Suffice it to say I felt no reason to change my diet of rare hamburgers and copious amounts of alcohol and I was completely honest with my log.

Favorite part was the teacher noting an improvement from day to day in one instance but when I explained to her it was because the tomato juice I had was spread out over three or four bloody marys she sort of threw her hands up in disgust.

Worst part was the fact that the textbook had PLUMMETED in value because even though I had a brand new book the health dept at the school was switching books AGAIN and I think I got five bucks back for a $120 book. Fuckin criminals.

[HMS Sophia]

Holocaust and Human behavior.

The above sounds like my International politics and the media.
My class had two problems:
a) Out of about twenty students, I was one of only two from the country. Now, this isn't normally bad, but when you have to defend the idea that the BBC is not a nationalist propaganda machine, though they have all assumed it is... Grrrr...
b) The lecturer decided in the first class to define what a satellite was. Yes. really. A FUCKING satellite. that kind of set the pace for the rest of the semester.
So, yeah, basically all of my classes have been shit, at least this semester. At least it was amusing hearing the lecturer attempt to pronounce my name in Security Studies.

[NomAnor15]

@Exonerate, Duchess

That's interesting, because I also had a similar experience with linear algebra. Maybe there's a common theme here? I will give my professor in that class credit for being a good lecturer, but like you said, the material seemed completely disconnected from both the tests and the homework. I think I learned more linear algebra in my diff eq class than in linear algebra.

[starslayer]

I think it's a bit of a tie between the second quarter of modern physics and upper-div thermodynamics for me. Not because the material was horrendously difficult or uninteresting, or the homework or exams were wrist-slittingly hard. No, neither professor could teach at all. For modern physics, I went in expecting a good class; I'd had the professor before, and he was great. The first time I had him, for my first thermo course, he went over all this extra cool stuff, gave great lectures, etc. The second time? He seemed to have lost all of his capability to care over the intervening year. His lectures consisted of Powerpoint slides which were all graphs and equations straight from the textbook. I stopped going after the midterm, just read the textbook so I could do the homework, and got an A.

My upped-div thermo, well, this professor cared, all right; he earnestly tried to give a good lecture. However, he couldn't give a consistent lecture, or stay consistent in his notation, to save his life. He seemed to write everything on the board at least twice during lecture, and could never stay consistent in which direction he filled the board. If you happened to come in a half-hour late, or just had to go to the bathroom midway through, the board and lecture would be literally impossible to follow from there on. Not to mention the fact that his explanations didn't actually explain anything. Again, I stopped going a few weeks in, read the book and did all the homework, and got an A... somehow.

[aerius]

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.

[The Spartan]

Hmmm... well... there's public speaking, which I hated, simply because I hate public speaking, though it did help me in the long run...

There's Advanced Analysis, which is just a fancy name for theoretical calculus, a subject that's more or less useless to an applied mathematician/mechanical engineer.

Let's see, there was Macroeconomics from my engineering degree, which basically replaced Intro to Business and Engineering Economics from my math degree. There was nothing wrong with the class per se, I just didn't need it.

I took archery one semester to fill out my schedule. I basically skipped half the class and still got an A.

There was the first time I took Dynamic Systems Modeling and Simulation, but that was more about the prof than the class (which I retook and passed and is a useful course for mechanical engineers). The problem was the prof that first time around had a teaching style that was so far off from what I can learn from that I just couldn't keep up.

There was also FORTRAN. Which I haven't used or even kinda/sorta needed since taking the class. Even in my new job, they use MathLab when they program something for the tools we design. I don't even go near that shit, since I'm on the mechanical side of things. We let the Sparkys take care of that.