For all those that know my misanthropic ways this will come as no suprise, but to those who are not often subject to my miser like persona here is a titillating revelation: I like to find fault. Everywhere I look, there are faults. People who walk too slowly, breath too loudly or talk when it is quite obvious I would rather bend over backwards, insert my head into my anus, and begin to chew my way to freedom than listen to them utter one more word; stairs which are too thin, making a double step downwards a potentially lethal undertaking, or stairs which appear to have been built for a man with horribly deformed, 7 foot long legs. There are faults everywhere, but for the most part I am not obliged to sit, in silence, and watch them for an hour at a time. I guess that’s why they invented shitty lecturers.
Lecturers are the prime method for academic learning. We sit in a room with any number of other students and listen to a single professor flex his oratory muscles for approximately 50 minutes, less if the professor is incompetant, more if he’s enthusiastic, and much, much, much more if he’s senile. The problem with this method of teaching is that it relies quite heavily upon the lecturer having some form of personal charisma; think about the most boring person you know, then imagine he has a vast wealth of knowledge about a subject which you are incredibly interested in, now decide whether you would rather listen to him talk about it for 50 minutes or remove your own genitals with a mandellin. This is what, depending on how my sleeep pattern is fairing, I, and my fellow students, are subjected to on a weekly basis. Needless to say there are many male students with severely bandaged genitals.
There is one lecturer who, despite darwinian self preservation and common sense, manages to ensure that all of the male studentship finish his module minus a penis. If I were to take a rather large, kebab-curry-alcohol triage, dump into a paper bag, glue said bag to a lampost and then proceed to draw eyes, a mouth, a nose, I would have created, without any doubt, a creature capable of exuding more charisma than this particular lecturer. Not only that, I would have also created something more capable of giving lectures on physics. If upon beginning the module I were given the option of Lecturer or Shit Bag man, knowing what I know now, I would quite happily stare at a bag of my own excrement, provided he supplied notes.
Lecturers who do not provide a comprehensive set of notes cheat those of use who enjoy 5 hour lie ins out of an education. If I do not attend lectures, which is often the case given that I have a near endless supply of paper bags, marker pens and poo, I have no recourse but to accept that I just lost the corresponding exam marks. There is literally nothing I can do: for some modules even a google search is useless. If the lecturer does not provide notes, I do not learn.
How some of those entrusted with forming my young jellymind into a marbel sculpture of academic proficiency manage to scrape past peer review is beyond me. My best guess is that somehow there is a blind, deaf lab assistant who is volunteered for peer review duty each year, that or professors are easily bribed – The latter is a concept which should be examined more thoroughly, for purely educational purposes. It fills me with sorrow and a slightly infalted sense of debt that my university education will be marred by uncharismatic, uninspiring, and potentially genital threatening lecturers: I love physics, I truly do, I love learning about it and I love practising it, I enjoy every aspect of explaining the natural world; but even love so pure as that can not overcome what amounts to 50 minute of temple drilling boredom. Whilst, like a well adjusted parent, I will never fall out of love with physics, I do realise that his friends are bringing him down and we should really move to somewhere nice.
