aggienaut | University of California Left off Avery (Reply)

   As you may recall, I am taking a French class at the local community college. Its interesting how different JC and JC students are from university.
   Not only has our class shrunk to about half the size it was in the initial weeks, but on any given day we seem to have a random selection of half the class. We've been put into groups to work on skits in French for our midterm (I'm pretty convinced that this is because the teacher is far too lazy to actually put together and grade a written midterm. In fact, we haven't had any written quizzes at all.), but since on any given class-day a randomly selected half the students aren't in, many groups have spent most of the time crippled because they were missing a key person (we were originally organized into partners, which led to a comical game of musical partners every day as everyone realized their partner was gone and mix-and-matched a new one). I'd also like to mention that I hate group work and I think this is wasting a lot of time that could be put to better uses with more effective ways to learn a language.

   But the most shocking difference for me was when I finally had a group of four people together, and we were discussing how to finalize our script. "Give me all your email addresses," I said, "that'll be the best way to disseminate and comment on the script." They all looked confused, and one by one each one of them said "um, I don't really use email." (!!!)
   So we arranged to meet at a local coffeeshop on a Sunday evening. ...I was the only one to show up. Only one of the others even bothered to tell me he couldn't come, although it was via text after I was already there.
   Not to be brought down by them, I wrote the lines my own character could reasonably be expected to have, since a script was due the next class-day (not that my grade actually matters in the class, what use is a JC grade to me?). Only one of the members of my group showed up that day, and she and I formed a new partnership.

   Also, awhile ago a student turned to the student next to him and said in a completely serious manner "you know what our economy needs? another really big war" and the girl, also completely serious responded "yeah you're right!" I sarcastically offered that we HAD just tried the troop surge but apparently it wasn't big enough, but they both looked at me like I was crazy. I think they were talkin WWIII.