When It's Good, It's Good. When It's Bad...

At the beginning of this school year, I began my fifth semester of class here at Wittenberg University as a Junior. This means that, since my Freshman year, I've taken sixteen classes; some of which were good, and some of which were quite the opposite.

Unfortunately, one of my experiences with a "bad" class occurred the first semester of the my Freshman year. The class was called "Cave Ecology", and I was taking it as a science credit which the intent of avoiding taking something like "Biology". I found the content interesting enough, but one, the class was an hour and a half, and two, it was an entirely lecture-based period that was done in a large, cold room in the Science Center. Anything we learned came from whatever the professor said about the Powerpoint and all of our grades, saver one project, were based around tests and quizzes. Granted, I already found it difficult to take lecture notes based off of what someone is speaking, and I'm also not terribly good at test-taking; especially when I'm studying from half-assed notes.

Needless to say, I dropped the class before I had the chance to actually fail it.

But my sophomore year was completely different. My first semester, I took English 290 with Professor Davis, and I couldn't have been more happy. Not only were we reading some of the most interesting American literary pieces in history, but all of the other students in the class were English Majors who were as genuinely excited about this kind of stuff as I am. We had engaging classroom discussions, thought-provoking paper assignments, and projects that were complicated, but fun. Even studying for my exams for that class was cool just because it gave the students the opportunity to just sit down in Post and talk about books for a few hours.

I think every college student will experience a bad class at some point. But the truth of the matter is that the majority of the college-level courses that I've taken have been interesting and engaging. A couple of "bad apples" in the bunch haven't changed that.

-Fran