I learned a lot in my first day of school today. But not about the sort of things that I thought that I’d be learning.
My first class was Knowledge and Reality, your standard intro-to-philsophy class. Well, standard except that there were hundreds of students in this class. Every seat in the auditorium was full, with students standing in the back and sitting on the floor in the aisles. The teacher, a short guy with a short guy attitude, played the role of tough guy in an effort to tame the masses, and it appeared to have an effect on the horde of 18-year-olds. He expressed his frustration with the size of the class, saying that he knows that it will be overcrowded, and that many people who had shown up weren’t actually in the class, and probably wouldn’t be able to get in the class. We’ll be reading the standard intro-to-philsophy stuff (Descartes, Hume, James), most of which I’ve already read. The teacher beseeched the class to do the reading, because we’d be having discussions during each class, and he’d know if anybody hadn’t read the material. That, of course, is just silly — I’ve been to college basketball games with lower attendance than this class; there’s simply no way for him to know who has done what. For that matter, there’s simply no way for him to possibly get to know but a tiny percentage of the students. By “get to know,” I mean “know their name.”
My second class was World Politics and Economy, with equally-swollen ranks. Again, the teacher expressed shock and dismay at the lack of resources of students, saying that he had never taught a class of this size, and felt wholly unprepared to do so. In an effort to better address the needs of each student, there would be three discussion sections over the course of the week, taught by a graduate assistant. (These TAs were all, incidentally, younger than I.) Each of these discussion sections will, I assume, have well over 100 students, which hardly seems conducive to discussion. The teacher is young and foppish, to say the least, addressing the class in a suit and tie, strolling around the room with a wireless microphone pinned to his lapel, speaking like a University of Iowa poet laureate. He took a few minutes at the beginning of class to address vaguely the source of the financial crisis faced by Virginia institutions of higher learning, placing the blame largely (and accurately) on the shoulders of the fiscal mismanagement going on in Richmond and Washington.
As both professors explained, and many students could be heard discussing, the state of class sizes and availability at Tech is so abysmal as to be debilitating. Many students are facing a mandatory five-year program, because there is simply not enough space in the required classes for them to complete them in four years. Teachers and advisors are now starting to advise the five-year course, knowing that attempting to finish in four years is simply an exercise in futility.
With only the briefest of reflection following these two courses, it has become clear to me that I will be taking away little from here over the course of my education that I could not gain through my own studies. With class sizes measured not in finger-counting, and not by the dozen, but by the hundred, any possibility of close cooperation with and mentoring by faculty is out the window. With the selection being so terrible (non-existent, to be honest — students, including myself, simply have to take the first courses that they come across), I can’t see that I’d have much of an opportunity to weasel my way into more challenging classes or classes that might prove more interesting or appropriate to me. I had hoped to increase my course load from 15 credits to 18 credits this semester, but I’ve been assured that I won’t be able to get into another class, and that I ought to be grateful for what I have. Instead, I anticipate (and I am told) that I will spend the next year and a half in classes that I will battle my way into, each perhaps as small as dozens of people, where I will remain unknown by the professor, merely following the readings and completing exams.
None of this is to say that I don’t intend to get a great deal out of my time here. On the contrary, I intend to seize this time and make the most of it that I can, reading about and acting upon all of the political science (my major) information that I can find. Just last night, having read ahead for all of my classes, I started on Edward Tufte’s “Political Control of the Economy” (yes, that Edward Tufte), a book that was a gift to me from Max some months ago.
A frustrating first day.