I was annoyed in a class of mine this week. The all blessed Hebrew class. Unfortunately, I was annoyed at classmates. I understand that I'll come across as a biased nerd or something in this post, please forgive me now, but I need to vent (again, my wife and another classmate got to hear it already).
Today was the vocab quiz which covered the 80 words I talked about yesterday. It wasn't a terribly difficult quiz for me. By course standards, we are supposed to spend 8 hours a week outside of class working on Hebrew. I haven't come close to that, and have found myself well on top of the material. In fact, I have over 100%. This past week, I spent a total of 40 minutes or so on the vocab. It didn't seem too hard, it's just memorization.
This is where I acknowledge that I'm not always the normal case. I can memorize quickly, have a very able mind, and can remember lectures and notes photographically. I also have tendency to be able to write my papers very efficiently. This usually means that I come nowhere close to the course recommendations for work outside of class. Trust me, I do understand that not everyone is like me.
A few classmates today, argued that we have too much work to do. They argued that we are required to learn so much vocab that we can't possibly be keeping up on all the grammar rules we are learning as well. We are too overwhelmed.... My frustration hit immediately as I knew this teacher was too soft to not change. He had reduced the workload once, and was about to for a second time. My frustration was obvious to the classmates immediately next to me, so we had a side conversation.
All three of the students around me had also done fairly well on the vocab quiz. To do well, meant you needed to know all the vocab, so as not to just get lucky. It seemed the average time spent was probably around 2 hours for them. I'll assume that would be the normal time for an average student then. I, and thus by my argument we, decided that anyone who claims that the vocab is too much work to do to expect us also to learn grammar (with an understanding that we are to spend 8 hours outside of class) had to be lying.
I can't imagine anyone who did 8 hours worth of Hebrew could barely scrape by the vocab. Anyone that put in the recommended time, the expected time, the guidelined time, should be able to accomplish all that we have learned. I mean this as unsarcastically as possible: anyone in this level of education that could not get both vocab and grammar, and spent more than an hour a day working on the language, needs learning assistance help.
The complaints were ungrounded to me. They had no leg to stand on, but the first year teacher felt sorry for them and is cutting back our required vocab....again.
On a different note, I'm fascinated now by a "to say or not to say" question as it deals with the name of God. Ask me about it sometime (or maybe it will just show up as a blog sometime).
No comments:
Post a Comment