I figured that after having two semesters of college under my belt, I figured I would be prepared for anything else thrown at me. After all, I had a musical theater roommate, and she and her friends got into some pretty crazy antics. Well, I was very wrong, and honestly this was the worst semester I have ever had.

My classes this semester were History (151), Educational Psychology, Honors (203, the last in the Humanities sequence), Multicultural Education, Psychology (364- Learning), and Geography (120- Economic Geography). Like most other semesters, I had 18 hours in credits. Here’s why my classes were kind of awful:

• EDMU 205 (Multicultural Education)- Man, this one was bad in every single area. To start off with, this class was a Tuesday Thursday class. We only have 30 meetings, which may sound like a lot. However, this class was cancelled 10 times throughout the semester. Some of the excuses were understandable, but multiple were not. Along with this, we did not even receive a syllabus until the third week of classes. This was also a service learning course. This meant that we had to get 20 volunteer hours in the Muncie community. That’s all great and stuff, except for the fact that our professor was a board of a tutoring service and wanted us to volunteer there. This place was only opened Monday-Thursdays from 6-8 P.M. By the time I found this out (because you know, I did not receive the syllabus until three weeks in), I already had a job and we had already settled History Club times. As an officer, I would not be allowed to miss enough times to get all my volunteer hours. I told my professor all this and her first suggestion was for me to drop the class. This class is necessary to be a professional educator. I couldn’t “drop” the class. As a result, I had to rearrange my entire work schedule (I’ll come back to that in a bit). When we did actually have class, we were supposed to read an article or a chapter prior to coming to class. It was supposedly “discussion-based” but really it was her calling on certain people and asking their “opinion.” It was a really pointless class. Per university standards, every class is supposed to have at least one exam. So we had our exam, and similar to the class itself, the test was almost entirely opinion-based. As a result, most of us did not give the opinion she was asking for, and she failed us. I got a 56 on a midterm that I deserved at least a 90 on! At the end of the semester, we were supposed to write a “cultural autobiography” about how our experiences with other cultures shaped us. There was basically no guidelines for us to follow other than the fact that it had to be 10-30 pages.Who on earth can write 30 pages about themselves?!?! Mine was only 11!!!! This paper was only worth 25 points. That was completely ridiculous. I was so angry that I was prepared to fight with Deans and heads of departments if I did not receive an A. I did not think it was fair to miss 1/3 of the class (from her excuses, not mine) and NOT receive an A. I also wrote a pretty scathing review of her in our course evaluations.
• EDPS 251 (Educational Psychology)- While the content of this class was actually somewhat interesting, the professor and some of the classmates made it less than enjoyable. Specifically, this one classmate was the stereotypical “Honors kid”. You know the type: always prepared for class, takes avid notes, something to say for every single thing. I feel like I know her entire life story even though I have never spoken to her. As for the professor, this was the first professor that I have had who has not had a doctorate. Originally, we were supposed to have pop quizzes throughout the semester, but about five weeks in, he decided to give us alternative assignments and drop the pop quizzes. The first assignment was fine: it was to get five movie clips and explain how they portray a psychological concept. The second assignment, on the other hand, was almost entirely pointless. He wanted each of us to take a couple hours and download 25 journal articles onto our laptops. I asked him if we were going to use this on a paper or a project or even something else, and he told me that basically the only reason we were doing this was because college students don’t know how to do research. We also had a research paper that we had due at the end of this semester. I didn’t understand why we had to retrieve these articles because “we don’t know how to do research” even though we had a research paper. Also, that paper ended up being 15 pages.
• PSYS 364 (Psychology of Learning)- This was another class where the content was very interesting. However, this professor was extremely nit-picky and petty, and I kept getting points taken off for dumb format things for my weekly homework. I earned only one perfect score from 12 homework assignments. Some of my favorite comments were (and I kid you not): “You used the wrong font color” (my hyperlinks turned blue, imagine that) and “your page numbers are in the wrong font.”. It made it really obnoxious. This class also had a large paper due at the end of the semester. This one ended up being 19 pages (if you’re keeping up with my math, that’s already 45 pages in large papers and I have only covered three classes).
• History 151- This is a survey course from the history since the beginning of time to about 1650. Although my professor was cool and she made class usually pretty interesting, she required so much work for us that it was way harder than a 100-level course should have been. We had to be so thorough and basic with our answers, and it was just so difficult.
• Geography 120 (Economic Geography)- The professor of this class was super cool. I hope I get to have him again. However, the content of this class was insanely boring. Seriously, you can only talk about the economies of countries for so long and keep it interesting.
• Honors 203- This was the last in the sequence (it’s basically a timeline). I was with the same professor and most of the same classmates as I had been with the past two semesters, so I knew what to expect. As a result, this class by default became my favorite. That’s a little scary because this was the only class not in my major.

Now about work. I got a job this semester, but due to my dumb EDMU class, I had to rearrange my entire work schedule. This meant that I had to work just about every Friday of the semester. That sucked. I like to have my weekends free.

It was a very long semester, and I am glad it’s over. There were times I was under so much stress that I was just trying to get through one day. But there were a couple rather good things that happened. First of all, I got a new roommate who turned out to be really awesome! I’m so glad she’s in my life. Also, I was able to test out of COMM 210, which is a public speaking course. So I am officially done with speech.

I see each opportunity as a learning experience, including this crap semester. Here’s hoping that the subsequent ones are better than this one!