One half of O Chem

I haven’t posted about the Organic Chem class for a while. And there’s a reason. :-/

The instructor is a new hire, after the previous long-term instructor bailed with short notice. So, the college interviewed a bunch of candidates, and hired this guy. And, wow is he bad. He seems to be bright, and I’m sure he knows a hell of a lot about O Chem, but he just seems to be a really lousy teacher.

I mean, where can I start? On day 1, after several hours of lecture, we were treated to the instructor introducing his wife to speak to the class. And she proceeded to give us 15 minutes of tips on how to pass this guy’s class. Such valuable tidbits like, “He tends to show up late for class, but don’t show up later than him, since that really gets on his nerves.” and “Never leave a question on a test blank. He’s a sucker for partial credit.” What does it say about a teacher’s communication skills when he has to bring in someone else to explain his little quirks and nuances about his teaching style?

And then there was the first test. Shall I talk about the problem where the answer was explained in Chapter 5 of the text, when the first test was only supposed to cover Chapters 1 through 3? Or how about the problem where over half the points involved counting all of the individual atoms in a fairly large complicated molecule (C24,H36,O2, iirc)? Counting freckles would have been as productive.

I did fine on the first test, mainly because it was a lot of review from material covered in the previous class (with the excellent teacher). But the next test (half of which was take-home) was a real mess. There were multiple chapters of material I just didn’t get at all, despite multiple readings of the chapters and doing all of the assigned homework. I still did better than most of the class (I got a 90% on it, when the class average was 60%), but it felt like way too much guess work and not nearly enough, “Oh, I get it”.

And then this past weekend, the “final” of the first “semester”. Here are a couple of lovely examples of how bad it has gotten.

The prof was at the white board, trying to explain a problem to the class. And the more he said and the more he worked on this one diagram at the white board, the more confused people got and the worse it got. And this one problem just happened to be one of the few recent topics that I actually understood. So, after watching the situation snowball and grinding my teeth, I actually got up and went to the whiteboard. I practically elbowed him aside and said “let me try” and quickly sketched a solution and explained it quickly, while the class said, “Ahhh, okay, now I get it.” At which point I handed him the marker back, went back to my seat, and waited for him to mangle the next problem.

Hours later in the same lecture, he was reviewing some problems from the sample final he had provided. I asked him to walk through two of the problems, because I disagreed with his answers. So, he went through them at length, and after some hemming and hawing, he agreed that his answers were wrong. On both problems. When we got done hashing through the second problem, a girl in the class smiled at me and quietly asked, “What time will you be here before the exam tomorrow to answer questions?” The teacher, clueless as always, assumed she was talking to him and answered.

I guess it sounds like I’m bragging, and I really don’t mean to be. The sad fact is there are huge sections of the last five chapters that I completely do not understand. Not even a little. Total guesswork, even after reading the chapters repeatedly and doing all the homework. And yet I still feel like I’m doing better than about 2/3rds of the class. Sigh. So, I could take the second half of the class, and probably get a fine grade (unless he’s gonna fail everyone), but I still wouldn’t understand it. And, I dunno, what’s the point of taking it if I’m not gonna understand the material? At least some.

So, I’ve decided not to take the second “semester” right now. The program admin will either have to fire this guy, or maybe he’ll actually get better once he’s done this a couple more semesters. Either way, I’ll wait until the outlook is improved before I try to finish this course.

The one upside to the dismal situation is that the students in the class have begun to bond much more than ever before. Everyone is so grumpy and frustrated with the situation, it has generated a sense of camaraderie and “trench friendships”. Most of these same students will be moving on to start Physics in May, and I’m strongly tempted to try to join them.