"Don't sweat the small shit, and remember that everything is 'small shit' "
You're not used to being in retreat, and it probably feels like this is a retreat. If the class is not a requirement, and/or can be replaced with something else for the credits, bail. It's not worth butting heads with the instructor, because in the power structure you find yourself mired in, she has all the power, and you have damned little. I've been to a lot of colleges, mostly because it became something of a hobby for me when I was in my 30's. I went to a Community College, and the University of Virginia, and the University of North Carolina, and Virginia Intermont College. In addition, my first wife went to Christopher Newport College and then grad school at the University of North Carolina, and I occasionally had to deal with her fallout there as well.
Some instructors were never meant to instruct, and are no damned good at it. It's probably harder for word to spread about them among the student body in an online setting, because, no Student Lounge or Student Union building or much of a gathering spot where one can trade notes and bitch about the instructors. In in-person educational settings, such instructors get a name, and have a hard time acquiring students... and eventually get sacked for that, if it is discovered before they get tenure.
Sometimes, it's just a matter of teaching style vs. learning style clashing. I had one professor who never, ever gave any tests. He got a lot of students like that, but then lost a lot when they discovered that a 10 page paper was due every Friday covering the weeks's instruction, and that the "final" was a 30 page term paper. Lots of kids could not handle that, and decided that tests and quizzes were not necessarily a bad thing, and dropped his classes. The entire course was graded solely on those papers, and class participation. I thrived under those conditions, but a lot couldn't make it, because of the clash between his teaching style and their learning style. That was Ben Ramsey, who taught Religion and Philisophy sorts of classes at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I rarely agreed with him, but always made good grades under him because he realized we didn't have to agree, we just had to be able to properly communicate our disagreements, and get our respective points across by setting forth logical points.
I had other instructors that I could not get along with, The worst of them had chips on their shoulders and took the attitude that they knew everything, you knew nothing, and their job was to hammer their "wisdom" into your head, and "un-teach" any notions you had that they considered wrong. In those cases, I either dropped the courses or, if it was too late in the semester for that, just stopped going and took the hit in GPA. It wasn't worth the aggravation to continue.
Sometimes, you just have to cut your losses and move on.
Another part of the problem, in my case, was that when I got to UNCG, I was "the Old Man" of the campus. I was in my 30's, whereas most of the student body was kids fresh out of high school with no life experience. It's easier for such instructors to "mold" young minds and bend them to their will because the kids have not had experience handling adversity, and they get used to that, so us old farts on campus present a sticky problem to them. They can't buffalo us like they can the youngsters. A side note to that situation was a big difference in how we, myself vs. the younger students, handled people such as the support staff. The cooks in the cafeteria, the groundskeepers, the maintenance staff, campus police, etc - I dealt with all of them differently than the kids did. I was old enough to realize their value, worth, and necessity in keeping everything running in the background, and treated them like humans beings, where the kids just gave them all a ration of shit as "beneath" the kids, because they were just the "hired help".
On the other hand, I gave the instructors more crap than the support staff. I wasn't afraid of the instructors like the kids were, and I respected the support staff for the jobs they did, unlike the kids. It is an entirely different dynamic going to school at an older age, and the people there catering to the kids are used to kids - old guys are not what they are used to dealing with in their work setting.
Things may be different now, with more older people entering the educational arena. However, you will still run across the Gods of Education, or instructors who consider themselves as such, every now and then. I actually told one that it wasn't that I was too stupid to learn, but that it was he who had no damned business teaching. I mentioned that "them as can, DO, and them as can't, TEACH", walked straight out of his office and down the the Registrar and dropped his class, and never took another class under him, so as to prevent him from gaining an opportunity to retaliate.
I studied Physics and Astronomy at UNCG, and actually had a class created there, just for me. I was the only student in it, and probably the only one that EVER took it. I was working on stellar navigation, and found that I needed a class in Spherical Trigonometry (to plot angles and vectors in 3 dimensions) that they did not offer... so my advisor had one created. Easy class - no instructor, I researched it and taught it to myself, and just checked in with him once a week to report my progress. I still have my "final exam" from that class, a series of star maps plotted from a particular perspective external to the solar system, to illustrate the 3 dimensional nature and huge expanse of space.
I graduated from the Community College while bypassing a "required" course, because I could not get along with the only instructor that taught it. It was a phys ed course, and he was a dick, so I dropped his class and convinced the administration that a class on the obstacle course under a police instructor was more in line with the Law Enforcement curriculum I was pursuing than volleyball classes under a wimp. So I talked them into substituting the useful for the useless. Be creative - it's not a retreat, it's a reorganization and regrouping!
AND - congrats on going back for more education. Like my Dear Old Dad always told me, you can never get too much education, and you are never too old to learn!
.
You're not used to being in retreat, and it probably feels like this is a retreat. If the class is not a requirement, and/or can be replaced with something else for the credits, bail. It's not worth butting heads with the instructor, because in the power structure you find yourself mired in, she has all the power, and you have damned little. I've been to a lot of colleges, mostly because it became something of a hobby for me when I was in my 30's. I went to a Community College, and the University of Virginia, and the University of North Carolina, and Virginia Intermont College. In addition, my first wife went to Christopher Newport College and then grad school at the University of North Carolina, and I occasionally had to deal with her fallout there as well.
Some instructors were never meant to instruct, and are no damned good at it. It's probably harder for word to spread about them among the student body in an online setting, because, no Student Lounge or Student Union building or much of a gathering spot where one can trade notes and bitch about the instructors. In in-person educational settings, such instructors get a name, and have a hard time acquiring students... and eventually get sacked for that, if it is discovered before they get tenure.
Sometimes, it's just a matter of teaching style vs. learning style clashing. I had one professor who never, ever gave any tests. He got a lot of students like that, but then lost a lot when they discovered that a 10 page paper was due every Friday covering the weeks's instruction, and that the "final" was a 30 page term paper. Lots of kids could not handle that, and decided that tests and quizzes were not necessarily a bad thing, and dropped his classes. The entire course was graded solely on those papers, and class participation. I thrived under those conditions, but a lot couldn't make it, because of the clash between his teaching style and their learning style. That was Ben Ramsey, who taught Religion and Philisophy sorts of classes at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I rarely agreed with him, but always made good grades under him because he realized we didn't have to agree, we just had to be able to properly communicate our disagreements, and get our respective points across by setting forth logical points.
I had other instructors that I could not get along with, The worst of them had chips on their shoulders and took the attitude that they knew everything, you knew nothing, and their job was to hammer their "wisdom" into your head, and "un-teach" any notions you had that they considered wrong. In those cases, I either dropped the courses or, if it was too late in the semester for that, just stopped going and took the hit in GPA. It wasn't worth the aggravation to continue.
Sometimes, you just have to cut your losses and move on.
Another part of the problem, in my case, was that when I got to UNCG, I was "the Old Man" of the campus. I was in my 30's, whereas most of the student body was kids fresh out of high school with no life experience. It's easier for such instructors to "mold" young minds and bend them to their will because the kids have not had experience handling adversity, and they get used to that, so us old farts on campus present a sticky problem to them. They can't buffalo us like they can the youngsters. A side note to that situation was a big difference in how we, myself vs. the younger students, handled people such as the support staff. The cooks in the cafeteria, the groundskeepers, the maintenance staff, campus police, etc - I dealt with all of them differently than the kids did. I was old enough to realize their value, worth, and necessity in keeping everything running in the background, and treated them like humans beings, where the kids just gave them all a ration of shit as "beneath" the kids, because they were just the "hired help".
On the other hand, I gave the instructors more crap than the support staff. I wasn't afraid of the instructors like the kids were, and I respected the support staff for the jobs they did, unlike the kids. It is an entirely different dynamic going to school at an older age, and the people there catering to the kids are used to kids - old guys are not what they are used to dealing with in their work setting.
Things may be different now, with more older people entering the educational arena. However, you will still run across the Gods of Education, or instructors who consider themselves as such, every now and then. I actually told one that it wasn't that I was too stupid to learn, but that it was he who had no damned business teaching. I mentioned that "them as can, DO, and them as can't, TEACH", walked straight out of his office and down the the Registrar and dropped his class, and never took another class under him, so as to prevent him from gaining an opportunity to retaliate.
I studied Physics and Astronomy at UNCG, and actually had a class created there, just for me. I was the only student in it, and probably the only one that EVER took it. I was working on stellar navigation, and found that I needed a class in Spherical Trigonometry (to plot angles and vectors in 3 dimensions) that they did not offer... so my advisor had one created. Easy class - no instructor, I researched it and taught it to myself, and just checked in with him once a week to report my progress. I still have my "final exam" from that class, a series of star maps plotted from a particular perspective external to the solar system, to illustrate the 3 dimensional nature and huge expanse of space.
I graduated from the Community College while bypassing a "required" course, because I could not get along with the only instructor that taught it. It was a phys ed course, and he was a dick, so I dropped his class and convinced the administration that a class on the obstacle course under a police instructor was more in line with the Law Enforcement curriculum I was pursuing than volleyball classes under a wimp. So I talked them into substituting the useful for the useless. Be creative - it's not a retreat, it's a reorganization and regrouping!
AND - congrats on going back for more education. Like my Dear Old Dad always told me, you can never get too much education, and you are never too old to learn!
.
Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king.
Said Aristippus, ‘If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.’ Said Diogenes, ‘Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.’
Said Aristippus, ‘If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.’ Said Diogenes, ‘Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.’