Class Personality

Every class has its own personality. This is mostly reflected in how the material is presented and how the people in the class are treated.

For instance, I think of my chemistry classes back at Linn-Benton. They seemed small-time. It was like the teacher was teaching stuff and if anything remotely dfficult came up (algetbra even), she would rush to make sure and explain everything as if we didn't know how to do it, which maybe some of us didn't. This may have had something to do with it being a 100-level class.

In contrast is my Statistics 421 class this term. It's all business. There are no apologies for difficult material, and even the simple stuff is presented in a precise, scientific manner.

If Chemistry was a 1 and Statistics 421 is a 10, here are some of the other classes I've taken.

Statics: 5. Because of the instructor who didn't know the material extremely well; it was also a summer class.

Societal Issues & Radiation: 6.5. Because the teacher addressed us in a businesslike manner; points knocked off because she would have us break into groups and discuss things, and the things we came up with were often fairly basic and sometimes lame.

Linear Algebra: 8. Honestly, I think as you move closer to pure science, the higher my rating would tend to be, because science doesn't apologize for being technical and scientific. You'd think the same thing would be true of engineering, and in most cases you'd probably be right, but...

Artificial Intelligence for Engineers: 4. We studied different computational methods with a very high level perspective, but our teacher almost completely ignored the mathematical and theoretical underpinnings of the methods. Maybe this was beyond the scope of the course, but the sense I got was that the math was scary so we'll stay away from it.

Electrical Fundamentals: 5. The funnest teacher you'll ever have, but material was presented as independent units of problems to solve instead of any type of big-picture conveyance.

HIstory of Western Civilization 1: 4. Our teacher brought artifacts and passed them around. He also dressed up in strange clothes.

American History 1: 10. This guy just made sense. You felt that history was really important when you listened to him. He didn't just regurgitate facts, but wove them together into a story in which there were reasons that people did what they did.