10 Years After

A quick post after British Literature. We finished with Wordsworth and are moving on to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Also, we received a suggested list of topics for our first paper which is due on the 20th.

The Chicken or the Egg

A quick post before British Lit. Yesterday in World Civilization it was the same story. More reading from slides. What's more, the slides that aren't in the instructor's online version of the powerpoint (tm) presentation seem to be nothing more, for the most part, than illustrations in the book. I'm sure if a student looked through enough of the links from the History dept's Web site they could find the pictures, or those similar to them. Two interesting nuggets of information from this class. The first was that chickens came from India and that the first known recipe for eating chickens is from the Romans. And some critics say that the Romans did nothing but leech off the Greeks! (Note: they also came up with concrete, but we did not go over that in this class.) The second triviality was that magic mushrooms grace the prehistoric art from the Saharra Desert. Some of the people are depicted as having the heads of mushrooms.

One annoying aspect of the class is the technology used in it. The class is held in one of the auditorium style classrooms in the Social-Science building. This means that besides being subjected to a power point slide presentation the instructor has a wireless microphone that he uses while he walks around the class room. In itself this isn't so bad. However, there are dead spots all over the room. Even up on stage next to his computer and whiteboard there are dead spots. This means that his voice goes from booming loud to barely audible in mid-sentence. Nothing like seemless technololgy at work. Personally I'd rather he just project his voice while he walked around or just stay up on the stage nad use a wired microphone.

Don't even get me started with that damn laser pointer of his with the dying battery. For 2 classes we've had to endure a barely visible red dot that is suppose to point out something in a slide. How difficult can it be to replace the AAA batter or go back up on the stage and use a physical object to point out something which the slide doesn't focus in on.