Published by Mircea on 13 Oct 2005 at 07:25 pm
The snapshot of a newcomer
The teacher holding the Using Operating Systems course asked the students of the first group in the series he teaches for to remain after the classes to get aquainted. I have attended this meeting, since I am a Teaching Assistant.
This was a good priviledge for gathering input on their feelings as new students. It was interesting to see the diversity of the environments students were coming from. It remembered me about my first year, when I was surprised by many of my colleagues.
Some of the students felt like expressing their ideas about the school, after only 2 weeks of studying. It was partially a shock for me to hear what they said.
Not to get into lots of details, the most expressed ideas were on the implementation of the new teaching system. As you probably don’t know, the teaching system has been revamped in .ro starting this year. Students will do 4 years instead of 5 (+other years for BSc etc.). Everything looks great until now. Older students can only imagine how is university without lots of useless subjects.
Now comes the “fun” part. Some subjects were provided less classes. Surprisingly, some teachers admitted this AND they said that, because they have less classes, they have to compress the content - do more stuff in less time. Now, where’s the improvement there?!? Students were supposed to make 4 years learning other (&less &addapted better to the specialization) stuff. Students were puzzled.
Some of them complained that they don’t have time to learn usefull subjects because of the other ones. It kind of remembered me of the 2nd university year, where we so caught up with other subjects that we had to leave behind Assembly Programming.
Well, it was sad to hear that… I really thought the system could do it right from the start. Unfortunately, there’s too much suff to be changed, starting with the mentality of some teachers…
