Blah!

I may have ranted on this before, but I can't remember and I need to rant a little more on it now.

So, my lab teacher decided to be like all the other lab teachers and do a quiz on the lab that we are doing that day instead of last week's lab. WELL, before I was doing well, becuase I actually understood what was going on in the lab, and the questions at the end of each lab helped me to further understand why we did what we did in lab. As such, I did good on the quizzes. Now, I got back my last quiz, the one that we took on the lab-to-do-that-day, and I didn't do that great. I got the score (in the B-range) that I usually got on my quizzes in Basic chemistry, and I deserved those because I didn't even understand the material before or after the lab.

This is frustrating to me, becuase if the quizzes are set up as they currently are to make sure that each person does their reading, it's very pointless!!! You cannot carry out ANY of the experiments unless you have done the required reading before! It is a must! And I do the reading, but I am not a textbook reader. I do the reading, but I don't necessarily understand all of it. My understanding comes from the teacher explaining it in human terms (the textbooks use something else, whatever that is!) and then me doing the problems, or carrying out the experiment. I mean, if we, as new Organic chemistry students, are going to learn something new, shouldn't the quiz come after? In all of my other classes, quizzes were given AFTER you learned the stuff that the teacher showed/taught you.

I guess I'm just grumpy becuase I'm actually doing well in this class (instead of scraping for an A) and now this stupid set up is going to make it seem like I'm not as good as I really am. That's silly, I know, because I KNOW I'm doing good. I'm understanding everything we do in lab and class, and the points I miss are only because I missed one or two minor details. Does it even make sense to quiz people on something they don't really understand?

Okay, okay. Maybe I'm blowing it out of proportion. After all, that last quiz was set up so that it dealt with what the book says. But still! I'm doing good! I wouldn't be as annoyed with this current set-up if the quizzes weren't worth as much as the labs!!! Not to mention, doing the quizzes after showed to me that I understood it, and when we took our first exam I was confident in it. I walked out of there feeling good about it. Because I was able to do the quizzes, I was able to do the test.

Okay, I think I'm done. Thank you for listening.