I will have to admit, this class is starting to wear down on me and make me nervous after these past few weeks. The class is turning out to be more difficult than I was told, which is not exactly a problem because classes are supposed to be challenging to enable one to learn and grow from them, but I was informed that this class was going to be easy-going in order to ease new resident assistants into their first semester on the job, and so far, this is not the case. Talking with returning resident assistants, I have found that the class has actually changed a great deal from previous years and has been made more difficult in the process.
From the beginning, I was told that grading would not be harsh and that homework and assignments would be few in order to help in the transition of beginning a new resident assistant position. After speaking with other new resident assistants, however, I found that we are all being inconvenienced by the class, having to work more than expected and bearing additional stress. When mentioning to returning resident assistants that I am studying for a test within this counseling class, they respond in a confused manner, stating that they didn’t have to take any tests when they took the class. This reveals that the class has transformed and has been made more difficult.
I feel as if I keep receiving false advertising. When told to write a simple autobiographical paper, I figured it’d be no problem, as in most classes we were given the same assignment, and I, in fact, love to write about myself and tell others more about my life. I figured it would be an easy-going assignment, yet, after looking at the rubric, I found it was not a simple assignment and required us to write more about our discovery of self-identity and list certain details, than simply write about ourselves. Although I did fairly well on the paper, less than I had hoped but still an A, my colleagues did not fair so well. In fact, I received a higher grade on my more complex, in-depth analysis of an historical event described through memoir written for my Honors course, than I did on this “simple” autobiographical assignment, and I was worried about that one.
The next time I felt unprepared for the upcoming challenge was for the test. After the confusion of when the test would be and if a study guide would be provided, I did not think the test would be very challenging. Thankfully, a fellow student created a study guide which I studied from alongside studying for other tests that week. After receiving the tests back, however, I was very taken aback at the fact that the highest grade was a 90, and that I was not the one who received that grade. I do not often get lower than an A and had studied quite thoroughly. Once again, this is typical for a class, but I was told this class would not require so much of my time and effort.
Then there was this week, a week of presentations. I was not expecting to give a presentation for a “Current Event.” Once again, I was told we were to simply present a current event to the class, another typical assignment that I have been given in other classes. I gave the assignment little thought until the day of, in which I was planning on printing out a current event, reading it, and talking a little about it to the class. That’s what’s usually expected of from a student presenting a current event. Then I looked at the rubric and was horror-struck. This was the same rubric used in my communication class for the speech we were to give at the end of the semester and given weeks to prepare and perfect. I thought this was a simple current event assignment, just to stand up and talk about the article, not to present a well-written speech! Thankfully, within the hour or so I had before class began, I scrambled around researching, reading, highlighting, and writing out my speech, filling out notecards to help me. Once again I felt bamboozled, in a way.
Next week, I will be preparing a volunteer experience speech, one that I was expecting to give a speech on, but surprisingly had an opposite experience with. After looking over the rubric, I found this assignment to be simpler than the current event assignment and less than I was expecting. This is fortunate because right now I am tired of being told I will not have to work very hard in order to find out that it is simply not true as my grades begin to slip.
<- RA Class Week 5 | RA Class Week 7 ->
I’m sorry that this class was like that. Nothing is worse than being told that your assignment isn’t difficult, or that it’s a short assignment only to have it changed later. Was there a new teacher for this class? Or did the teacher not make the curriculum for it? You would think that if they wrote what assignments you would be doing, that they would have an idea for the difficulty level.
Well, the class is actually arranged by the Residence Life department, meaning they tell our instructor what he must teach, and have even given him a list of all the assignments he must assign and tests he must give, etc. So it’s the department’s curriculum, and their criteria and such, but the part I was upset about was that what he was verbally saying was that it’s short and simple, but what was written was different with much more to it. So, I get that it wasn’t his rules, assignments, etc…but he knew them and didn’t convey them to us efficiently. So for those students in my class who did what he “said” and didn’t look at the papers he handed out, they received incredibly low grades.