Monday, November 26, 2007

Chewed-up by Prof.

Today was the big day, big in every way possible (a certain senior-level) course wise.

My group was presenting its research to our prof and ppl from admin.

Big in scope big in nerves big in marks....and big in dashed hopes.

I worked on the ppt presentation for what must be 14 hrs (with a fancy flash intro etc), and thought it was good. But, in my horror our prof opinionated his distaste for us doing a different take on presenting findings.

So check this, instead of putting up a sentence for findings. We took pics and described the findings as supported by the pics and moved on to recommendations.

Now this must of really irked our prof, because after the presentation he got into how we didn't do what was asked, and where is a page for the findings.

Being the calm cool and collected presenters we were, we responded with a"oh I'm sorry I thought we just talked about the findings for the past 15 min" and he was like "umm well list them now" and we were like "ok"..... jeeze .... its like he zoned out and didn't listen to a word we said.

I suppose today was appropriate, because lately this has been happening a lot. People don't actually listen to what you say and then throw in their 2 cents on what they think and how you didn't address ____, meanwhile you having just finished talking about that very same thing.

I think this is a deeper problem in society. People just don't listen, and nitpick at little details as if they were your main point.

Going with the same example, a girl commented (to the whole class and prof) how she didn't agree with us that the whole campus should be paved over (ps..we did our project on pedestrian movement) for pedestrians.

Now here is the biggie, throughout the whole presentation we emphasised how we only focused on the areas where there was a safety hazard and the land degraded to an extent that warranted a sidewalk. We recommended that out of the 100% area of the campus about .1% extra be paved over for pedestrians, to facilitate ease of movement, safety, and prevent erosion of the landscape due to cow paths.

Somehow this girl zoned-out for the whole 20 min and thought she was smarter than the rest of us. But since we addressed her concern with, "we did not recommend that, if you look at the map provided we ask that these specific areas be addressed" she didn't concede. She then went on how we were wrong about a pic, meanwhile what she was talking about was not what we actually said.

In general after a serious lack of sleep, and an even bigger issue with my prof I am ready to go kick some ass.

Its in times like this that I wish I belonged to a boxing gym, where I could go and punch out some of my pent up frustrations.

I do wish all beings peace and compassion and freedom,
but sometimes its hard to appreciate a persons ego when its rubbing you right in the face.

Those are my two cents.

Hey...maybe more ppl should have blogs so they blow off their crazy ideas online, while leaving class presentations for more civilized flame wars.

peace
-Anna (r)

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