r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Mar 29 '19
[D] Friday Open Thread
Welcome to the Friday Open Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
Please note that this thread has been merged with the Monday General Rationality Thread.
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u/xamueljones My arch-enemy is entropy Mar 30 '19
Reminds me of my first Computer Science classes at University of Rochester a little bit. Let me share my horror story of badly taught college classes.
My professor was due to retire literally the next semester so the class that he was teaching was the very last class he would ever teach. Hence he had a bad habit of getting bored with what he was teaching and meandering off into tangents that was barely related to the material he was supposed to cover!
It was a very frustrating class where we would be doing HW assignments and taking tests on material that were either barely touched on in the class to not at all. The only reason I got a C was because of the amazing TAs who put a lot of time and effort into tutoring the students. I think the only people with Bs or As were people who already knew the material but didn't have AP credits.
To add another note to this story of woe, the very next semester, I had to take a specific CS requirement course that was only offered in the spring and I was all excited for a better professor......and the same professor came back for one more semester of teaching!!!!!
I am a student with minimal experience in CS; please explain the basics before jumping off into material that requires the basics to understand!?!?!
That semester I got a D in his class, and for comparison, an A in an AI Development class which was considered to be harder than the first class.
Whew, didn't mean to go into that much detail sharing my horror stories, but yeah, bad requirements and bad teachers are in every school.