Dear Dick,
After completing your course I was so jubilant about actually passing it that the thoughts of what I had been feeling and thinking while taking your subject became a distant emotion.
Instead, I only concerned myself with the self gratification of not having to spend any more long hours (yes, hours) every day beating my head against an imaginary brick wall while trying to understand the concepts.
But Dick, persistent badgering and recurring memories of those frustrating days in your course has given me the ammunition to let you know what I really think about your mandatory required course. I mean, if a lowly student like me can see that when a semester starts out with a class of 35 and ends with only eight remaining and only three of those actually pass the final exam, there’s something wrong here.
Dick, you would think the powers that be would pull a committee together of both students and faculty and start researching the problem and making changes when it becomes common knowledge that your course is one of the most failed courses this institution offers semester after semester.
Since when did this subject become a horse race while you demonstrated an assignment problem on the whiteboard? And where the heck are all the steps involved in working out the problem to find the solution? I, for one, didn’t see the next step in my mind and from the success rate of your course completion quota, I’d say I probably wasn’t the only one.
Dick, don’t even go there with the excuse that I just didn’t try hard enough. I took advantage of every available resource offered. There was even talk of having a chair bronzed in The Learning Center with my name engraved on it because of the amount of time spent there. Of course I’m unemployed and old so I made the needed time to wade through all of the struggles to squeak a passing grade out of your course, but not everyone has that advantage.
Also Dick, I’m sticking to my story about all of the stress caused by your course, which caused my heart to malfunction periodically, putting it into an A-fib rhythm. Wonderful stuff you teach there Dick, I’ve forgot 80% of what you raced through my remaining brain cells and I’ve got more health problems to contend with. Marvelous.
I’m sure you’ll just brush this letter off as nothing to be concerned about, but to those of us who have been there, (and some more than once), it will at least bring a smile or even a chuckle to know the light at the end of our tunnel will be 80% less of you.
“Hasta la vista, baby!”
Ralph Myles
