I mean, sure, I expected that I would be surrounded by… Bell curve cannon-fodder. Even though I was taken by surprise at the actual level of intelligence around here, it was not something that I had not considered. It was more of a thing that I half wished to be true. Of course I expected that there would be a bunch of dickweeds who talk way too much, and don’t use their brains a lot. Yes. I expected all of this.
What I did not expect, however, was that there would be a certain module that sucks balls. Seriously. That module is called Introduction to Molecular Biotechnology. Molecular Biotechnology, the very name of the course which I am in. By the name, you’d think they’d be covering a little bit of each topic that goes under the Molecular Biotechnology. A sort of overview, to let us know what we’ve gotten ourselves into. That’s certainly what I thought.
I was so wrong. Introduction to Molecular Biotechnology, or IMB for short, is one of the most redundant modules ever. It’s so basic, and shallow that it looks like something that should have been taught during the lower secondary years. Or maybe as side-notes for O’ Level biology.
(also I hate the module coordinator. It’s like she constantly has PMS or something.)
Anyway, the source of my frustration is basically that. The sheer simplicity of it. It’s simple, but not in a good way. It’s not simple in the way that it sums the topic up well, or that it is a great analogy for the subject. No, it’s just so brief and so layman that I can(and probably have) picked up more knowledge from reading a faux-sci-fi novel.
Here, I’ll illustrate my point. My class has been assigned a project, where we are supposed to turn a lecture into a performance. Sort of like… A new way to deliver a lecture. I personally find the entire concept pointless, because people are idiots and are unlikely to learn anything anyway. The class was divided into five groups, one of which were supposed to play a team of scientists. Which, unsurprisingly, I am in. No way in hell I would play the part of some kind of animal activist.
The topic was on transgenesis and cloning. On the first day, when I picked my group… My group was really empty. I was supposed to have five people. All I had was me, and another guy(who fortunately, is actually significantly more intelligent and friendlier than the others), and some dude who seems to have issues with understanding sarcasm. At that point, I was going “Hey, where are my other two people? There are 26 people in the class. There’s no way that they shouldn’t be here.” For some reason, the role of the scientist was highly unpopular.
Okay, I’ll just give you a moment there to think about it. Scientist. Unpopular. Molecular biotechnology. God, these people need to be shot.
So anyway, my group got stuck with some… Person who was hanging on to another group even though it was already full. Obviously a reject. Someone who you don’t want to work with if you had the choice. The other member was someone who skips school half the time and was absent on that day. So, my group basically boiled down to: myself, one useful member, and a guy who’s just good for ordering around while getting frustrated at his inability to infer from your statements. Awesome.
Well, never mind that issue. I knew that it would come to this eventually. And anyway, my partner is a good worker. Certainly less lazy than I am. I gave out instructions to everyone to find out as much about the topic as they could, because the teachers gave me the impression that the reason why the scientist group was unpopular, was because of the need to do research. I took that to imply that we were expected to do research. And that’s why I made everyone go read up on stuff.
Next lesson, we come back, and the bloody teacher says gives me this look and says in that annoying voice of her’s “No, no. This is only an introductory module! It’s not supposed to be in-depth!” Oh, gee whiz, so what was that thing about research that you people mentioned last week? So then I turn to my group and say “Sorry, people. We’ve wasted all our time reading up and compiling all this stuff. They don’t want it.” Sheez, I wrote a frickin’ essay about recombinant DNA technology and cloning.
(Oh, by the way, the module coordinator also has issues with interpreting simple information.)
After a series of… Discussions, the class sort of came to a consensus on what we were supposed to do. I deleted about 80% of my essay and turned it into a script for the scientist group. During the run-through, the teachers made some very disconcerting comments about it. They commented that “a lot of people don’t even know what DNA is” and that “they would all be asking, ‘what do you mean, integrated into its genetic code?’” Also the way they said it, it was as though they thought that 90% of the student body had the general knowledge of a mollusc.
And I’m starting to think so, too.
Anyway, they basically asked me to turn the script into “layman-ese”. Oh, awesome, how are you supposed to turn the phrase “blastocyst-stage embryo” into layman-ese? How are you supposed to turn “embryo” into layman-ese? A lump of cells that appears inside a uterus after SEX occurs? Hell, judging from… Everything, not everyone is entirely sure about what a uterus is.
So I literally spent two effing hours sitting at my computer, trying to de-jargonise the text. I failed miserably at that. I just couldn’t do it. It was so entirely against my principles. Every time I tried to change anything into “normal human speech”, my brain just froze and crashed. I would eventually manage to type something out, and then I would read it over and my brain would automatically tell me “Hey, this is lame. There’s a better word for “nuclei of the sperm and ova which remain in the zygote for several hours before they come together to form the nucleus of the baby. It’s “pronuclei”.” So you see, my brain was instantly translating everything back into its original state.
Thankfully, a friend of mine volunteered to take it off my hands. He was slightly more successful than me, although he clearly stated “I will never, ever, degrade a scientific text like that, ever again. Never.” He said it so resolutely that he must have been creating a contingency plan for if he ever came across a similar situation again.
So, anyway, that’s my story, about the most useless module ever created. If you’re not going to teach anything useful beyond making illiterate people go “oooh!”, it’s entire pointless. There is just no good argument for devoting an entire module to this. It’s almost as if they ran out of ideas and a certain person came up with “Hey, I can do an introductory module, so as to torment anyone who so much as read a few pages on Wikipedia on the subject!”
I’m starting to think that that actually happened.
Then there’s Com Skills. But I think I’ll pass on ranting about that. It’s basically about the same thing: People over here have something against complexity and detail.
Oh, and shitcakes. We have an NE project. Ugh, biggest waste of time ever. Can’t even rant about it in a satisfying manner.
-Joe