It's finally over!

So, with the last email I sent the instructor, I am now officially finished that darn course.

I have to say I'm really disappointed with the instructor and her choices on course management this time around, and have projected my thoughts towards the course instead of the instructor, whose fault it rightly was, in an effort to avoid hating an otherwise nice person.

Basically, while I can (and do) blame myself for dropping the ball on many occasions, much fault can also be found with the instructor (and in most cases made it far easier for me to drop the ball).

• The teaching method employed favoured students who learned well verbally, while I know for a fact that I learn best visually.
• The instructor chose to send out course news and assignment specifications through email (through the automatically-set-up mailing list for the course) instead of having a centrally-located web site or set of pages. This to me was the single biggest issue I faced, as it made it difficult to find the information needed for a particular assignment.
• Information about each assignment was spread out over several messages, and in some cases, over as many as a full dozen messages.
• The number of emails to the course mailing list was really large, especially for a course with no official course website, which made it still harder to find information. (and email search tools will only help so much, too)
• Not only was assignment information spread out over numbers of messages, other information was also mashed in with it. In several cases, assignment information was tacked on the end of presentation feedback, with no mention in the subject line.
• The instructor often forgot information between class and email. For instance, she'd mention something important in class that should be mentioned at least two or three times in-class, or once in class and sent by email so everybody would know about, or sent an email about something, but forgot about it when class time came again.

Really, I should have seen some of this coming a long time ago, but as I didn't, I'm kind of stuck with my fate.
(fortunately, I've done much better in the other two courses I've taken, so my grades aren't all bad)

Much of what I've mentioned above she knows about, so hopefully nobody else has this many problems with her.

As this was a graduate-level course and I'm still an undergrad, it was expected that I not do quite so well as the graduates, but doing this bad has caused me to question whether I really want to do any graduate-level work here at my university.
Granted, it is an isolated case, but it was very sobering.

I will admit that I did learn some useful information in this course, but only so far as Prolog and Logic Programming go, which is to say, not very far at all.
Prolog and L.P. are nowhere near mainstream, and most jobs that would require knowledge them are specialized research positions and not stuff you'd run across very often in the real world.

Oh, and a word of warning: Any comments that talk about how I should have done better have a very high chance of being deleted, as that is not what this journal entry is about.
(plus I've already gone over all of this myself, as has my instructor and parents. Yes, my parents still care about me, which is why I hadn't gone to the last class)

Now I get to go to bed and get up in less than five hours... -.-