(no subject)
so...i'm a second semester sophomore! yippee! my classes are going really well thus far, i have some really amazing professors. there was one professor i was a bit nervous about, as this is one of the reviews he got:
Bilgrami started the semester by missing his first two classes, and then proceeded to miss two or three more during the semester, plus called in sick at the last minute for another class, leaving his TA's with no material or guidance for how to spend the class. If you're keeping count, that's around six absences. On top of that, he was over 15 minutes late for EVERY class, including a couple of times he was over 1/2 hour late. Why care about his attendance (besides that you're paying tuitition for him to be there)? Because it just shows how little he cares about his students. Not once do I recollect him apologizing for keeping us waiting. The closest he came was deigning to make up some excuse once about arriving on campus and thinking it was Wednesday instead of Tuesday or something. He thinks himself so superior to us pea brained undergraduates that he feels he is doing us a huge favor by just allowing us to hear him speak. He's so full of himself and his Oxford degree. I think the reason all the above reviewers think he's brilliant is that he speaks with a British accent. Anyways, even if he is brilliant, all you get from the course is Bilgrami showing off how brilliant he is (or thinks he is) and very, very little substantive knowledge about philosophical arguments. He went off on diatribes almost every class about how stupid other philosophers' arguments are and then presented even stupider ones of his own that the TA's had to patch together at the review session in order to explain to us - and they still never really made sense either to them or us. I really just don't like the guy and would recommend taking Methods and Problems with a different professor.
Oh, some more stuff - we didn't get through any of the material, hardly. The course was supposed to have six topics, and we spent well over half the semester just on the first one and had almost no time left for the others. In case you think I'm just sour over receiving a bad grade, I actually got an A in the class. The grading was really erratic (mostly the TAs' fault I think), though, and some really intelligent people I know got C's on the midterm.
A good friend of mine took his Senior Seminar last semester and now dislikes the man's (lack of) teaching as much as me. Oh, I could go on and on . . . like how he takes questions from the class, completely screws up (because of his brilliance? maybe I just didn't get it) the argument and confuses the person into submission. God forbid the person makes a logical mistake or asks a stupid question - Bilgrami will rip them apart (again, to show how smart he is). That's actually one of the fun parts of class - when he rips apart some pompous know-it-all. One last thing that I almost forgot: the guy has, like, mental problems I think. He just snapped like five or six times during the semester and, in the middle of lecture, started screaming about George Bush being a nitwit. Hillarious, but really scary. He also snapped a couple of times at students. One quote I remember was "I have a whiplash tongue, and I won't hesitate to lash you all over with it!" What?
Oh, I almost forgot a doozy. THE MAN ANSWERED HIS CELL PHONE IN THE MIDDLE OF CLASS AND HAD A CONVERSATION. I mean, right in the middle of lecture he walked over to the window and had a conversation, leaving the students absolutely dumbfounded. I'm amazed that there are no other negative reviews of this guy.
yeah. um, terrifying. and he did indeed miss our first class. the head of the department taught us instead and she was an incredibly sweet and intelligent woman, so i was very sad to see her go in favor of a professor who inspired such revulsion.
the review was correct about some things. he showed up 15 minutes late and he does have a british accent. at one point he even accused a girl of being "morally arrogant" and "delusional about her own uniqueness" and as promised it was the most entertaining part of the class. however, i found his lecturing perfectly pleasant, comprehensible and interesting. i definitely took thing away from the lecture that i hadn't gotten from the reading (and i was actually able to employ them almost immediately in my next class). overall, im not dreading that class anymore, which is excellent as its a fairly large lecture and if i dont enjoy it i just wont go and that is just not good at all.
i did observe something mildly amusing during the course of this class, as well. we were discussing "universalizability" which is basically the concept that if i judge a certain choice to be correct in a certain situation then i judge that others ought to make that choice in a similar situation. we had read sartre, who basically finds this notion absurd and the professor asked us to raise our hand if we agreed with sartre and the majority of the class did (on the basis that if you spent a lot of time debating a tough decision and came to one conclusion, intuitively you would understand someone debating the same tough decision and coming to the opposite conclusion). the group that raised their hand included the boy sitting next to me, we shall call him boy a. then he asked who disagreed with sartre, and a few raised their hands, including the boy sitting next to boy a, hereafter known as boy b. boy a and boy b were obviously friends and had been chatting intermittently throughout the class so boy a felt comfortable nudging boy b and giving him a you-are-such-a-meanie face when he chose the "morally arrogant" option of disagreeing with sartre. this was totally hilarious as not five seconds previous boy a had condemned this sort of behavior when he agreed with sartre!
sigh.
i'm going to do my latin homework now. i miss catullus. ovid is no where near as raunchy.
Bilgrami started the semester by missing his first two classes, and then proceeded to miss two or three more during the semester, plus called in sick at the last minute for another class, leaving his TA's with no material or guidance for how to spend the class. If you're keeping count, that's around six absences. On top of that, he was over 15 minutes late for EVERY class, including a couple of times he was over 1/2 hour late. Why care about his attendance (besides that you're paying tuitition for him to be there)? Because it just shows how little he cares about his students. Not once do I recollect him apologizing for keeping us waiting. The closest he came was deigning to make up some excuse once about arriving on campus and thinking it was Wednesday instead of Tuesday or something. He thinks himself so superior to us pea brained undergraduates that he feels he is doing us a huge favor by just allowing us to hear him speak. He's so full of himself and his Oxford degree. I think the reason all the above reviewers think he's brilliant is that he speaks with a British accent. Anyways, even if he is brilliant, all you get from the course is Bilgrami showing off how brilliant he is (or thinks he is) and very, very little substantive knowledge about philosophical arguments. He went off on diatribes almost every class about how stupid other philosophers' arguments are and then presented even stupider ones of his own that the TA's had to patch together at the review session in order to explain to us - and they still never really made sense either to them or us. I really just don't like the guy and would recommend taking Methods and Problems with a different professor.
Oh, some more stuff - we didn't get through any of the material, hardly. The course was supposed to have six topics, and we spent well over half the semester just on the first one and had almost no time left for the others. In case you think I'm just sour over receiving a bad grade, I actually got an A in the class. The grading was really erratic (mostly the TAs' fault I think), though, and some really intelligent people I know got C's on the midterm.
A good friend of mine took his Senior Seminar last semester and now dislikes the man's (lack of) teaching as much as me. Oh, I could go on and on . . . like how he takes questions from the class, completely screws up (because of his brilliance? maybe I just didn't get it) the argument and confuses the person into submission. God forbid the person makes a logical mistake or asks a stupid question - Bilgrami will rip them apart (again, to show how smart he is). That's actually one of the fun parts of class - when he rips apart some pompous know-it-all. One last thing that I almost forgot: the guy has, like, mental problems I think. He just snapped like five or six times during the semester and, in the middle of lecture, started screaming about George Bush being a nitwit. Hillarious, but really scary. He also snapped a couple of times at students. One quote I remember was "I have a whiplash tongue, and I won't hesitate to lash you all over with it!" What?
Oh, I almost forgot a doozy. THE MAN ANSWERED HIS CELL PHONE IN THE MIDDLE OF CLASS AND HAD A CONVERSATION. I mean, right in the middle of lecture he walked over to the window and had a conversation, leaving the students absolutely dumbfounded. I'm amazed that there are no other negative reviews of this guy.
yeah. um, terrifying. and he did indeed miss our first class. the head of the department taught us instead and she was an incredibly sweet and intelligent woman, so i was very sad to see her go in favor of a professor who inspired such revulsion.
the review was correct about some things. he showed up 15 minutes late and he does have a british accent. at one point he even accused a girl of being "morally arrogant" and "delusional about her own uniqueness" and as promised it was the most entertaining part of the class. however, i found his lecturing perfectly pleasant, comprehensible and interesting. i definitely took thing away from the lecture that i hadn't gotten from the reading (and i was actually able to employ them almost immediately in my next class). overall, im not dreading that class anymore, which is excellent as its a fairly large lecture and if i dont enjoy it i just wont go and that is just not good at all.
i did observe something mildly amusing during the course of this class, as well. we were discussing "universalizability" which is basically the concept that if i judge a certain choice to be correct in a certain situation then i judge that others ought to make that choice in a similar situation. we had read sartre, who basically finds this notion absurd and the professor asked us to raise our hand if we agreed with sartre and the majority of the class did (on the basis that if you spent a lot of time debating a tough decision and came to one conclusion, intuitively you would understand someone debating the same tough decision and coming to the opposite conclusion). the group that raised their hand included the boy sitting next to me, we shall call him boy a. then he asked who disagreed with sartre, and a few raised their hands, including the boy sitting next to boy a, hereafter known as boy b. boy a and boy b were obviously friends and had been chatting intermittently throughout the class so boy a felt comfortable nudging boy b and giving him a you-are-such-a-meanie face when he chose the "morally arrogant" option of disagreeing with sartre. this was totally hilarious as not five seconds previous boy a had condemned this sort of behavior when he agreed with sartre!
sigh.
i'm going to do my latin homework now. i miss catullus. ovid is no where near as raunchy.