Rant: what are you thinking?

This may come as a surprise to you but there are actually a good number of people who are interested in your class and the subject matter we are discussing. Perhaps this interest is not exhibited in the manner you would hope: being excited about the fortnightly quizzes before any real lectures, reading over 100 pages of mostly irrelevant nonsense for those quizzes, and then eagerly applying that befuddled knowledge haphazardly to mundane problems of little future impact; nevertheless, the lack of such "ardent fervor" does not preclude genuine interest.

I wonder if you realize the huge disconnect between what you say your intentions are and how you are going about to achieve them. You exude a sense of approachability but you're not willing to commit to your answers when we do ask you questions. You deliberately apply tricky wording on recall tests, including triple negatives and vague questions, and you allow only team appeals? Clearly, you're hoping for some self-censorship to work its magic so that you don't have to deal with the issue of unfair testing. Again, the guise of making the test work for the student just doesn't cut it; perhaps I might believe the story better if the questions were direct and not unintentionally unclear.

You claim you want to guide us, Professor Guru, instead of just feeding us material, but if you've actually thought about your material carefully, you would appreciate how unclear it might be to someone beginning in your subject. Frankly the most interesting and high-impact research is surrounding these controversies; that you just gloss over—"problematize", as some other careless academics would term it— them glibly just shows how lowly you think of us. It's already 5th week and we are still talking about that absurd final paper that we have to write before learning anything more than what's on Wikipedia page titled *******.

That you would refuse to lecture but spend an entire class period talking about archaic rules on how to write a paper really, really disgusts me. Read any news article. Does every paragraph have a topic sentence? Is there ONE and only one thesis statement? Do all the topic sentences lead up to the thesis? Your "it depends" answer to some of the questions show you clearly believe otherwise.

But you still had to give us that list, didn't you? Once again, your strict adherence to the safe, tried-and-tested, by-popular-definition, common-ground nonsense that you have been sell is just getting exasperating.

Seriously, what are you thinking? This class is quickly becoming a futile independent study project that meets way too often for the miserable amount of work that gets done.