Welcome to Cellular and Molecular biology. This course will be the most memorable of your undergraduate degree. Mostly because no one can understand what we (Charee + Erin) are saying during the lecture. Seriously, the sound system in this lecture hall is horrible, and neither of us will ever stand close enough to the microphone so that you can hear us.
As you can tell in your timetables, 3 hours are blocked out in your schedule for this course. We will spend about an hour covering course content that will not be on slides but actually just a pdf of a word document. Then we have a team of 50 TA’s that you must refer to as “The Gang” who will reteach you everything since odds are our lecture sounded like Sims characters talking.
Now, your TA groupings have already been made in a very disorganized fashion on another pdf of a word document (please see A2L). About a quarter of you (60 students) will be very lucky to be in the auditorium across the hall (we expect gifts in the form of organ baths), the rest of you can fend for yourselves. Read that again, yes, fend for yourselves. There’s 180 of you, we’re expecting a brawl. There will be 9 TA’s and 180 students and all of the tutorials will be going on simultaneously. This method of teaching is all related back to Problem Based Learning (PBL). We’re not sure what that actually means, but we figured since it has the word problem in it we should create a massive inconvenience for 75% of you. Expect for the lecture hall to sound like MUSC at 12:30, and the entire tutorial will just turn into a large extra help session with an 180 student lineup. The other 60 students will be in a proper tutorial, using real learning strategies, but we figured: why offer everyone the same advantage? How would that be any fun for us?
Good luck to the 180 of you who got stuck in the bad experimental tutorials, let this adversity push you to do well on a crossword puzzle.
The Procrastinator 