oh boy

I just submitted my last assignment (group) for accounting class. This makes me very happy, if only because by the time I take my next class, I will have a whole different set of people to scorn and complain about. I did actually learn something about accounting, but I certainly won't trust my accounting knowledge when I get to real grad school. Amusingly, after launching into a diatribe about how UoP students are not up to my standards, my dad replied with, "what if you don't like the Harvard students either?" What, indeed.

Also, I dreamt about food last night. Not just any food, I had a dream involving utterly gorging on ground beef. I haven't eaten ground beef in about 9 years. I think not eating is getting to me a little and it's only been 3 days. Turning on the food channel at the gym today just made me crave coleslaw, which is not something I usually like. I then came home and started poking around the internet for recipes. It's all self torture. It's not that I actually am hungry, but today is definitely the day I'm getting lots of cravings. I've already started to plan what I get to eat when I get solid foods again.

Crackers.

Hard Reset

For some reason I decided that my digestive tract needed a hard reset. This means that I'll be doing the Master Cleanse for next several days, possibly up to two weeks. I'm not so sure about this.

This morning started with trying to chug a liter of salt water. It's hard enough to chug a liter of regular water without adding the taste of the ocean. I promptly went back to sleep only to be woken up two hours later by the angry noises my stomach was making. Salt water flushes definitely work.

After finally dragging myself out of bed, I made breakfast, but it just as easily could have been lunch or dinner. Juice from half a lemon, a cup of water, two tablespoons of maple syrup and a dash of cayenne pepper combined and downed and I was ready to attack the day. I'm hoping that I get used to the weird taste, since it's all I'll be "eating" for the foreseeable future.

I've since had a couple more glasses of this stuff. I already miss chewing things and I'm looking forward to the herbal laxative tea this evening, if only because it won't make my nose run with spiciness.

This could be a very long two weeks.

Real College

The "college experience" at Olin was anything but typical. I can probably count the number of times I went out to a bar. There wasn't really anyone on campus that I didn't "know". Going down to Penn State has made me realize what college could have been, what "real college" is.

By 5PM on a Saturday afternoon, we're already trying on dresses and getting makeup opinions. The six of us swarm in from of the mirror, trying to cover sunburned noses from the football game that afternoon, trading bras, and using double stick tape on skin and fabric. We finally call a taxi at 6:30, hoping that Jaime will stop flipping out and get herself together by the time it gets there. She ends up putting her makeup on in the cab.

Dinner starts with drinks at the bar while waiting, some girly, others just hard. Dinner itself is mediocre, but doesn't really matter to Laura, who may well have an eating disorder. More drinks to go around at dinner, and then we’re off to the Scanty Gaff. We're all dressed in dresses and heels as we show the bouncer out IDs and fight for drinks at this very dive-y college bar. Vodka tonics combine with eighties music creating the need to dance. Once the heels start to wear, we join a group of ex-Army guys at a table. Free beer magically produces itself for the wearers of cute clothing.

I listen to the guys talk about tricks they played on each other while they were in Iraq. One in particular corners me while I put on my best innocent, conservative Southern girl act. He talks about how he works building houses now, how he hopes we don't get into any new conflicts that would send him back to combat. We talk about motorcycles and mindless things. Beer continues to grease the entire situation.

Feeling nicely buzzed, we decide to go back to the bar from the night before. The bouncer was cute there and Laura's only goal for the night is to make out with someone. The second bar is more upscale, a place where the heels and jewelry are perhaps a little more at home. The bouncer is working as bar back, still dark and handsome. The Army guys have joined our group and help us grab a large table. We order more girly drinks and beers, but move to the bar as it begins to empty around 1. The bar back completely ignores Laura, sending her into a depressive state while the rest of us seductively ask the bartenders what they make best. With Laura sulking and last call approaching, 3 of the Army guys and one of the girls break off to go "home". Michelle declares that she wants pizza and starts encouraging the rest of the group to head that way. Before leaving we ask the bar back to join us after he gets off. He takes Laura's number and promises to meet us.

Pizza after the bars close in a college town is what everyone seems to do. The line is out the door with drunk people in various states of clothing. Once we finally make it to the front, the girls and our one remaining Army guy grab pizzas and a table. A professional football player, back in town for the weekend, sits at the next table over, politely obliging for pictures. His girlfriend must hate us. Halfway through the pizza, the bar back calls, then joins us. Turns out that he's actually a freshman, which is perhaps a little young for Laura, who's been out of college for 2 years. Our Army guy doesn't know what to make of a group of girls fawning over another guy and leaves confused and alone.

We all finally leave around 3, thinking we'll be able to catch a taxi. We call the cab companies and get no answer. We try flagging down any taxi we see, and even try to flag down a pizza guy, just hoping for anything that will keep us from needing to walk the 4 miles home in heels. We talk to other people on the street, thinking maybe one of them is heading in the same direction. One guy is, but he doesn't have a better plan than we do. Michelle finally sits down on the curb, while we try to hail any one down. A nice man in a Lexus stops at the stoplight with his windows open. When a cute girl in a skirt asks if he can possibly take us home, he says yes. We arrive home, the four remaining girls and the guy we had picked up on the street, having hitchhiked. Life is strange and drunk.

I don't have enough stories like that.

Five Reasons University of Phoenix Online Isn't Worth It

I recently had the need to take an accounting class, but living in a small town couldn't find one here. Someone suggested that I take accounting online from University of Phoenix – it offered the right class, a new section starts every Tuesday, classes last only five weeks, and all you need is reliable internet access. It sounded like a perfect class, one that would fit around my sporadic travel schedule, but still leave me with the knowledge I desired. Sadly, after paying nearly $1700 in fees and tuition for a 3 credit class, I’m realizing that University of Phoenix on-line is not an educational experience worth the money.

1. Discussion Based Classrooms only work if the students are intelligent.

I don’t mean to bash the students, as I’m sure there are plenty of intelligent people taking classes through University of Phoenix, but given that the combination of no admissions requirements and a for-profit University, there are also plenty of less intelligent people. Discussion in my accounting class the first week quickly devolved into a discussion about how abortion is wrong, while the second week included gems about how murderers should be put to death. I don’t understand what either of those has to do with accounting, either. To compliment these, in response to a question the instructor asked that actually had to do with accounting and tax law, several students proceeded to make guesses at an answer, instead of using the internet, which they were sitting in front of, to actually find the correct answer. Given that class discussion is intended as a learning tool, I think the only thing I’m learning is that the students are skewed towards conservative and seem to actively avoid spell check.

2. Team Based Assignments do not work when you don’t know your team.

We participate in class discussions together and have all posted little bios, but I definitely would not count my classmates as friends, not even facebook friends. When assigned to a small team together, since we don’t know each other, there seems to be little to make people feel responsible to the team. Some people turn in sections for team papers which just take large chunks of text from various websites, while others don’t submit their sections until half an hour before the deadline for the entire paper to be edited, run through the plagiarism checker, and submitted. Incomplete sentences and poor grammar are more the rule rather than the exception. I realize that my standards are higher than many of my fellow classmates, but turning in original work, on time, that has been run through Word’s spelling and grammar check seems like a bare minimum for participating in this kind of team. Unfortunately, if you don’t know your teammates, you are probably more likely to violate all three of these because you feel no obligation to your team.

3. Software must be scaled when dealing with large groups of users.

Wikipedia claims that University of Phoenix has 280,000+ students, making it one of the largest university systems in the world. Even if you only count the on-line students, estimated at 120,000, it’s just a lot of students. All on-line classes run on the same schedule, with assignments due Monday evenings. All on-line classes also require that papers be run through a plagiarism checker, a tool which automatically searches for sections of the text on the internet. Although I’m not the most technologically literate person, I can’t imagine that task having a large amount of computing overhead. Still, when I submitted the last team paper to the plagiarism checker, I gave up after 50 minutes of waiting. If I were to try again today, the same check would take less than 2 minutes. If you’re going to require that 120,000 people use an app on your website at the same time, perhaps there should be some more investment in ensuring that it will work for all your users at the same time.

4. Professionalism is not expected of instructors.

Although my instructor asks good discussion questions, she is not above using LOL or other internet colloquialisms in her posts. It may just be me, but it seems that at least the faculty should be a bit more professional; they are getting paid to be in the class, after all. They should probably also stay clear of those aforementioned discussions about murder and abortion, but mine certainly doesn’t.

5. I could get the same knowledge from reading a textbook alone.

I feel like I’m paying a large amount of money to read an accounting textbook every week. There are no lectures, in video, audio or text format. Every week, there is a reading assignment from a textbook, the class discussion, a homework problem or two from the textbook and a group assignment of either a paper or a discussion problem from the book. I’ve already covered how the discussions, despite good intentions, are not effective as learning tools, and team papers about a given website certainly isn’t any more effective than just exploring the website on my own, which leaves the reading and the homework problems, both out of the text, as my learning tools. Maybe I’m paying for the grading, but buying the solution guide off of Amazon seems like a more cost effective solution.

Although some people may find University of Phoenix online a good experience, my own experience has left me wanting. Wanting for good students and a learning environment lacking LOL.