To go or not to go...

[triskellian]

I spent this morning in a lecture on the history and varieties of the English language. The subject is pretty much central to my course, and it should in theory be really interesting. What actually happened was that the lecturer spent about half an hour faffing around and taking the register, then handed out a question sheet relating to a video he was about to show, read out the entire question sheet to the class, and then put the video on (a Melvyn Bragg thing from ITV several years ago*). While the video was showing, we dutifully wrote down the answers to the questions on the sheet (no analysis or thought required - the questions were all directly answered in the video). Then we had five minutes to "discuss your answers with your neighbour", then another twenty minutes of going through the questions with the whole class, by which time I was ready to bang my head against the wall.

While relating this tale of woe to a lunch table** of colleagues, someone asked "so why do you keep going to the classes?". It really hadn't occured to me not to - I'm a Good Student***, and attending classes is deeply ingrained, even though in this case it's reasonably clear that I could cover more of the subject, and in more detail, with an equivalent amount of time spent sitting at home with some books.

And so, in the time honoured tradition of using LJ to make vitally important life decisions, I present a poll!


[Poll #672963]

It also occurs to me that the current arrangement of my lectures means my weekly day off is split between Tuesday mornings and Thursday afternoons, and if I stop going to this class, I could switch my half day to Thursday mornings, which is much easier all round.


*Which amused me by asterisking out two letters of a perfectly good Anglo-Saxon word, and by drawing a parallel between medieval traditions of courtly love and "today's three-minute pop song", to the strains of the thoroughly up-to-date "Unchained melody". And then it annoyed me by talking about changing fashions in names with a list entirely composed of male names.

** "Lunch table" is the collective noun for people who work in my department, because we all have lunch together every day, and there is much bitching and piss-taking and randomness.

*** "Good Student" in the sense that I usually do what I'm told, rather than in the sense of getting good grades, though I do that too ;-)

Comments

[the-original1.livejournal.com]

Keep going. There's a scheduled end at it, and it's always possibly he'll say something useful that isn't in the books.

[triskellian]

He might, but I don't think it's particularly likely, and it's even less likely that the hypothetical useful thing he says will be relevant enough to the assessment that missing it will have any effect on my grade if I've otherwise done the reading...

God, that's a pretty damning assessment, isn't it?

[metame.livejournal.com]

In the age old tradition you appear to have answered your own question. All that remains for me to do is to back you up as most likely to know what's going on here...

Skip 'em.

I never did in Maths, but I skipped a few in Philosophy as it varied course-by-course what the connection was between the lecturer, the lectures, and the papers. Often they were... loosely-coupled, is the term these days.
Sometimes they remained interesting if not useful, sometimes neither. I reckon you've hit the latter case here.

[the-original1.livejournal.com]

There were a few times I cut class to spend my time more productively at the OTB, but there were also perfectly cuttable classes I attended, without which I never (or, at least, much later) would have found out about useful materials that were mentioned in passing and were not part of the official lecture or reading.

[onyxblue1.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, I remember when you finally told me about playing the ponies instead of going to mythology . . .