It’s just one of those days. I’ve been poked and prodded and twisted by my chiropractor, gone over my woes with my therapist-type-person and now I’m killing time in the computer lab waiting for my History class to begin. Oh and I’m handing in my first real essay of my university career (such as it is) in lecture today. Oh, oh! I almost forgot, I also have a root canal booked for 4pm.

It’s just one of those days.

The depression weight’s been sitting on me all this past week. It’s gotten worse over the weekend and yesterday. I figure it’s just a reaction to the increased stress of this whole situation. I’m tired, I’m in a foreign land, I’m finding no time for myself, I feel like I’m failing at everything I should be good at… it just sucks. Money is freaking me out, school is a fucking mess, and I’m not eating right… gah!

I’m never taking a new course again. This course has been massively mismanaged and booched beyond all recognition. The assignments don’t match the expectations in the syllabus, the teaching styles and coverage changes between the profs, there’s no acknowledgement that they’ve screwed up and the cream on the top? My assignment that’s worth 10% of my total mark? They’ve decided to not give it a mark at this time.

So I’m the student that got 84.1% on the first test in the course and beyond that I don’t have a single blessed clue as to where I stand at all. Granted until I get my essay back from my history course I don’t know where I stand there either, but at least I knew that coming out of the first class. That class has actually matched the syllabus.

The inability to do anything about unprofessional behaviour in this environment is maddening. As a student I have 2 choices available to me: take it or leave it. I mean I could make a big ass fuss and take it to the dean, but ultimately there’s nothing that will be done. I’m enough of a realist to expect that. It just drives me batshit crazy. If I behaved as arrogant and dismissive of the concerns of my customers as these people do, my business would’ve failed instantly. Yet they have their cushy tenured jobs where they get to lecture a classroom of nearly 40 students about how men are the root of the entire universe’s ills… and nothing happens to them.

I sat in a room with my prof a couple weeks ago and said “Look, the syllabus says one thing about how to do this assignment; you have told people individually something completely different. This has created confusion. The sources we were given are poor.” And she responded with “I’ll keep that in mind as I mark.” Specifically the fact that the provided French sources were utter and absolute shit. The comment on my returned assignment? “The French answer is a bit weak.”

Un-fucking-believable.

I’m just going to make it through this course and then make damn sure to avoid any classes with these profs again. It’s my only recourse. Well not my only, but definitely the only practical one. Anything else would put my already way too high stress levels through the roof. It’s just bullshit.

Ahh well, at least I got 84.1%, eh?