Frustrations

I have been frustrated with my grad school professor the entire quarter. For one thing, he is continuously late. It's a cause to celebrate if he's on time. This is ironic because our participation grade depends on our tardiness (or lack thereof). How would he even know? We took a midterm exam in the beginning of April. When did we get those grades back? In Wednesday's class. We have a final on Monday and we were worried. We all thought we did horribly on the exams and we needed to know what to do better for the final. We had this take-home part of the exam where we had to take a case study and make treatment recommendations. According to the syllabus, we were supposed to do another one for the final.

So we get back our exams. Before he hands back the take-home part, he says that he was "extremely lenient" and that "it wasn't even funny." Maybe it was because of this or maybe it was because we got our grades back so late, but either way, he decided to scrap that take-home assignment for the final and assign us something else. I get back my exam and I did get an "A," which is great. I actually did a lot better on the multiple choice portion than I thought I did. My take-home portion did not have any feedback on it at all. . . just a bunch of check marks. One of the girls in the class asked him about his "lenient" remark and asked if maybe he could give us some pointers on what we could do to improve in the future. He says that he didn't mean to imply we did a horrible job and that actually, we had all written a very excellent paper (especially considering the fact that it was our first case formulation). O-kay. . . . now, we were all confused and also a little irritated. Were our papers crap or were they good? I'm not sure if he was lying to us because he thought we couldn't take the criticism or if it was because he just couldn't take the time to give the damn feedback.

Even though we don't have that particular assignment for the final anymore, we will probably still have to do treatment plans for our future jobs. Something tells me that our bosses aren't going to tell us that we did a great job if it's a piece of crap. This is grad school, for crying out loud. And I'm an adult. I can take a little criticism. Yes, I am an obsessive-compulsive, perfectionist, Type-A personality and yes, I hate anything lower than an A. But I don't want the A if I don't deserve it. This professor makes me long for my Ethics professor that I had last term. Yes, he was demanding and challenging. But that was what I needed and he also gave great feedback. I got a 99 on my paper in his class and it was still covered in red. He put comments on there about exactly what he liked. He also put comments about a few things he thought that could be improved in the future (even if he didn't necessarily take points off for it). I think my current professor is stretched too thin and he just shows up to get a paycheck. He has his own practice at three separate locations. This would explain why he's late all the time and why he can't be bothered to actually teach us. I'm just frustrated by it. Pardon my venting.