Last night was simply horrible.
I've been looking forward to my ART113 class at WCU since I signed up. Art is something that I would like to be much better at but simply am not. I figured that by signing up for a computer art class, I might gain some artistic/design insight while learning how to best use the professional industry tools that I usually have available to me. It looked like a win/win. But my first foreboding came a week before the class even started.
Mom and I had been taking a web design class, as you might have noticed if you've been reading this column. The class was oddly both elementary and complex - I knew nearly all of the course material by heart, but that's not to say that it wasn't involved. Even so, the class never seemed as though it had lost a sense of direction. The teacher clearly knew the material, and what he didn't know, he admitted to.
One day after web design class, I entreated my mom to come with me into the fine arts building to look for my future classroom. On the second floor, tucked away behind a misleading set of stairs, we found it. A Macintosh lab.
Before anyone who reads this gets the sense that I'm prejudiced against Macs, I should point out some things. First, I've used a Mac before, when I was in high school, to lay out the school newspaper. So it's not unfamiliar ground. Second, I had a pretty good idea that we were going to be using Macs in this art class, so it wasn't a real shock as much as a letdown. Finally, I was actually looking forward to a computer class that might teach me something new, especially if it gave me a better impression of what the "other side" is like.
See, it's difficult for PC-entrenched users to set aside their thousands of dollars of PC hardware to use a Mac lab at school during specially scheduled hours. But I wasn't worried because I was sure that some of the work could be done at home, since this was supposed to be more of an art class and less of a computer class. As long as I could open my files from home on the Mac, everything should be fine, I thought to myself.
Anyway, we left the art building with this new knowledge, and I processed the new knowledge over the following week.
Last night in class we were indeed expected to use the Macs. I never had doubt of this. But some strange things started to happen that kind of set me off.
When I arrived in class, there were only a few people there. The teacher, one Professor Will, was having a discussion with one student (presumably a computer science major at a Virginia university summering at WCU) about the new Mac G5s released this week. The topic of conversation was as unimportant as casual conversations get, with the exception of the processor architecture discussion that ensued.
The Mac G5 apparently uses a 64-bit architecture. That's double anything that's currently in the consumer market. The front-side bus speed is also an impressive 1GHz. But you must accept the fact that Apple has essentially cheated to create this system. They've enlisted IBM's help to produce the 64-bit chips, and use a variant of BSD's Unix as the operating system. So essentially this Mac uses a Linux OS running on IBM hardware. Bottom line - It's not really a Mac. With the exception of the weird handles on the case, it even looks like an evolved "pizza box".
Anyway, their conversation about the G5 wasn't really disturbing. The fact that they found all of these tibits about processor and bus speeds so interesting was disturbing. Professor Will kept leaning over the large class table in front of me to point out cool features of this computer in a whitepaper he had printed out. He looked like a dog about to roll around in poop, he was so giddy. (Incidentally, I've known about the G5 for a couple of days. Where has this guy been that his joy hasn't worn off yet?)
Sundeep, the deaf guy from my web design class, happened into the classroom with his entourage of finger flailing interpreters. They're nice people, but not entirely open-minded about the subject-matter. They sat at my end of the table, which was ok, except for the one interpreter kept trying to look at things I was writing or reading, and it became unnerving.
Class commenced. I will paraphrase:
"Let's go over some of the things I will expect of you in class," says Professor Will.
"You will demonstrate a competency on the Mac," he says. Maybe I didn't explain clearly what I had in mind when I took the class. See, I wanted to learn to draw using the computer. I did not want to learn the Mac. If I did learn the Mac, it would be incidental to producing art using the computer. Following this?
"...as such, to complete your projects, I will be here 2 hours before class and on Wednesdays to open the lab for your use." Whoa. Projects? Exclusively on the Mac? This is not good. I only want to have to come to school when class is scheduled.
"Before we can start, we will need a basic nomenclature so that we can converse with each other about the tasks we are performing." Um, ok, where did you learn what nomenclature means? You're looking for the word "vocabulary". Nomenclature implies a system of creating vocabulary for a specific field, for example, if you were naming animals, then you might use a Genus-Species nomenclature. That's why there is a different word, you see.
"Hardware. Hardware is... the computer. Anything that's not software." Brilliant.
"Processor. This is the CPU. The Central Processing Unit." Yeah, and? Oh, you mean to skip explaining this and just jump directly to...
"Data Bus. The data bus does... The data bus..." He stumbles, trying to come up with something.
The student he was talking to before speaks up, "If you think of the processor as the brain of the computer, then the data bus is the spinal column." Hmm, not bad, dude. Hey, wait... Wasn't the teacher touting the bus speed of the G5 before? If he didn't know what the bus was, why was he so excited about how fast it went? Hmm.
Skipping a few items of "nomenclature", the only interesting term he offered was with the term "Imposition Software", which is software that arranges smaller pages onto a larger sheet of paper so that they are in the correct order when the paper is cut and bound. Not really a startling revelation.
Then he started to use the computer. It was pretty clear that he knew what he was doing, but I have several problems with his technique.
- Too Darn Slow - He just wouldn't talk fast enough. I was peeling my eyelids back to keep from passing out during his increasingly long lecture.
- Wouldn't use menus - This is a big problem with people that, in my opinion, "Just Don't Get It." He insisted on teaching commands by providing the shortcut keys. Shortcut keys are great, but when you don't know the command you're looking for, it will be more handy to know where other similar menu items are so that you might find it amongst them. Of course, on the Apple, this concept of grouped menus may not apply, but I won't know because I wasn't shown them.
- Fiddled With the Mouse - It wasn't annoying at first, but it became moreso as he progress through his hour monologue. He kept flinging the mouse about the screen too quickly to see the pointer and playing with things. It would have been quite disturbing for any computer novices, since you couldn't really tell when he was actually showing something or just screwing around.
At one point, he was showing the use of the Undo command. (By the way, the students have yet to touch a computer by this time, even though we're sitting in a room full of them.) He says, "You can press Command-Z to Undo what you last did. Photoshop will let you Undo up to 199 things!" Gee, wow!
A classmate asks, "What about Redo?" He's referring to the feature that lets you re-do something that you undid, asking if that feature exists like if does in the other programs with which he is familiar.
"Yes, Redo," says Professor Will in an inflection connoting, Thanks for correcting me, I can't believe I got that wrong, but I'm about to fix my mistake by telling you about the actual Undo feature.
"...and if you press Command-Shift-Z, you can Undo what you Redid. So press Command-Z to Redo, and Command-Shift-Z to Undo the Redo." Patently wrong and air-brained, and so simple that one must wonder how it could have been expressed incorrectly, especially if his whole aim was to provide us with terminology for the class. The student who asked the question rolled his eyes, as did several others without correcting the professor.
So far, I had learned "Imposition Software", watched students make up for the professor's incompetence at least five times, and pretty much felt as if I had wasted the previous two hours of my life, a full 4% of the total time alloted for this class.
At the first sign of a break, I perked up, and when we were dismissed for ten minutes, I bolted over to the registrar's office to dump this teacher and his crappy lessons.
I wonder if I could have hung in there a little longer. Actually gotten to touch the Mac and use Illustrator. Maybe things would have improved. But he clearly didn't listen to our feedback.
Here is a true concern: This professor obviously knew something about art but insisted on teaching how to use the computer. So when he has taught computer use badly, and evaluates our projects, will he grade based on his lousy computer tutelage or on the artistic expertise which he did not impart? A curious thought, I think.
I wasn't going to risk my grade finding out.
