Supporting
podstudent18. The anatomy teacher is a smart guy and stuff, but teaching the material it doesn't always come across that well to us students. Sure not every teacher is perfect in the world, but he stands out from the other professors in our school... and not in a good way. No other class has been this much of a struggle and us students spend MOST of our time on anatomy. What makes it worse is that it shows he is getting up there in age. He isn't very well organized (ex: like one person in my class said the professor will talk about something that isn't on his slides and then later when the slide comes up it will be about what he talked about 20 minutes ago), his notes are terrible to the point where you just write everything he is saying, draws horrible diagrams that are hard to read and follow (you'd think after all of his years in teaching he'd just simply post neat diagrams that he could reuse instead of making sloppy drawings on the spot) to the point it is scribbling all over a screen, and you notice old age affecting him as he will constantly correct himself about a word he just said, students who had him before will tell you he is inconsistent with what he says to the class. Its not meant to make fun of the teacher but when you see wide scale class grades suffering and see the curve being such a big deal... you come off feeling (besides depressed and frustrated) his teaching ability leaves alot to be desired. Also, having two teachers alternate back and forth kind of makes things tough as you just wish you had one teacher the whole way. You also wonder if our "main teacher" is just better off teaching at the dental school and our school just having one person. Thankfully that painful experiment of the 3rd wheel TA teaching us stopped after the 1st exam. No other class comes even close to comparing to this situation. I looked to see what is written in the past on this forum. Here are some excerpts that I know bunch of us would nod and say yes:
"The Dr Landers (Anatomy professor) issue has been greatly debated before and you can probably find the threads still. I thought he was awesome at teaching, just unorganized."
“As of right now it seems very disorganized which makes material that is already complex even rougher.Instead we get the typical overreactive punishment. Hard practical exam tags for everyone.”
“Attendance has dropped so low that a few of the professors now have started to get pissed off or as one of the doctors just recently put it to us "Just a warning. From what I have heard from the rest of the faculty this morning, you guys are getting the reputation for being a class that doesn't attend your lectures."
“So guess what that translates into? That's right the profs start writing "punishment" exams similar to how the lab practical tags get tougher as participation drops. Yet another overreactive group punishment that effects the people that attend and put in the hard work.”
All these quotes above about our school from years past on this websites forums. Seeing that this a trend year after year.. you wonder if our school just sits back and does nothing about this without a care in the world. The school should realize we learn far far more from the anatomy tutors than the anatomy teacher and thats what helps students get through this... its to a ridiculous extreme. Also, I don't like our class representatives/student government cuz all they have done is just send out emails telling us we need to dissect more. Thats it. They haven't really expressed our concerns, represented us very well or spoke up for us.
So yeah... anatomy has really been a sore spot this semester. As one kid who took the course said welcome to anatomy at Kent State. You get the feeling the school thinks if we do poorly it will make us work harder, but looking around it actually has the opposite effect. And we aren't looking forward to taking neuro with him in the spring. Pray to survive and yes laugh at his dry jokes as much as you can...