So, I more or less just need to vent this.
In the beginning of the year, our physics teacher told us that learning ROOT was a useful skill to have, and that we would have to use it to do the more difficult labs. He showed us his wiki, told us to do the tutorials on it, and hasn’t mentioned it since.

I like to use this analogy. Say you’re going to get a fishing lesson. Now imagine that, when you get there, your instructor pushes you into the water, tosses a lifejacket in after you, and tells you to learn how to swim on your own. Then, the instructor continues on with the fishing lesson. Three problems here.

1) You did not sign up for a swimming lesson. You weren’t even warned that this would involve swimming at all. Yes, swimming is an important skill to know if you’re going to be fishing, but you weren’t prepared to do it.

2) Had you been given the lifejacket before being tossed into the water, you might have had a fighting chance. Now, you have to try putting on the jacket while simultaneously both trying to hold on to your fishing pole and trying to learn/ listen to the instructor.

3) There is a very good possibility that you will drown if you either don’t get to shore or don’t learn fast enough.

Had our teacher sent us an email saying we would need to learn ROOT and given us a link to the tutorial (prepared + lifejacket) before the semester started, I would have had the time, resources, and patience to learn it. When you throw something like this at me when I’m trying to juggle 4 other classes, tutoring, extra-curricular obligations, and taking a “half-class” in preparation for a summer semester abroad, there’s not going to be time to take what is basically another class online with little to no guidance. Whatever time was spent was wasted, as I have little-to-no background regarding matters such as this, got frustrated, and gave up before I could accomplish anything.

What ended up happening is I made my way to shore, dropped the lifejacket, and did my best to learn to fish (ignored the tutorial, tried to learn physics). If swimming (programming) needed to be done, my lab partner did it, as he was much more familiar with C++/ROOT than I was.

Now we have gotten our take-home final. Guess what’s on there? Yup. We have to program something that will let us identify a particle based on data in a file (similar to a lab we did).

I really really really wished that the physics department would have some class we could take where we would learn Maple, MATLAB, Mathematica, ROOT, and all the other stuff that teachers either assume we know or assume that we can learn on our own. That way, I wouldn’t have to flounder helplessly in a sea of stuff that I don’t know. I can have someone to guide me, to let me know what I’m doing wrong, and to praise me when I finally do something right; currently, as far as I’m concerned, computers are made of circuits and magic, do things because of user input and magic, and they run on electricity. And possibly magic.

Oh, and to make matters worse, half the time the server for my professor’s wiki is down, so I can’t access it. And whenever I even try to open ROOT, the computer gives me some system error about something missing from the computer. FP has helped me install this, and it still pops up.

If I can’t learn what I need to know by the time I have to turn this in, I’m thinking about writing down my suggestion for the course and my reasoning for why it’s important we have one. That way, at least it’s not completely blank, and maybe I’ll even get some partial credit.

tl;dr: I’m bitching about how my physics professor expects us to know/ do things he hasn’t taught us how to do, and how it’s on the final.


____________________