fun with syntax
This class is awful. The teacher is rather young, and lacks that dignified classroom presence that makes students trust she knows what she's talking about. Also the (free online) textbook is poorly written and confusing. Each chapter ends with exercises that are even more confusing, which are expected to be attempted before class, but none of them are ever reviewed in class except for drawing trees of example sentences the instructions did not ask us to draw in the first place. The teacher has us going straight to complex trees without any review, in lecture or the textbook, of how to do basic or intermediate trees, for those of us who have not had to think about them in two years. The homework dates listed on the syllabus are apparently not the dates they are actually due ... I think. I hadn't checked the syllabus in a week and a half, since I was ahead on the deadly-boring reading, and then everyone was asking questions about it today in class (mostly about the teacher's inability to post it to the website in a universally-readable format), but there it was on the syllabus. But as she has updated the assignment document today, and told us tonight not to do any previous versions, I cannot imagine it being due in twenty minutes. Which is good, as it is currently in PDF and my Adobe will not open from the start menu or from opening the document. I am giving up for now, and tomorrow will attempt to kick it into submission or open it on a different computer.