How to Destroy and Rebuild My Faith in Humanity in Five Hours or Less

[akujunkan]

Japanese university courses are generally conducted on the following pattern: the professor assigns a student to outline each week's reading and recite said outline to the class. This means that the amount of work turned into to the professor is pretty low compared to the West; conversely, said presentation pretty much determines at least 50% of

Comments

[theosakakoneko]

UGH.

Wow people suck.

The whole incompetent secretary thing I'd expect here before Japan, but either way, that is very full of bullshit.

[akujunkan]

What gets me is that it goes beyond the incompetent secretaries. What university doesn't know where its own faculty are located, on its own campus? How can that even **happen??**

[ontogenesis]

That makes the ex-secretary in me want to smack them over the heads with an organizer.

Oh Japan. Why you so crazy?

[akujunkan]

Please, please do so at your earliest convenience. I think that office is going to need all the help it can get.

Also, Hurrah! for Heian period icons. I've never gotten into HnG, but rereading the Ochou Romanse novels has reminded me of the smexiness of kariginu.

[sara_tanaquil]

Professors don't hand out email contact info on the syllabus...?

Symptom of a very different set of expectations for student/teacher dynamics, it sounds like. Contact with your professor is doled out as a privilege rather than regarded as a right. I would be in a lot of trouble with my department if students couldn't reach me!

(Though sometimes it would be nice to impart some of that culture into the students who email me with a pressing question about the exam at 2 am the night before said exam and start the email out "Hi Sara..." Needless to say, no student ever gets my home number.)

[akujunkan]

Nope, which was why I was so surprised last semester when one or two profs insisted that I make note of their email addies right then, which I wasn't going to do because I keep my course syllabi in a folder on my desk and can always go there for the emails...except I now know I can't.

I really think it's more to do with the fact that aside from one's thesis, uni work here is just not at all academically rigorous, so there's really no need to contact your profs.

And that's just kinda...I'd be embarrassed to send an email like that to a prof, because it's basically like saying, "Hi, I hadn't really considered the course material before 10pm this evening!" Which is just not good strategy on a number of levels.

[bran420_7]

The whole purpose of an address related to the university is to provide the students with a contact point in an emergency situation, isn't it? Isn't why the profs DON'T give you their private contact information? Every hear of a voicemail tree? Hell, even our high school had one. TEN YEARS AGO.

On a personal note, our prof of Religious Studies last year not only gave us his personal e-mail(he said he rarely checked the uni address) but also gave me his home address so I could mail him a book.

Damn, cultural inhibitions suck...

[akujunkan]

You would think so, right? Right?

Anyone?

Bueller?

(Oh, and in case you wanted the punchline, the prof emailed me back from the selfsame email address the uni didn't want to give to me in the first place. Take that, logic!)

[wombatdeamor]

Props to the professor for being overwhelmingly cool.

Does Walmart own your university?

[akujunkan]

Bwahaha, it's private, so they just might.

Does this mean I'm gonna have to go to those craptastical training seminars you posted about a few months back? o.O

[wombatdeamor]

No, they'd probably make you take lessons on a computer that had nothing to do with the job you were going to be doing, and then they'd ask you to do a thousand things that weren't your job, and furthermore you know people who do those things for a living that make almost thirty times what you make.

But that's almost like college isn't it?