194-1 and Israel vows revenge

[exploited]

So did you guys do case studies or anything? For instance, one of my first assignments in my poli-sci class was to submit an essay about a controversial, modern political conflict (which we chose from a list) and then analyze the arguments of the listed authors. I did mine about the Israel-Palestine conflict, so I read The Fateful Triangle by Chomsky, Ariel Sharon's autobiography, Arthur Hertzberg's "The Zionist Idea," which is an older compilation of Zionist thinkers writings, and a few others that I forget. I don't remember the word count, but I remember my finished product was just over 20 pages and I was worried if it was too long.

The reason I ask is because you were expected to be able to understand the full spectrum of opinion on that particular subject. This was pretty much the standard model for assignments at UWO, at least for the first year. Is that anything like your experience?

[John Galt]

yes, did things similar to that, or others where you were forced to argue an opinion different than your own. the thing is my class size for poli sci classes was between one and two dozen students, so most of the time was discussion of materials read, instead of writing assignments (which we did have to do too, but it was a lot of discussion)

[Homer]

[John Galt]

[The Comrade]

the one polisci class i had outside of the intro shit had a single 35 page paper as the assignment on any topic that then had to be tied into globalization and the breakdown of nation-states. it was a fun class because it was the global studies/polisci senior seminar that i was in no way qualified to be in. most of the class was discussion of theory applied to real world situations.

the class was decent enough but the final presentations of people's papers was the worst thing i experienced at college. everyone(and i do mean at least 90% of the class) changed their topic halfway through to kony 2012. the result was that everyone had poorly researched papers about a fad movement so each 3 hour long class was nothing but listening to the same 20 minute long presentations about the same topic involving the same facebook activism buzzwords. it was a god damn nightmare and the look of disappointment on the professors face, who had reached that nirvana state of college professors where they just don't give a shit about the self-esteem of their students, was palpable. i got a 4.0 even though i didn't do my presentation and i'm 99% sure it's because i wrote about a topic that wasn't kony2012.

[The Comrade]

[exploited]

Heh. The lectures for my poli-sci class were attended by around 700 students. That was three or four times a week. After the lecture, we'd have group discussions with ten or twelve others, led by a TA, which lasted about an hour but could go longer. Often we'd have to present our thoughts on whatever assignment we were working on. Then there was mandatory guest lectures, usually a couple a month, by practicing political scientists.

I'm just curious if there is any real structural differences in postsecondary education between the US and Canada.

[John Galt]

[The dane]

[John Galt]