odd stuff

there are tons of weird things at my university. one is that the course numbers do no mean anything. usually, 100-level courses are to be taken first, and then 200, and 300 and 400-level courses are for junior and senior undergraduates... and 500-level courses and above are for graduate students... but here, freshmen can take geography 690 their first year of school, and then the next course in the sequence could be geography 248. oddest thing in the world. numbers are assigned completely randomly.

another strange thing is the "service departments" that they have. the regular departments offer minors and majors, and you can graduate with a degree in information technology management, for example. but then they have 13 (THIRTEEN) service departments that offer course but not degrees! one of them is english! others are maths, history, psychology, geography, computer science, physics, etc. these departments only offer courses to students from other departments. for example a student in arts and contemporary studies has some options, like french or history or english options, and then they take courses in the french or history or english department. so basically, these service departments are seen as "secondary," and way less important than other, "real" departments, which means less money, less space, less respect, less power, etc. oddest thing in the world.

another strange thing is that they have "prerequisite" courses, like everyone else in the world, but they also have "antirequisite" courses, which means that if you take, say english 423 you cannot also take english 863 and vice-versa. which means that some courses are basically the same, which sounds like a waste of resources to me... except when you remember that there are between 60 and 150 students PER SECTION in those classes... i don't know why they wouldn't simply have different sections of the same course, but then maybe it's because the teachers who will teach those sections want to do their own stuff... oddest thing in the world.

these 60 to 150 students per section is another odd thing. they have the most complicated (dis)organisation of teaching assistants, marking assistants (we don't give GRADES here, we give MARKS), and other assistants whose names i can't remember (those who assist with exams, etc.). they have scientific formulas that take into account the number of students per sections, the number of assignments, the number of credit hours, the number of textbooks used, the number of sections, and the age of the teachers (nah, i'm kidding on that last one) and then they're given a certain number of hours when they can use assistants for certain things. so they don't have a system like in the us, where graduate students become teaching assistants and teach hundreds of students on their own so that there can be more sections of the same course with fewer students in each section. craziest thing in the world!

and THEN, teachers who can have assistants must actually post their job offers online through a special system, and people from our university but also from other universities and the community can apply for the position and the teachers have to read tons of CVs and interview the potential assistants and hire them and that's another big mess because some are our own students but some are not. the reason why few of the assistants are actually our own students is because less than 2% of our student population are graduate students and few teachers want to hire undergraduate assistants. craziest thing in the world!

ok, last one for tonight: in the us, people say "bilingual" as bye-lin-gwal, in 3 syllables, but here, in canada, they say bi-lin-giu-al, in 4 syllables. haha! funniest thing in the world!