college (part deux)

It’s official. For the first time in more years than I’d like to believe, I am a college student. This time around, I’m doing it at the Raphael Recanati International School, Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya. The degree: a three-year BA program in Middle East Security Studies, Counter-Terrorism and International Relations offered by the Lauder School of Government.

Much of college hasn’t changed from however long ago. The administration, the faculty and the students, for example, are still all full of shit. My classmates are an interesting group, and I mean that in a good way and in a not-entirely-good way. Some of them seem to love learning and some seem to be passionate about the subjects. It is a very mixed group, with a lot of people from Europe, southern Africa and North America, as well as Israelis. Almost everyone is younger than I am – the students from America tend to be 18-19, the students from Europe maybe 19-20, and the students from Israel about 20-22. They probably did not get a good high school education like mine, which makes me feel bad for them because, depending on the seriousness of this program we’re all in, doing a BA in three years could require a lot of work. I’m quite a bit unimpressed that many would have pursued a bachelor’s degree in Business, but were turned away by that program’s math requirement, and ended up in the Government program because it’s considered easier. On the other hand, I think the general consensus is that the student body at IDC is the most physically attractive group of people in Israel, which to me means eye candy, or another reason to attend classes in which attendance is not required (note: I enjoy the subject material of all my classes except for one, so I would attend class anyway).

On the other hand, some aspects of college in 2006 are totally different from what I experienced in 1999-2002. Remember hearing 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 years ago about something called “the paperless office”? Today, IDC is doing everything possible to achieve “the paperless campus.” Every course in which I’m enrolled has a website that’s accessible by signing into the university’s website. On the course websites, I’m expected to locate the following:

• my course syllabi. They are not printed out and distributed on hard copy in class, which means that when a professor jumps immediately into a confusing (for my classmates, not for me) lecture on the very first day, no one even knows where we are.
• weekly readings for class. What ever happened to buying the book in the bookstore (or online to save money) and picking up a copy of the coursepack in the printshop? IDC’s bookstore contains school supplies and about five different books; there is no printshop. This means it is suddenly my own responsibility to print all the readings – if, that is, the professors actually want me to read them.
• a PowerPoint presentation for each lecture. Back in the day, we would read what we were supposed to read (or not read it), then come to class and listen to a professor lecturing and occasionally writing notes on the board. We’d write down what we considered important, and anything that was covered both in the reading and the lecture would definitely be in the test. Now, the professors post their atrocious visual lectures online before class. We’re supposed to download them and open them in our laptops during class, and type notes into the individual PowerPoint pages as the pages are displayed on the projector. What is wrong about this system? Only everything. I won’t go here into why PowerPoint is totally evil, but I will point out that an entire generation of college students is being trained not to take notes – not to know by ear what’s important, not to know how to write it down – and not to study for tests. And at the same time, professors seem perhaps to be losing their lecturing skills – one of the things that PowerPoint does to people is atrophy their ability to improvise.
• announcements for class. Did the classroom get changed arbitrarily by the administration? Is class canceled next week? You won’t know unless you log into the site.
• assignments.
• and more! Want to contact the professor at his or her email? The address is on the site, since there wasn’t a syllabus… too bad the address on the site might not work!

This probably would not be so bad, except: IDC’s network and website absolutely, positively suck. Starting with the network – it is accessible only in certain buildings and, in those buildings, only in certain classrooms. In some cases, my computer can see the network to join it, but the network is not connected to the internet. In other cases, the network is invisible (ie, out of range) or only momentarily visible. Only in a minority of classes can I actually get onto the internet to access the course website, where I would find everything for the class. If the problem with IDC’s network is that I can rarely get onto it, the problem with IDC’s website is that I never want to get onto it: without a doubt the most poorly designed website that I’m unfortunate enough to need to access regularly, its programmers violated virtually every rule of decent, sane site design in its construction. It’s super graphic-intensive, which means it takes a long time to load every page. Everything is in frames, and opening in new windows when I don’t want it to. It doesn’t work on most web browsers. All the actual information is stored on the site not as text, but as numbered .doc files that need to be downloaded, opened and immediately retitled because nobody thought to give them proper titles in the first place – or how about saving bandwidth, server space and years of man-hours by just writing the information where I want to find it? Oh, what else? I’ll tell you what else: on the first day of school, I signed into my brand new IDC email account and immediately discovered that it was overrun by spam! Since then, I’ve been getting near-daily spam reports from the piece of crap spam filtration system that the university installed. And the reports are, of course, html emails that are practically unusable. Idiots!

By the way, this is also the method the RRIS administration chooses for communicating directly with students. When they need to tell me something, they send me an email. But instead of writing the one line of relevant text in the email, they write it in a MS Word file and attach the file to the email, and the content of the email is just to let me know that there’s a file attached. Unbelievable!

For first year students in my program, seven classes are required: Introduction to Government, Introduction to Modern History and the Growth of Zionism, Introduction to International Politics, History of the Modern Middle East, Globalization and International Political Economy, Microeconomics, Communication Skills in English. I was exempted automatically from English on the grounds that I studied for at least one year in a university where English was the language of instruction, which is a bit of a relief because my understanding is that I might have exploded if I’d been compelled to attend even one of the lessons.

Regarding the other classes, I have run into a bit of difficulty. Obviously every single one of the remaining six classes, with the lone but obvious exception of Microeconomics, is fascinating, entertaining and enjoyable to me. And yet, can I really be expected to sit through courses that are in three cases (Microeconomics, Modern History / Growth of Zionism, Modern Mideast) exact replicas of courses I’ve studied elsewhere, and and in another case (Government) a very close approximation of several classes combined? I think not – to do so would be unfair to me, unfair to my classmates and unfair to my professors – and therefore I need to get myself exempted from them. The school, however, has implemented a ludicrous policy of requiring both transcripts and syllabi from the earlier classes in order to apply for exemptions.

What does this mean, practically? If I’d taken the earlier classes in Israel, the syllabi would be on file at the university. In America, however, universities and colleges do not keep syllabi and make them available. So I have to go through box after box of papers in a country that I don’t live in, in order to find the documentation for classes that I took years ago. Thanks, RRIS; in the mean time I am attending all the classes from which I’ll eventually be exempted.

Here are some more of my least favorite things about IDC:

1. Suppose a professor assigns a paper in class. This is normal and natural. What is neither normal nor natural is that we the students don’t turn in the assignment to the professor. We turn it in to someone in an office at the other end of the campus. This is the Heder Avodot, or Assignments Room. That person then submits our work to the professor, who gives it to his TA, who grades it and then reverses the process for us to get it back. Sounds really smart!
2. Some of my professors actually take attendance during class by passing around a sign-in sheet. IDC has a policy of excused absences and unexcused absences. Wow! So what happens when my mother and brother come to visit and I want to go meet them at the airport? That’s an unexcused absence! And what happens when I have medical tests that last an entire day? That is an excused absence, but of course the professors don’t handle the bureaucracy of excused absences themselves – students are responsible to take notes from the doctor to another university office and give them to another university bureaucrat.
3. I live in central Tel Aviv, work in Ramat Gan and go to school in Herzliya, which means I need to spend a great deal of time and money waiting for, and traveling on, trains and buses. The bus from Tel Aviv to Herzliya takes a ridiculously long amount of time and I’d still need to walk 15 minutes from my house to it, and another 15 minutes from the stop to the university, so it’s out of the question, and I’m consequently taking the train every day. But the train station in Herzliya is about two miles from the university with no bus service and the only way to get to the university from the train is to take a private cab, which costs NIS 20, several times the price of the train itself! Fortunately, I’m usually able to find someone else and split the cabfare, but this situation is absolutely moronic and it must be ended. I can’t figure out why the University hasn’t gotten the idea to run a shuttle back and forth from campus, charging NIS 10/person. They could make a huge profit off of us commuters. On a positive note, tremping (ie, hitchhiking) out of the university back to the train station, or to work in Ramat Gan, or to home in Tel Aviv, is very easy.
4. What else? I don’t have a student ID card and no one seems to be able to tell me when I’ll get one. Apparently, they send students’ photos in batches of 50 to a place in Tel Aviv to have the cards made, and therefore it can take three weeks, a month or maybe even longer. So why doesn’t the university just buy an ID card making machine? NYU had one and it resulted in me getting my ID card within three minutes.
5. There’s more to complain about; I just can’t think of it all right now.