Slow Papers are Frustrating

Three of the four papers I'm taking at university this trimester are so frustrating because they are going so slow. The offending papers are STAT131, COMP202 and COMP206. These three are admittedly all below the year of papers I should be taking, being a third year student (4 majors = falling behind in some courses), but still.

STAT131, being a paper full of first years probably has the best excuse out of these three, and the slowness is most likely exacerbated by the fact I've done second year maths, and one third year maths paper (doing another now), but the lecturer spends so much time explaining things, and going over things more times than he has to. We've had 4 lectures now, and only covered like 12 pages of the student notes. It's around 150 pages (remarkably short) and we have 30 lectures, so we should at least be up to page 20. Ah well, it's probably my fight for going to lectures. I skipped the tutorial today because the assignment was so ridiculously easy.

COMP206 is the one that causes me the most frustration. We spent like 15 minutes in one lecture going over function calls. When every student there has had to have done two papers in Java (as they're prerequisites) they must know how these work. And with programming, you can only do so much in lectures, they should only be going over the language features very briefly, and then let us learn all the ins and outs by writing actual code, at least to me. Instead they covering things in way too much detail in the lectures, and the assignment we got (due in 2 weeks time) was crazily short, I finished it in 2 hours and did more than I had to do.

COMP202 isn't so bad, we're not really going over the stuff particularly slowly, but there are other reasons why the lectures of this paper frustrate me. Firstly, way too many people talk in the lectures, come on, this is university guys. And when our (current) lecturer doesn't talk that loudly (plenty loud enough when people aren't talking) it makes for quite an infuriating time. Also, out lecturer is a little too nice, when people ask questions that really should be done in a tutorial, helpdesk, email, on the forum or whatever, she'll stop and help them for 5 minutes when it doesn't really relate to what we're doing and is of little help to the other people in the theatre. Especially as it is a rather difficult setting to answer one on one questions well, so they don't often get answered satisfactorily for the asker.

Ah well, my only hope is these papers get better as time goes on (and possibly as lecturers change). Enough of a rant by me.