Shaky Foundations

Thank God the semester is almost over. The introductory SQL class I'm taking online has been OK (fortunately the due dates of the homework assignments are mostly flexible), but the classroom based course is driving me up a wall. Nominally titled "Introduction to Telecommunications", it encompasses two of the three modules for the CIW Foundations certification test. Supposedly meets from 6:30 to 10 PM on Thursday nights. Except that until the last couple weeks, we never ran even close to 10 PM. Not that that's a bad thing.

First part of the course was Internet Business Foundations. I have seldom been so bored in my life, and that's saying a lot. We're talking about an extremely shallow overview here, with the instructor basically going over the textbook hitting the high points (which aren't very high) and adding essentially nothing. Lesson 2, for example, was about Web browsers. We carried out several "lab" exercises, meaning we downloaded and installed Netscape, Firefox, and Opera on our classroom computers and navigated to assorted web pages. Lesson 4 was an overview of databases and search engines. Learn how to use Google! Woo-hoo! All eight lessons in the first book were about on that level. One week we signed up for Yahoo and Hotmail email accounts.

Each week we had a 5-question multiple-guess quiz on the previous week's lesson. Dead easy questions, except for the occasional "date" questions. (Like which year all mainstream browsers got frames capabilities. Who gives a crap?) And the sporadic "homework" assignments were mostly trivial, irrelevant busywork. One of the assignments was to outline the last book chapter, which was an overview of project management. Another was to download four images of trees from Google Images and email them to the instructor. (Thus demonstrating we knew how to use those email accounts we established.)

Over the course of ten weeks, we had two classes cancelled, and eventually got through the eight chapters. Now, those of you who are familiar with college schedules will immediately realize that's well over half the semester spent on the "easy" module; at that point, there were four classes left. The second module is Network Technology Foundations, and while the book has only five chapters, it has about the same page count as the first one. Lesson 1 is a blockbuster on Introduction to Networking, with more acronyms than you can shake a cable modem at, like NOC, OSI/RM, CRC, NFS, UDP, NetBEUI, CSMA/CD, NICs, LANs, WANs, WAPs, WEP... and I know bloody well the tests are going to be littered with them.

I'm sitting in class right now, listening with less than half an ear (with rare exceptions, it's all in the book), and halfway through tonight's class, we have finally started Lesson 2 (TCP/IP) -- after spending two and a half weeks on Lesson 1!

Did I mention that the instructor's specialty is networking? That he teaches a whole friggin' course on networking? Mm-hmm.

Astute readers may by now have calculated that we have one and a half classes left to cover Lessons 2 through 5. Houston, we have a problem. So of course, now the instructor is keeping us till 10 because he's so far behind. There's a slide on the screen labelled "Demultiplexing." My eyes are glazing over.

I had forgotten just how much I hate sitting in a classroom. And the hell of it is, the spring semester course schedules list an online section of this same course. This fall, there were no online sections; if there had been, I'd have been in it. Would that I had waited. **sigh**