Somehow this week has managed to be the culmination of almost everything that I initially feared could go wrong with taking public transit during winter. Compared to this, the fiasco on Friday could be a mere passable event.
Highlights of the week include:
● Almost being late for a midterm
● Being late for a lab session
● Being trapped on a VIVA bus for over three hours
● Almost missing Chinese New Year's Eve dinner
● The most hours ever spent studying on a public transit vehicle in a single week
● Writing a midterm for the worse course I have ever taken
Initially, I thought that the storm this week would be way more mild than last week, with less snowfall but a chance of freezing rain. As a lesson learned I immediately registered the Winter Storm Hotline into my cellphone. Sadly, the storm ended up being very wet and voluminous...
Wednesday morning provided a little scare as one of the ever fragile subway stations decided it would lose all power, grinding the whole line to a halt. However this is not all that unusual, and luckily that was the only interruption that morning. I normally arrive over an hour before the start time of the miderm, and I managed to arrive before the midterm started.
Later that day, there was an optional review session for the pharmacology course from 5-6. Initially I wasn't going to attend due to the professor being notorious for creating more confusion and havoc in her "clarifications", but in the end I stayed...for a reason best left unbiased by hindsight.
Because of this, upon reaching Finch station at 6:59pm, there ensued a great one hour wait in the snowstorm, by now at its peak. At least I had practice from last week. But the reason for the delay was that there was apparently some major series of accidents north along Yonge, causing a blockade immediately along the VIVA route. No buses arrived until an hour later, during which time amassed a sizable amount of snow on the platform, people in the station, and water in my shoes. Although during this time I was able to see flashes of lightning in the sky, which is apparently really rare during snowstorms.
Since the whole Finch/Yonge intersection was literally frozen in place, the bus driver headed up normally along Yonge, but reached an impasse at Clark station, where we too remained immobile for an hour. In addition to freaking about about having a lab the next day and a midterm on Friday, there was a man onboard who seemed to be suffering from a mental disorder which caused him to scream shrilly every now and then, effectively scaring the hell out of everyone on board.
There eventually formulated a plan to divert the bus through some residential streets and connecting to Bayview via John St., before turning back towards Richmond Hill Center. Awesome, let's inch along the road faster, please. Unfortunately, the plan, although with very good intentions I'm sure, involved driving into
one-lane roads and over a
very steep hill. This effectively amounted to being trapped in the bus for a further two hours.
During this time the atmosphere on the bus instead grew rather relaxed as we all accepted our fates in the blue-coloured tomb. Everyone grew accustomed to the random wailing of the aforementioned fellow. However, another dilemma was still present, which was that today was Chinese New Year's Eve. The tradition says that on Chinese New Year's Eve, you must dine together with your family in order to ensure good luck for the new year, a rule that my family adamantly abided by. It's either that or be cursed for the rest of the year or something. As it was currently about two hours from the end of the day, you can see why the frequency of stressful phone calls I received from home was increasing.
My father was previously stuck on the roads too but eventually reached Richmond Hill Center and we drove home. After spending about 5 minutes charging back and forth up the driveway which by now was covered in a foot of snow, our family had Chinese New Year's Eve dinner at 11:15pm.
The following day involved arriving late for the lab, rushing in short-breathed followed by a few other stragglers, but understandably we were still allowed to write the quiz normally administered at the beginning of the session and granted a zero if you were late.
Friday was a whole different dimension of stress. This involved the pharmacology midterm. However, this was no ordinary midterm. It was also no ordinary course. PCL201, up until last year, was effectively a bird course (well, as bird-course-y as life sci courses can go at UofT). This year, there was a new professor. And she decided to do things her way. This includes:
● Being excessively rude towards her students. She seems to view every reasonable request as a threat to her position or status, belitting us for wanting things that every other professor willingly provides.
● This includes lecture slides which she provides in a format which requires a magnifying glass to read without permanent damage to the eyes. When students made the request to change the format, or at least provide the Powerpoint so that the students could do it themselves, she outright refused.
● The lecture slides consist of cut and paste from what seems like Google Search images.
● She makes many, many mistakes during her lecture. She mixes up very important terms such as "hydrophobic" and "hydrophilic" which can totally change one's understanding of a concept, as well as mixing up drug names (Digoxin? Dioxin? Didroxin?).
Obviously the last straw came when marks were directly involved, as is always the case in UofT, it seems. The class average on the simple 10 question MC quizzes were dramatically low. They were the kind of quizzes that are simply supposed to "make you review" and allow you to get 10/10 on for almost every one. Most of the more adamant students appealed to the student council for pharmtox and they actually held a student meeting for the issue. Now that the midterm has passed, no doubt there will be an even greater source of enmity towards the professor.
As of yesterday, over 50 people had dropped the course. Which makes one sarcastically wonder what retake % this course will receive at the end of this semester.
Luckily on a much lighter note, tomorrow is the day of the
VGL concert in Toronto! Hooray. As well, I just bought
Our Dumb World today which is written by
The Onion, and it is basically the best book in the world on the world.
On a more grave note, there is an organic chem midterm next week. Owch.
