school is making my life hell. i did spectacularly poorly last semester. trying to integrate a family into my life, learning to be a father, and trying to do school at the same time was too much. it was a hard lesson to learn. but i had been having a difficult time academically since before this. its just that this was supposed to have been an 'easier' term so that i could buck up the old gpa. well, the opposite happened. life for me has sucked big donkey dicks ever since I made the mistake of going to the U for my education. The professors in my engineering classes have the human touch of a test tube. They are incompetent at teaching. For one thing, their only training is in the subject matter that they present. They do not actually 'teach,' so much as present a series of related concepts, one after the other. It is up to the student to try and integrate these concepts into some sort of coherent whole. The student must also devise means for problem solving. In other words, the student is handed a number of tools, sometimes described in great detail, but is given little or no instruction in their use. Most often, the tedium of providing students instruction in problem solving is left to the GSI and the one hour per week he or she is allotted for this task in the discussion section. This is not nearly enough for me. I am an intelligent person, but the teaching style used here at the U simply does not cut it with me. I hate it. The professors are typically far more concerned with getting back to their research than spending the time needed to prepare a lecture that fully illuminates the concepts they feel are important. They keep minimal office hours, and seem to resent having to answer basic questions. i don't think i can keep going on there, and i am looking into other options.