Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong

Is probably one of the best pieces of advice you can follow in college.
Like seriously.

As much as I've loved my second year of college so far, it's been a bitch and a half to get through, and coming up on the halfway point here and christmas break, I really wish I had another week or so to get everything together because, well, balancing seven or so classes (especially one that requires you to shit out 60+ drawings every assignment)  has really been a struggle. Of course, that's to be expected and that's not what I'm complaining about because despite that, I really enjoy everything.

What I don't enjoy however, Is this clusterfuck of things thrown at us last minute.

Our finals consist of:
one 30 second to 2 minute animation
a 6 page comic
an animatic
and 3 illustrations from our comic
an art history exam
an animation history exam
and a writing and lit exam

Now, the Art History and Writing and lit exams are to be expected, The 6 page comic was built off a previous existing assignment so we had a much lighter workload there (basically one assignment was "okay guys make 3 comic pages then make 3 more and finish the previous for your final") so it wasn't too bad. The illustrations are kind of a pain but again, nothing too bad there.

The storyboarding class (6 page comic final) and drawing for animation class (3 illustrations from comic final) are taught by the same teacher who pretty much understood we have a lot of crap to do. Even though she still gave us a bunch of things, she was smart enough to allow our projects for the two classes to pretty much fit together thus making things just a little better. I really appreciate this teacher because despite telling it how it is and acting extremely snarky most of the time, in the end she really does care about how we do and tries to help us along and tries to make us push ourselves to be better. I have absolutely no issue with her.

What I do have an issue with, is the newly hired head of our animation department.
I suppose I'm a bit biased considering I was looking forward to having the previous director for a teacher since like, 11th grade and was extremely disappointed to hear he was leaving last year. Nonetheless I gave this new person a chance and despite my best effort to give them the benefit of the doubt, I can without a doubt say that I can't stand them. I love my major, I love my classes, I love the people I'm forced to constantly be around, but this professor (if one could even call them that) just pushes all my buttons constantly.

For one, most of her assignments feel like they were just planned on a whim. (One week near the beginning we spent a class making stupid gifs cause she wanted to do some sort of compilation for a contest or something when we were supposed to be focusing on walk cycles.) Additionally, she rarely gives good critique, (it usually consists of "you should probably fix this" but she never tells us or points us in the right direction as to how to fix it) and she gives off the most condescending vibes sometime.  She also pulls these last minute plans out of her ass for field trips and such and expects us to drop everything and go do them at our own expense (ex: one week she decided we were all going to take a field trip to philidelphia to see a film festival. The trip was to take place that Friday. She told us this on tuesday and only finalized the plans that thursday. If that wasn't enough she expected us to get there on our own *she lives in philidelphia and didn't want to come down to the school to guide us into getting to the correct location* and pay an upwards of 16 bucks to get there by train.) and if that wasn't bad enough, on our manditory trip to the Metropolitan museum of art she decided to schedule a studio tour.
This would have been nice except we always have to do an assignment at the met for art history which a) makes up about 20% of our final grade and b)takes a pretty long time to get done. The studio she wanted to go to was in brooklyn and would have taken a large chunk of time to get there, would have cost us more money, and would have given us the risk of not finishing our previous assignment. We told her our concerns about the assignment and afterwards for the next few weeks she bugged us profusely with "well do you absolutely HAVE to finish it?" and "so do you think you can hurry and get it done in an hour?"
Naturally a lot of us didn't go and despite her making the trip optional after awhile, gave us an attitude when we told her we were going to stay behind.

That's another thing, she gives us an attitude quite a bit. but before I get into that I should probably give a background on this:
You see, Charels, my laptop, decided that finals week would be a fabulous time to add to my stress and on tuesday, he thought it would be fun to have his video card act up and make my screen look like this> sphotos-b.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos…
every time I used photoshop or flash. Because of this, I can no longer do my animation final on my laptop 'cause despite setting flash to autosave every 10ish minutes, I don't like having to force shut down my computer every hour so I've had to use the computer lab for the past week.

This leads us to the story I was talking about earlier. I was going to the lab to work on my project but to do so I had to sign out a tablet from the library. I was informed I had to get my teacher's permission to do this so I went off to go ask her. She was in class but they were listening to a guest speaker (who wasn't really telling them much at the moment aside from basic photoshop things) I was quiet and respectful and if anything she made more of a commotion than I did because when I went to go ask her about the tablets she made a big scene of getting up and walking to the corner of the room to talk to me.
I told her I wanted to work in the basement because, well, I didn't wanna disrupt mister guest speaker man. Her response was to ask in a whiny voice if i could work up in the classroom cause she didn't feel like going down and signing out a tablet for me (if i was to work in that room all i'd have to do was get a tablet pen from the library) I felt kind of uncomfortable doing this but I didn't wanna argue so i went and got a pen and tried to get to work, unfortunately the tablet did not want to do so. so i had to go talk to her again and again she made a big deal out of it. She started messing with the tablet and sort of complaining under her breath. I ended up quietly asking her if it would be easier if I just worked in the basement. It was a simple enough question and I only asked it because I figured it would take shorter for both of us. To which she decided to snap at at me "I DON'T FEEL LIKE SIGNING A TABLET OUT FOR YOU!"

all because she didn't want to miss the exhilarating lecture on how to use the magic wand tool to get rid of backgrounds.

Now I know how irritating it is having someone pull you away from something but really now, I was working on my FINAL for HER CLASS. You would think helping out your student who only needed a second of your time would be more important than not missing maybe 2-3 minutes tops of a presentation that was meant more for your class than it was for you.

so yes! this is my fabulous new teacher.

I completely forgot where I was going with this journal now psssh so i'll just end it here.
sorry for the rant but I hope you enjoyed some fun stories at least.