Angry post about physics class

Let's get one thing straight. I HATE the politics at USC. And here is how my higher learning institution of choice has most recently fucked me over.

So I have to take this physics course, right? My advisor tells me that I should take a course called "Physics in the Arts" since because I'm not a physics major or anything remotely close to one, a real physics course isn't exactly practical. It's a distance education course, which means that it SHOULD be a "watch the DVD, answer the questions, study the terms, get an A" kinda deal. WRONG.

This is the most convoluted, fucked up, unintelligable bunch of shit I have encountered so far at USC. That's really saying something, because our university very often spews fucked up unintelligible shit if it means that they'll get an extra dollar. This takes the cake for me though.

I get this "package" in the mail with all the stuff im supposed to need for my physics class. It includes: a set of DVDs. No instructions, no book, no nothin. So I go down to distance education. Really, this incident should have been my very first red flag, but I had faith in the university, thinking it was just a mix up. I bought a book at the distance ed. office.

It turns out to be a hand written, hand typed, hand bound "volume" of physics terms embedded in run on sentances, and tangents that have nothing to do with physics. The graphs are hand drawn. The models are hand labled. There are no captions. Nothing is bold, there are no headlines or subtitles or ANYTHING to break the information up, unless you count chapter numbers. It's just paragraph after paragraph of rambly explanations about fucking COMPLICATED concepts (for me anyway) and lists and lists of formulas that contain symbols and numbers that are NEVER explained. Not once.

The DVD's are even worse than the book. They're labled "Lesson 1-2, Lesson 3-5, Lesson 7-26" etc etc, but they don't follow the chapters, not even a little bit. They don't necessarily discuss what's covered in the chapters, they cover material that isn't even mentioned in the text, and theyre not in order of the book. And they're poorly produced so half the time the experiments he does aren't visible or clear enough to get.

The homework is to answer four questions per chapter. But heres the thing, the questions have NOTHING to do with the material half the time, and if they are covered in the text or the DVD, different terms are used to cover them, and of course there is no rhyme or reason or order to the whole thing so it's bloody impossible to locate the information concerning the question you have to answer. like 80% of the time, I have to look it up on Google and that doesn't pan out half the time.

So ask your teacher, you say. Well, my teacher lives in Greenville. I think. And he hasn't responded to any email or phone call in three weeks. I'm completely on my own, and to make it INFINATELY worse, the university won't do anything but throw red tape in my face and tell me that my teacher is on "vacation". WHAT? Why is it even remotely ok to go on vacation for over 90% of a class that you're supposed to be teaching?! I've only gotten one assignment back, there were no comments on it, and I have a test in like four days. I DIDN'T PAY EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS TO FUCKING TEACH MYSELF PHYSICS.

If I fail physics I am going to raise holy BLEEDING hell to everyone that has anything at all to do with this ordeal.