Couldd I please just have a whine about the other students in my class?

[redexpat]

NB am in a forrin country so things are a bit different here.

Am about to start my second year of a three and a half year social work degree. There was much discussion on our facebook group earlier this week about the articles we're supposed to read for Monday. How the tutor hasnt put them up on the intranet and how long are we supposed to wait. I asked if anyone had actually emailed the tutor to ask. Silence. So I emailed him. He replied that the intranet was down so there wasn't much he could do. I wrote back saying if he sent them to me I could put them on our FB page, which he did. So the whole thing was sorted by me in less than one hour.

Another article we were supposed to read was unavailable, because the link to the pdf was broken. I emailed the magazine saying hey this link is broken and i need to read it for uni - could someone please fix it? And got a response within 20 minutes saying thanks for bringing it to our attention. We'll fix it, in the meantime here's the pdf. Which I have put on the FB page.

Am I spectacularly good at problem solving? Or do my classmates have NO initiative whatsoever? Do any of you have a similar rubbish class dynamic?

Hi red, are you a bit older than your fellow students? I'm a mature student, and am occasionally stupefied by the lack of problem solving by a group of highly intelligent young people.

On our first day a lecturer asked a young girl to open a window. 'I can't, I've never opened one like that before.' So I opened it. Etc etc.

Well I know what you mean about mature students, but half of the class is on "revaluation" where essentially you can no longer do the job you were originally trained to, so you get the very generous dole while you retrain. There really aren't so many straight out of 6th form!

Love the window story!

I think what you're encountering is a group of students with no interest in doing the reading!

Lots of people in my classes "can't" do the reading if it isn't on the VLE. Lots is available in online journals, many are just scans of chapters AND there is an extensive recommended list so if you really can't find it for whatever reason you could just read something else.

Plus there is a library there for a reason and we have access to a vast network of libraries.