Funny that everyone says math or physics. I thought there'd be more for organic chemistry. I majored in math and my hardes course was fiction. We had to read a book a week, and some of them were really long. Try reading Jude the Obscure in a week. I gave up at around page 50. The course probably would have been easier and I wouldn't have had to retake it if I had used Cliff's notes.
I was a math and physics double major. Class I worked hardest in was Quantum Mechanics, the liberal arts school cut the second semester so the professor tried to squeaze both semesters into one. 6 hours a day minimum for the entire semester.
Hardest course, Real Analysis. The teacher didn't introduce any of the proof concepts, so on homework we were supposed to do these proofs that we didn't know how to structure. Most poorly taught class I ever had. A complete waste of time. Prove a buch of shit you already know how to do.
brain and behavior, psych/neuroscience requirement. the professor's notes for the day would be the front and back of a sheet of paper, completely covered in size 8 font. class started with about 70 kids, by the end there were about 30. definitely a weed out class.
I change my answer after reading the fencing, it reminds me that perhaps my hardest class was freshman year taking Track and Field I. My track coach was the prof. and he's an old guy, great guy but man did he have some standards for an A.
In order to get an A there was standards as far as how far you went or threw or fast, etc. If you didnt get the standard you were graded down accordingly, and you could get extra points to make up for other events if you wanted to. Here were, and still are his grading standards, we did 5 events over the half-semester:
Mile: 6:00, no problem got plenty of extra points on that one, but still difficult for the rest of the class. I jogged like a 5:40.
110 Hurdles: 16.7, ridiculous for anyone who doesnt train for it, granted they were at the intermediate height but still i thought it was a little out there. I think i ran about 19.8
12lb shot put: 35 ft. 35 feet!! I'm a distance runner I can barely throw a tennis ball that far. I threw it about 27 feet maybe.
Triple Jump: 35 feet as well I believe. Not asking too much, but I did end up with a stress fracture that ended my XC season that year. I jumped 33 feet I think.
Okay maybe there was only four events because I dont remember any others, but it was pretty tough.
organic 2 was a bitch. i didn't find calc hard at all, just plug in numbers.
I also took a track class. I missed the day when we tested for the 1600, so I made it up about 15 min after the 800 test (which was the first, last and only competitive 800 I've ever run).
My most difficult class was student teaching. It's a lot of work the first time you teach any course, so doing three different ones and having to get all my material pre-approved all while getting a brutal introduction to enforcing discipline on teenagers was not easy for me.
In terms of difficult concepts, only Foundations of Mathematics was hard. This was a 400-level class that only one guy taught, who was universally recognized as a complete jackass. I got a C and it was the highest grade in the class.
I can honestly say the thought processes involved in 30-some-odd semester hours of math were incredibly useful to me. I mean, you might not use non-Euclidean geometry a lot, but it teaches you to look at the world in a completely different way, plus my prof's emphasis on disproving Euclidean geometry really taught me how to rip an argument apart.
Literary Theory, especially theories of narrative. I still couldn't tell you what 3/4 of that stuff was about...
Last year I spent 8 months teaching in Taiwan, and taking classes at Providence University, Taichung, Taiwan (not affiliated to Providence College).
I took Manadarin (Chinese classes). Mandarin Chinese is not easy for foreigners to learn.
1. In speaking you have to get the `tones` exactly (and I mean exactly....) right, or else no one will understand you (Chinese is a tonal language).
2. With the writing system, you simply have to memorize thousands upon thousands of Chinese characters (and you need to recognize around 3000 just to be able to get the gist of a newspaper article).
It takes years to learn to read and write chinese, but you can learn to speak it at a conversational level in about one year (basic level) if you pay attention to the tones.
And that is where I am at now...decent elementary conversation in Mandarin....but my writing and reading skills leave a lot to be desired.
I took Mandarin in HS. Speaking easy, listening hard, writing damn impossible. But it was a great language for a math major to take, as I had no trouble understanding my profs.
By far Historiography.... the history of history. Didn\'t help the prof was like 90 years old and it was a 2 hour a day class...
Hard because of the \"caffeine factor\".... difficult to stay awake.... 7am start.
Texas Dude wrote:
statistics
i still hate it to this very day!
I'll second that.
2nd semester physical chemistry was probably the toughest for me. The lecture portion wasn't so bad, but the lab was hellish. We had a report due every 2 weeks that averaged 30-40 pages. Ate up all my free time the last semester of my senior year.
a math major.. . wrote:
Funny that everyone says math or physics. I thought there'd be more for organic chemistry.
Organic chemistry is really not very hard. It's mostly just memorization, and then applying this memorization to problem solving. I suppose some people are more blessed with problem solving/investigative abilities, and I'm not trying to sound pompous, but that sort of thing was never very troublesome for me.
I wasn't much for calc though. Just too abstract for me. I don't like playing with a bunch of raw numbers.
Electromagnetic Field Theory, Astrophysics, and Atomic Physics were all pretty difficult, but probably the hardest was Probability for Electrical Engineers. That was taught by unquestionably the most intelligent human being I have ever been in contact with in my life. I once saw him invert a 6x6 matrix in his head in about 5 seconds. Unfortunately his superior intelligence made it difficult for him to relate to 21 year old undergrads.
I was always a terrible math student. Then, in college, I took Calc 1 and 2 and, strangely enough, aced them.
It turned out that our prof spoke almost no English either so I just stopped paying attention to him and learned the entire class from the book (which he was following religiously).
Smart call. I got an A+ and actually finished the final with over an hour to spare. I was the first one to leave.
To this day I'm annoyed that I was taking out huge college loans so that my school could underpay someone who did not even speak the English language to poorly teach a class.
weight training....the teacher was an assistant football coach, a mr. macho type who hated skinny distance runners. Made me lift the day of a X-C meet.....and to boot, gave me a C in the class....(so much for an easy elective, to pad my grade point average).
It was P-chem and cell biology for me.
Statistics and Accounting.
WTF?!?
WTF(2.0)?