Rate my Professors

As a graduating senior, my biggest piece of advice for students coming back next year is not to pick a class based on ratings and reviews of that professor on ratemyprofessor.

I have made the mistake of putting off taking this one class required for my major for as long as possible just because she got really bad reviews on ratemyprofessor.com. But after taking her recently I have to say she is one of the best professors I have ever had on this campus. She was extremely helpful in helping me understand the material, and her class wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. In contrast, I took a history class for one of my capstones just because of the excellent reviews he got on ratemyprofessor, but he ended up being the most disorganized professor I have had on this campus. He never once gave a heads up on assignments that were due at the beginning of class, which caused me a lot of stress when I had to do a paper at the very last minute. I ended up getting a C in both classes, but I have to say the one I took with the professor who got negative reviews was far easier.

I remember during SOAR orientation one of the advisers telling me not to pick classes based on what I read on ratemyprofessor because they are written mostly by students who don't do the work. Looking back, I'm pretty sure he was right. The professor I took that got bad reviews would not take homework assignments after the first ten minutes of class, so my guess is that a lot of the students that complained about her online were the ones who came to class late or the ones who didn't do the homework at all. Thats what makes ratemyprofessor so unreliable, the fact that you don't know if the person writing the review is someone who gets straight As or straight Fs.

My advice to students is this: if you are trying to decide which classes to take for the fall, don't google ratemyprofessor. Instead, ask a reliable friend or classmate about the professor, someone who gets decent grades and always shows up to class. Because taking or not taking a class based on a classmate or friends recommendation is a much smarter decision than based on a review written by someone who might have dropped out of school long ago.

Gun Control Article

      When I was growing up, my mother was very protective when it came to guns. Before my brother and I would go to somebody’s house for a play date, my mother would go to that house beforehand to make sure there were not any guns there. She, like most parents across this country, was concerned for the safety of her children. Luckily for her, her two sons did not experience the horrors of gun violence. Unfortunately this cannot be said for 20 families in Newtown, Connecticut.

            I was convinced that the Newtown massacre would change things, that things would finally be different. I was wrong. Just recently the Senate rejected a measure to expand background checks to guns sold online and at gun shows. Although 54 Senators voted for it, it needed 60 votes in order to overcome the Republican-led filibuster. But I don’t just blame the Republicans for filibustering gun control, I blame all the Democrats who voted against it (except for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who voted against it as a procedural move in order to bring the bill back up again in the future). 

            Even though 90 percent of Americans support universal background checks for gun purchases (including a vast majority of gun owners), the bill was defeated mostly because of the fear of the NRA. Yet the NRA is not as powerful as people think it is. In the recent presidential election, less than one percent of the candidates they endorsed were elected. They also raised just $12 million during that election, which is a small pittance compared to the $100 million that Karl Rove’s American Crossroads raised.

            Opponents of gun control are totally wrong when talking about the second amendment. It was written at a time when there were no national military or state militias, a time when the only guns people had were muskets that could only shoot one bullet at a time. The founding fathers could not have foreseen a military-style assault weapon that could murder 26 people in the span of five minutes, nor could they comprehend over 2,000 people in this country being killed by gun violence within just a few months. Right after Newtown, NRA President Wayne LaPierre said that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”. But I think it would make more sense to make sure that the bad guy does not have access to the gun in the first place.