Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Why I Have Not Been Bloging Much Lately

I have been working on a short paper for one of my classes and the assignment has been driving me nuts. The assignment was too broad and vague with no clear instructions, this is what was written in the syllabus,
Assignment 1: Using the CT General Assembly website, research the legislative history (between 2003 and 2006) of the sentencing disparity between powder cocaine and crack (or freebase) cocaine. Paper should be between 3-4 pages and consist of three sections:

a. A narrative of the legislative history
b. An analysis of the connection between the fate of the legislation and electoral politics, including the electoral cycle, implementation costs and the effect of class and race on the bill’s package.
c. An appendix page the includes:
  • Title and bill number of all bills including LCO numbers
  • Sponsors of all bills and amendments
  • Committees of cognizance that all bills and amendments were considered by or referred to including the names and political parties of committee(s) co-chairs
  • Comparisons of draft language and final language of all relevant bills and amendments
  • Dates of public hearings, committee(s) votes and votes in the House and Senate, as well as any other applicable dates, including bill signing and “effective” date
  • Voting totals of all committees and chambers
The paper itself wasn’t long, it was the appendix that was driving me crazy. Did she want the party affiliation of all the legislators on the committees? Many of them are not still legislators and trying to find their party affiliation is almost impossible. How much detail does the professor want? I asked some other classmates and they all had a different answers, one student researched newspapers to find out the history of the bill.
In addition, the professor is not following the class syllabus, this is our fifth week and we have not covered one item in the syllabus. For last weeks class the syllabus said,
Understanding the state legislative process – How bills really become laws; how to prepare and deliver effective testimony; the role of lobbying and the advantages and disadvantages of using lobbyists
What did we talk about? We talked about decision making, the professor talked about how to argu. For the class today we are suppose the reconcile two different policy statements, but the syllabus said we are to,
The municipal arena for political advocacy: local city councils/ boards of alderman/selectman and their powers; effective political advocacy at the local level.
What does our assignment has to do with that?
She is the worst professor I have had so far.

2 comments:

  1. "Did she want the party affiliation of all the legislators on the committees? Many of them are not still legislators and trying to find their party affiliation is almost impossible."

    Try this: http://www.cslib.org/connga.asp

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, that is how I read the instructions.

    ReplyDelete