Triumph!?!?

Apparently I missed a very interesting class on my birthday. I refused to go to class on my birthday because I refused to be miserable on my birthday. But I've got my inside sources that keep me posted on all the gossip. :) So I got an earful about how the professor spent the majority of the class ranting because he found out about my complaint letter. He doesn't know my name, but he knows that the complaint was filed by a female Operations Research student. So uh, that limits it down to about 3 of us in the class. There were other complaints but that is the one he knows about, I guess because my complaint was more formal than some of the others. Anyway, he spent the class yelling about the complaint, directing all of his anger at the other two female OR students. Very professional. He also spent time discussing how he is leaving the university to go into industry. Why? Because the caliber of students has obviously decreased. So it's our fault that he's incompetent. Again, we come back to my disgust with people who refuse to take responsibility for their actions.

I felt it was my responsibility to let the department know what happened. So I sent an email to the OR Chair as well as the Dean. I wanted to make sure they knew that there will likely be 3 of us that will be retaliated against in our grades. The next day, I got a call saying that the professor would not be teaching the class, at least this week and maybe not for the rest of the semester. My first response was a mixture of shock and happiness. It was such a good feeling to know that this type of behavior will not be tolerated and that the school had taken action to ensure a positive educational experience for their students.

Well, then I went to class. The Chair of the Statistics Department was there to teach the class. First off, he gave a GREAT class. It was thorough, moved at a good pace, and he was able to explain things and answer questions. It's the way I would have expected this class to run from the beginning. The problem now is that he's teaching things assuming that we understand all of the topics in the previous chapters. But we haven't really been taught that. I took notes but have a ton of big question marks down the side of my notes where I was lost.

I left the class feeling entirely overwhelmed. The final is in 2 weeks and we're flying through material, including things that involve math from calculus 2 and 3. If we had been doing this since the beginning of the semester, I would have refreshed myself on the topics. But now there are 2 weeks. I can't reteach myself calc 2 and 3 as well as an entire semester of statistics in that time. And we have no idea what to expect on the final now. If the final is written as it should be for this course, I fully expect to fail.

I'm not sure what to do now. If I email the department, I'm complaining about their solution, even though I've been begging for a solution. So I just feel like a complainer. But at the same time, I don't think they fully understand how bad the class was with the old professor. I really think it's something you had to experience in order to understand. So I'm just kind of lost and overwhelmed now.