Is it just me, or does this really not make any sense?

I really don't approve of the textbook chosen for my human variation class. First of all, it has the dark mark on the cover, which is a very bad omen for the term. Second of all, it is extremely dense, with small print, and the figures are printed in tri-color - black and two shades of blue. Unfortunately, most of the time it's really hard to distinguish between the black and the darker blue, so it can be a real pain to decipher the figures (even if they were understandable to begin with, which most of them aren't). Thirdly, the level of this textbook is far far too advanced for this class and assumes that we know things about statistics and genetics and all sorts of things that are not prerequisites for the class, which makes it very difficult to understand. As an example, take these two sentences from the chapter I'm currently reading ("Processes Shaping Evolutionary Diversity"):

"The harmonic mean is the reciprocal of the mean of the reciprocals: {some long and complicated calculation} for t generations. In practice, this means that the effective population size is disproportionately affected by the smaller population sizes."

Does that make any sense to you?

The midterm for this class is November 1, at 8:00 in the morning (I think it's safe to say that I'm not going to be doing anything exciting for Halloween). This particular professor writes absolutely evil exams. And she told us last Tuesday that she's not going to be providing us a study guide for the exam -- she's going to allow us the privilege of making our own. Isn't that nice of her? Man, I was soooo looking forward to getting that study guide! She is going to allow us to bring a "cheat sheet" to the exam, which is nice, but I would have by far preferred a study guide and no cheat sheet. Sigh. I suppose I'll live. At least midterms mean the quarter is about halfway over (yikes!). :}