Struggling in course titled "Protein structure and function"

[Fakesmile]

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I'm taking a fourth-year molecule bio+biochem course titled "Protein structure and function". The course content is not challenging at all, but I'm struggling in it just because the prof is making the course needlessly difficult by making lecture very disorganized and mostly covering materials not found in course text or online. The two course texts (the famous Lehninger biochem text and "Protein structure and function" text by Branden and Tooze) and lecture are very unrelated. Also, his powerpoint lecture notes don't really have any content, but just simple words and sentences. So I need to take comprehensive notes during lecture. Otherwise, the lecture notes are useless and I must depend on the prof during office hours to understand the material later on. I often go to office hours but he's not even helpful (and this is coming from someone who aced previous biochem courses, not just a random lazy whiner).
The problem is that it's hard to get much out of his lectures. In other courses, I could preview the material to increase comprehension rate during lecture, but I can't do that in this course because he doesn't even post or give online lecture notes until after each lecture (very strange). In other courses, I could always go back to text for materials I didn't understand in lecture. I can't do that either in this course. I went to prof office hours several times but he was very unhelpful.
What's worse, though it's a fourth-year course, he set the average as C+/B-, and we recently had a midterm where I worked my butt off but only got slightly above average.
I'm wondering if materials the prof covers actually appear somewhere in the text or online. I'd appreciate recommendation of such resources. The topics he covers include (not exhaustive):

-Distinguishing features
-Cylinder/Plank diagrams
-Protein architectures represented by cylinder/plank diagrams
-Open and closed sheets and their packing
-Molecular volume and van der Waals radius
-Surface representations of proteins -Structure prediction
-Open and closed sheets and their packing
-Beta-alpha-beta topologies
-Circular dichroism
-Environmental polarity effects in fluorescence

 

[morning]

Are you allowed to record the lecture? Notes + recording could work out a lot better than just notes alone.

 

[Fakesmile]

I thought listening to lectures afterward would be really helpful, but the prof (for no good reason) doesn't record lectures either and I don't have a good recorder of my own.

 

[Zoom-Zoom]

I thought listening to lectures afterward would be really helpful, but the prof (for no good reason) doesn't record lectures either and I don't have a good recorder of my own.

Buy one. If he doesn't allow it, put it in your backpack. I found the mesh water-bottle holder in my backpack to be an optimum sneaky-place. This is assuming the problem lies in the note-taking and not with the professor being totally crazy, as it kind of sounds. Worst case, you can always drop the course and take a W if you think you're going to fail or it's going to seriously hurt your GPA. I ended up doing that with a senile biochem professor I had in undergrad and it all worked out in the end. Good luck.

 

[Morsetlis]

http://biology.ucsd.edu/classes/bibc100.SU1.08/sections.htm

Download my handouts. Maybe they'll help?