Well, I have to sympathize with you about how Northern arranges the delivery of their curriculum...It seems to me that you're spending way too much time with theory if you already spent your freshman year learning the processes and other subjects required towards your degree. When I taught the senior year of a 2 year technical college, the students were already competent enough with the process fundamentals, engineering drawings and not as bad as I initially thought with welding symbols... They were also pretty competent in steel mechanical properties and basic steel welding metallurgy, welding physics, etc., etc... They were only lacking in just a few topics related to welding technology such as Aluminum, Stainless steel weld metallurgy, NDT, QC,Economics, and fabrication projects as well as other topics which I fail to remember at this time, but you get the message as to what topics were covered...
In any one of the topics covered in the senior year, there was never a theory session that lasted over 30 minutes including Q&A! I bring this up because IMHO, this is not what your instructor does, and he must learn to present each topic in sections of no more than 30 minutes tops! Any distractions when I had a theory session going on resulted in immediate dismissal for the day if they would not stop plying games that were basically hurting other students trying to grasp and comprehend the subject matter... And if need be, the instructor could also be carrying over from one section of a topic to the following class session day of the week... This way the students have more arc time every day... And there are other tweaks they can do to the present program like offering you a part time job to help the instructor to make sure his lab is ready for the next day, and you can be paid with more arc time as well @ each end of the day for however long you instructor stays in the campus before he leaves for home and calls it a day...
This way, it's a win-win for both parties... In other words, be creative in how to open up more opportunities to have more arc time by working with the instructor and/or the administrators and if you're still not satisfied, then express this to the boss of you instructors boss because they don't like to hear about students being dissatisfied because of one legitimate reason or another and you have a legitimate beef that's forcing you to decide whether or not it would be better for you to go to another school instead for the amount of arc time they seems to be lacking @ your present school... All the best to you son.
You never know because you just might be successful - or not!
Respectfully,
Henry