CampusIntel

As a student blogger I am not sure that I will be offering the best kind of advice in this particular article; however I feel the issue has annoyed me enough and that I am now entitled to write about it. I’m talking class time, the 15 hours (or more) a week of class time.  Is it really necessary? Could we not meet for one hour per class each week to discuss what we should be learning and the track we should be on? And if need be, for those who feel it necessary, offer the other ten hours of class as an optional learning experience rather than an obligatory time-taker. I may not speak for every student, or even the majority of them, but I know for a fact that everybody gets tired of class and many drift into the zone of non-existence while they should be scribbling down notes. Is that really the goal here? To bore your students to death and make them wish they never got out of bed? I doubt that.

As an English major and philosophy minor, I personally feel overwhelmed with readings and essay writing. There is no way I am willing to sacrifice my social life, cut downs I can do, but ridding it completely is not likely to happen. My issue here is that I am asked to do over five hundred pages of reading in total before a week’s worth of class. However, finding the time has become somewhat of a problem for me. On Wednesday’s alone I am in class for six hours – six precious hours that I could have spent reading. What do I learn in these classes?  Well I learn the ways in which my professor and fellow students interpret what I have read. When it comes to my essay and choosing a topic, nowhere do I find a question that asks me to divulge in the opinions of those who attend the class or even the highly educated one who teaches it. They want to know what I think.  So what is the point? I know there are some benefits to attending class, but are those benefits universally appreciated? One might find class necessary in their learning regimen and feel lost without it, me however, I find class to be a waste of time and I feel that I am able to adequately understand and analyze most subject matter on my own.

This is where I begin to wonder why for so many years in our early developmental stages did teachers and educational teams work so hard at finding our strengths and weaknesses? What was the point in assigning students as different types of learners? I know very well at this point in my life that I learn the best when the information is put in front of me and I get to read it; analyze it, and absorb it at my own pace. Others, I’m sure, learn better when someone dictates or explains the information and some like to just stand up and put it all into practice. We know this is true, we know that everybody has a unique way of learning, so why is class made mandatory? Where do our professors get the right to assign ten percent of our grade to attendance?  Don’t even get me started on the fact that we pay to attend these classes. All I am suggesting is that one class a week is made mandatory for the reasons I’ve stated above, and the rest be made optional – intended for those who learn better in a classroom setting.  Everyone’s needs would be accommodated this way and I personally feel that my productivity would sky-rocket. At the end of the day it comes down to one thing – if you can learn as much and as well without class, why would you attend?

Everybody who’s anybody has been in this position before; it’s been written about and talked about and now it will be discussed again, by me. So, let’s get to it. When a relationship comes to an end, a relationship of significant value and time, that is, it is very difficult to move on. I know I am not the first person to be in a position of mourning over a lost love, and I know I will not be the last. In fact, I’m sure millions of couples are breaking up all over the place as I write this, as sad as that may be. The point of it all, however; is what do you do when it happens to you? The natural instinct (at least my natural instinct) is to cry and beg for an ulterior solution and hope that the one who has forsaken you has terribly mistaken their feelings and truly does want to be with you. Weeks will go by and eventually you realize that you are getting nowhere and they might actually want this. Now you’re faced with a real problem – he actually doesn’t want to be with you and here’s the kicker, you go to the same school.

Now not only do you have to deal with the stress of graduating and becoming a successful and praiseworthy adult, but you have to do it with a broken heart and the very good chance of running into the person who broke it. I wish this was an article on how to avoid accidently meeting the evil-spawn that caused your pain (‘cause I could use some tips), but it’s not, it’s an article about preventing you from making that happen. When you’re alone and upset it is natural to want to be with the person you love, the problem now is that they don’t want to be with you. Whatever you do, do not force them to see you. Do not pretend you have moved on and that you only want friendship. No, if you cannot have them in your life romantically it is not better to have them as friends. Who cares about everybody else and how awkward they feel around you because of it – for once you have to think about yourself. Becoming friends with your ex is a terrible idea and seeing them when the pain is fresh, is even worse.

How do you fight the urge? God, I wish I knew. You have to keep in mind that you’re going to want to see them no matter what but that doing so is self-destructive. There is a choice you have to make and like many choices in life, it won’t be easy. You will come to a point where you will have to choose whether or not you want to move on or waste your time fighting for a lost cause. The lost cause path will be the most appealing but I’m warning you not to take it, this is the kind of path that Robert Frost once wrote about, the easy path that leads to nowhere good. You need to make contact impossible and when you feel like contacting them, call your mother, your friends, or an automated telephone service – if it helps – contact anybody you can, except for them.  If it breaks your heart to think you will never see them again, take solace in the fact that you will inevitably run into them on campus, but hopefully by this point you won’t want to and you’ll be able to walk on by. The point is, the less you seem of them, the better it is for you (whether you agree or not, deep down you know it’s true). Now, if you are going to take anything from this article, take this: at desperate times friendship may seem welcoming, but trust me when I tell you not to board the ship – it’s destined to sink.

So keeping with my recent “back to school” trend, I wanted to discuss presentations. Personally, my feelings towards class presentations have always been the same. Since I can remember I have always hated presentations. Now, I don’t hate them because I’m shy or nervous or because I can’t be bothered to put in a perfectionist’s amount of work (although those are all true), I hate them because I hate to have to listen. If I have 52 people enrolled in my Shakespeare analysis class that means there are 52 presentations I have to sit through. Each presentation will be in the realm of 8 minutes long, now I’m English student so I won’t bother with the math, but that is a lot of student presenting time that I am devoting to this class. Maybe I shouldn’t be making such a big deal out of it, but I will tell you the three main reasons why this bothers me: I don’t know what I should remember, I pay to hear an educated professor speak, and (no offence) students are DULL presenters.

Let’s tackle my first issue, is what they are presenting important? I don’t know. That is the problem, I don’t know if I should be taking notes on these presentations. I don’t know if anything from these presentations will later show up on an exam or test of some sort. I know the simple answer is to ask the professor, but how do I know what she finds relevant in a presentation is going to be the same thing that I find relevant? It’s simple, I don’t know.  So I can sit there all class scribbling notes on what my fellow classmates have to say pertaining to Shakespeare’s incredibly fascinating life or I can sit there and doodle. Let me tell you, I am definitely more inclined to doodle and that is what I have done thus far in the semester. Still, I can’t help but wonder if I am foolishly setting myself up for failure in the near future. Let’s move on.

Another thing that annoys me when it comes to class presentations is the fact that I pay to be there. Post secondary education is not free (as you all know), and as far as costs go, university is pretty pricey. I can’t remember the numbers exactly but one of my math-oriented friends from first year once told me how much it costs to skip a class. Like I said, I don’t remember the number exactly, but I do remember that it made me think twice about ditching (which says a lot, if you know me). So if half of my class is taken up with student presentations then half of the money I spend on each class, to be educated by a professor, goes right down the drain. I could understand if I was a business student or a student in a program that demanded presentation and listening skills – but I am not and I do not want to be spending my money or my time listening to what my classmates have to say, no matter what it is they are talking about.

Lastly, I hate to say it, but it’s true: students are dull. Most of the time the person presenting would rather not be presenting, thus the excitement factor diminishes.  Often times the person presenting is simply relaying information that I already know or could easily read in a book. Almost every time the person presenting is meant to pose a thoughtful question, that no one wants to answer, and we are meant to sit there until someone gets so sick of the silence and decides to give the most basic and boring answer they can muster up. Now if that description alone doesn’t make you drift into lala land, I don’t know what will. These presentations are boring and painful for both the presenter and the audience and I believe it is time that our misery is put to an end – no more presentations, please! I may be cynical and I may be bitter but at least I know what I want: an education free of student lessons that put me to sleep, and if that cannot be arranged, I will be spending my time in bed.

So we are once again back at it, back to the endless hours of reading, writing, analyzing, calculating and so on and so forth. We are back for the winter semester at school – ready to discuss the many topics that have plagued great scholars over the past centuries and place them in modern ideologies. If any of you are like me, you are absolutely dreading the thought of starting it all up again – trying to remember the right way to take notes, trying to remember where your classrooms all are and, more than anything, trying to figure out how you ever got out of bed early enough to make it to your 8:30am class. Then a wonderful thing happens, you get to class and amidst all the discussion and note-taking, a topic comes up that actually interests you and what’s better, your teacher is willing to stray from her lesson and take a look at this topic.

It might not happen too often, but when it does you must savour the moment. Today, while discussing the enthralling events of the restoration period and the effects of the printing press, the idea of the dying newspaper came up. This topic led to the question of our generation and our knowledge of the world and the way the internet has changed media forever. From there a somewhat exciting discussion developed (obviously, because we had the chance to talk about ourselves). It is undeniable that the newspaper, as it has always been, is a dying medium. While some generations (including ours) do still take the time every morning to flip through the pages with their cup of coffee – the fact is that there is information available to us that is faster, cheaper (if not free), and coming from an array sources. All of this can be found on the internet. Much like the problem the music industry has faced with illegal downloading of music, news and other written materials are becoming available on the web to just about anyone who chooses to look for it. Copyright laws are unfortunately way out of date and there is little protection for authors and their work.

So, what is the concern about our generation? Many people in the media world (generations older than us) believe that we are uninformed about important issues, locally and globally, as we no longer read the newspaper like the people from our past once did. What do we have to say about that? Well, many interesting ideas were brought up by the students in my class when this question was proposed but it came down to a few main notions. For one, the newspaper is slow and if we have learned anything through observation, it is quite obvious that we enjoy fast and up to date information. Also, we are a cynical bunch and don’t enjoy having thoughts put into our heads and on the internet we are free to search for news from a number of different sources from nearly anywhere in the world. Lastly, with the many networking sites available, we are able to sift through the media and the news and decide what we want to learn about – rather than being limited to what one particular editor chose to print in their paper that week.

It turned out to be an interesting and controversial discussion, as my professor is an avid newspaper reader, however there was one outcome. The newspaper is dying due to the likes of new media forms – mainly the internet – and there is one option left for this dying medium, adapt or fade away.