COLUMN: Give ’em a break
It’s registration week. It is that time of the semester when everyone is fighting to get the perfect schedule for next semester while striving to not crack under the pressure of finals week as it looms in the near future. This registration season has been extra frustrating for me.
Aside from the fact that I can’t register for the quickly filling classes until my final grades are posted a month from now, I am also begrudgingly accepting the reality that common hour is going to fundamentally destroy my way of life. Just like the critics warned, I have a Tuesday/Thursday class that is only offered at the unholy hour of 7:30 in the morning or the part-time-job destroying hour of 4:30 in the afternoon. I argued my point in a previous article, it fell on deaf ears, and now we all get to suffer the consequences of the 2011 Robins Award winner’s legacy of nonsense.
Many students will find themselves a single credit short or so of their desired number of hours for the semester. In the past there was a simple, enjoyable solution to this problem. A billiards class was an excellent way to fill a credit with something fun and educational. However, like seemingly all good things at this university, an arrogant, ignorant, inefficient and outright preposterous proposal wants to get rid of the billiards classes as they stand and move them all to the Cache Valley Fun Park, a place where bowling classes have been meeting for years. Now, why on earth would anybody with a brain in their head consider such a thing? Whoever came up with such a counterintuitive idea wants to replace the pool tables in the Bull Pen with a Fun Fit Forever class. From what I could gather, it is a class designed to keep one’s heart rate going while exercising several parts of the body at different stations.
Apparently they need the space to accommodate such a class. The Bull Pen is 60 feet by 20 feet or, for those of you good at math, 1,200 square feet. Would it surprise any of you to know that there is a perfectly good 1,300 square foot space partitioned off and ready for use in the field house? It is the part of the weight room that many people refer to as the “girl area.” There is ample space for stretching and mirrors so the prospective body builders can see themselves hoist those 20 pound weights over their heads. With a little organization and rearrangement of machines, this space could easily be transformed to accommodate the class. There is plenty of ventilation up there, and even windows to look out of. Compare this to the poorly ventilated Bull Pen where the powers that be plan on installing radiant heaters to accommodate the new class. Those heaters would be great for billiards, but heaters designed to warm bodies as opposed to air seems like a terrible idea for high intensity workout. Then again, there was nothing logical about this move to begin with.
Now, let’s run through some statistics. The billiards classes accommodate more than 320 students in 19 class periods. The Fun Fit Forever class Shanghaiing the room will consist of a maximum of 60 students over 4 class periods, assuming they are all full. This move will be forcing 300-plus students to drive to the Fun Park every day so 60 over-privileged-by-comparison students can be taught how to keep their heart rate up. Call me old fashioned, but anybody who needs a class to get them to exercise has bigger problems than 40 minutes of a cross-fit “class” is going to fix.
Why should we, as a university, succumb to lazy students who can’t exercise on their own and force 320 students to drive two miles to attend a class they enjoy? It is not financially responsible, it is not logical and it simply isn’t fair to figuratively throw the majority under the bus like this.
Perhaps this move to accommodate the minority comes from the same stem of people that want to force the university to have more vegan food options when such a negligible percentage of the student population would be affected or even care. We all know, however, that the minorities have the power. The relatively small group of smokers still gets to pollute our campus and force the rest of us to breathe in their carnal weakness, and those that actually care about guest lectures get to mess up everybody else’s class schedules.
So, the next time you need an extra credit to fill your schedule, think back fondly on the days when logic prevailed and this university put their facilities and assets to good use by turning a profit on a game as culturally celebrated as billiards.
Tyler Barlow is a sophomore in computer engineering and is currently enrolled in a USU billiards class. He can be reached at tyler.barlow@aggiemail.usu.edu.