Column: The Way I See It
Spring semester has arrived after a luxuriously relaxing Christmas vacation. Very few of us have thought about books, papers, professors or anything more stressful than getting the last piece of fudge before your little brother does.
Now that it’s the end of the first week of school, most of you have had the chance to see what that “Ethics of Ring-Tailed Lemurs’ Social Habits: An Integral Approach” class that will fulfill some sort of deep and mystifying depth credit will be like this semester. You had no idea what it really was about, but perhaps you’d heard something positive about the class/professor/textbook-resale value and decided to give it a go.
First day of class rolls around and the professor lays it all on the line. The syllabus is the lemur’s version of “War and Peace” with an addendum that equals “Pride and Prejudice.” You will be glued to your computer doing research and chained to your textbook memorizing every sentence, phrase and comma in the 50 trillion chapters. Even if you do all that, the professor has stated a moral obligation to fail at least three-quarters of the class, regardless of how well they perform.
You panic. The very moment the minute hand even brushes the 4 on the clock, you are out the door and in front of the Registrar’s Office with an add/drop slip saying something like this:
You (hyperventilating): “Must… drop… this… class…”
Person at desk: “Hey, George, get the respirator. We’ve got another one of these!”
A few weeks later, after you have dropped the class and been restored to your normal breathing pattern, you talk to another person who wasn’t as intelligent as you and stayed in the class. This person says: “It’s not as bad as the professor made it sound. I’m pulling a B+ and I still make it to my ultimate Frisbee club every week.”
Now you feel like an idiot because you really wanted to take this class and you jumped ship at the first sign of a slight conflict of scheduling, by which I mean you didn’t think you could handle having reading and homework assignments every day.
I actually had a class that the professor made sound hard on the syllabus, but actually doing it wasn’t that big of deal. To be honest, it was actually a lot of fun. So, why did the professor make it sound like a Roman taskmaster beating the drum for the slave people rowing the boat?
Let’s look at it from the perspective of a professor. Actually, let’s look at it from the perspective of a normal human being who just happens to be a professor. How would you like it if you had to get up in front of a rather large group of people and have your every word written down, scrutinized and written in research papers? How would you like to have to read every quiz, test and paper that came in through the class, not to mention the assignments from the other classes you teach?
I don’t know how much of this is true and I’m sure I’ll end up with an e-mail or letter telling me that I’m crazy for saying so, but I wonder if some professors try to weed out a few students so as to lighten their own workload. The students who stay, well, they’re the ones who get to have the real fun.
Professors enjoy their work, generally speaking. They especially enjoy it in the state of Utah because, even though education keeps getting shafted financially, we still have great teachers. There has to be something a little more to it than the money they could very well be making elsewhere. The fun that the professors at Utah State have teaching their respective classes can be easily picked up by the students who stick it out and work with it.
A disclaimer: If you are in any class that you signed up for while your common sense took an early Christmas, by all means, drop it. My point is to give yourself a challenge, but don’t work yourself to the ground. It’s just not healthy.