LETTER: Not enough hours in week

Dear Editor,

I was frustrated by a letter printed Nov. 30 about the amount of time spent on out of class work. A full-time student (12 credits) spends 36 hours of the week actually in class. If students spend three hours on homework out of class for every hour in class, that’s 108 hours a week. There are only 168. I realize this letter meant credit hours, but here’s the breakdown:

• 36 (more often 39 or 42) hrs/wk spent in class.

• grant 28 hrs/wk in travel and meals.

• 42 hrs/wk asleep if the lucky student gets six hours a night.

• 20 to 30 hrs/wk working a part-time job.

This leaves approximately 35 hrs/wk or less to do homework and pay some attention to friends and family so they don’t ostracize you. Without belittling higher education – I have a high GPA, and I certainly value and appreciate the education I am gaining at USU – I must ask the professors and instructors here to be realistic.

What I value most about my education is the quality of the material I’m learning. The classes I and the classmates I’ve talked to resent the most as a waste of time are the ones in which we have a lot of “busy work.”

For example, I have a class in which two or three articles per class period must be read and full page journals done on each, without ever discussing the articles themselves or relating them to the class discussions. Some of them were interesting articles, but what is the point if we don’t have the benefit of the professor’s interpretations and class discussion to form our own opinions and contextualize the information?

We could read them on our own and get the same out of it, but we are in school in order to have these benefits in our education. Busy work doesn’t challenge us to think, it teaches us to do busy work.

I propose that teachers should be more concerned about the quality of the out of class work they assign than its quantity.

Charity Lund