The College Life

The College Life

Everyone knows it’s not easy being a student. Students today juggle class, work, plans for their future, internships, relationships, friendships, their parents, roommates, and deal with finding out who they are and what they want out of life.

After watching “A Vision of Students Today” from Kansas State University, it’s not surprising to hear that students pack 26.5 hours of activities into a 24 hour day. With three year of college under my belt, that’s how I spent most of my college life, taking 18+ units each semester, working 20 hours a week, living in cramped dorm conditions with some pretty unpleasant roommates, spending time with friends, and dealing with dating and relationships.

Like most students, my books didn’t get read in classes where the material wasn’t incorporated in class nor had any real relevance to my life. Un-engaging classes meant low attendance. People in class would have games on their computer screams or have intricate drawings on their note papers. Then there were students who were putting themselves through college and seemed to ask a million questions and took pages upon pages of notes on essentially useless info that they will use on the midterms and finals and forget come next semester.

There are exceptions however. It’s clear to tell when you’ve got a good professor. Nearly everyone comes to class every class meeting. When the professor speaks, everyone listens and responds to what they say. Students are encouraged to think and share their opinions and experiences that are relevant to class. As students, we recognize when a professor is passionate about what they teach.

In my brief time as an Environmental Ethics major at Humboldt State I had a Natural Resources Conservation course with a professor that was honored to be teaching us. We were assigned three carefully selected books, I read each one front to back, and we discussed each book in class. Everyday we tackled a new topic and he made it relevant to our lives. At the end of the last class he thanked us for being such a great and almost cried when expressing how grateful he was to be able to help get us thinking about the decisions we make in our lives and our impact on our world, whether it be through person action or through taking public action. That’s exactly what he did, and two years later, I still remember just about everything he taught us.

So why isn’t every professor this passionate? Maybe they’ve lost their enthusiasm over the years. Maybe they’ve assumed students don’t care enough and neither should they. Maybe they’re on a power trip and feel like students should play by their rules or they fail. Years of being told to sit still and be quiet and doing things by the books and fill in the bubbles has made us comatose in the classroom, especially in large classes where you can easily get away with listening to music or fiddling with your computer and know you’ll never be expected to respond to anything the professor is saying.

Students don’t feel pressured to be engaged in these large class settings, and with all the other stresses in their lives, class may be the one time they get to sit down for an hour or so. They have time to check their e-mail and networking sights while their professors lectures about post modern assimilation of the spotted owl frog, which means nothing to them and their life or future. Knowing they have to go to work for 6 hours after class, they relax with some music on their I-pod and work on a doodle of a dinosaur riding a skateboard while their professor rambles about personal stories about how they tried to get a game patented and repeat the same statistics over and over despite being on supposedly different topics although every single day sounds like the same lecture.

In situations like that, some classes start to feel like a waste of time, and a waste of effort and concern. Students have the option of not going, or going just incase they get an assignment or pop quiz so their GPA doesn’t get dragged down.

If this cycle of dispassionate professors and uninterested students continues, college will become useless and we will have an entire generation of young people that are unprepared for their careers and life. Students need to demand more from their professors and drop courses that will be a waste of their time and money to help get their point across. Through sites like ratemyprofessors.com and the spreading of alarming statistics like in the Kansas State YouTube video, technology may be able to save us after all.

-Melissa Kilmer