The Little Things...

"Hard work has a future pay off... Laziness pays off now."

Have you ever had a professor say "I'm not interested in whether you get the right answer or not, I just want to be sure you understand the material"? Or how about "I will be able to tell if you know what you're doing, and will take that into consideration"? Bullshit! If that is true, why don't test questions start with 'Why' or 'How' instead of 'What' and 'Who'? I think one of the biggest problems facing students here is the massive stress they end up under.

In the college environment there are three kinds of stress. The first kind is academic. This is caused by the expectations and demands of the professors. The worst are the professors who, for some reason, don't seem to realize that us students have other classes and cannot, henceforth, donate every single waking hour to their class. Following their lack of logic, they shove as many assignments down the students' throats as possible. With three professors all thinking they own exclusive rights to my/our/your lives, the outcome is disastrous. I think it may have been talked about in the Bible actually. Something about plagues of frogs and locusts, or turning into a pillar of salt.

The second is external stress. This is known to have been caused exclusively by the female of the species. OK, maybe not exclusively, but a large percent of social stress can be traced back to the competing for, spending time with, and talking to particular persons of the female persuasion. It has been scientifically proven (and when I say scientifically proven, I mean I did an alpha-numeric conversion on the word female, added the numbers, wrote the total down on a piece of paper and swallowed it without coming over all dead). Other minor causes of external stress have been traced to parents, money, job, world hunger, war, protesters, T.V., violence, police, bad milk, and so on, but no scientific testing has as yet been done to prove this.

The third and most sinister of the stress causers is internal stress. This kind of stress is totally avoidable if one has the right state of mind. Students have a tendency to think that they have to do everything the day after it is assigned, while the due date is in a month. We went through high school for a reason people, and it wasn't to learn!! High school was invented to teach you how to recognize what you can put off, and what you can get away without doing at all. If you don't let yourself get so stressed out, life will be a lot easier. Just relax.

Can anyone tell me the moral of today's story, boys and girls? It could be that you should do all your work quickly so you will have stress free time to rest afterwards…but it isn't. It may have something to do with the virtue of time management…but that isn't it either. The moral most likely has something to do with putting off the work till the last minute and have fun first (or at least don't complain to me).

Questions/ Comments/ Suggestions/ Cold Hearted Verbal Abuse? the_eye_of_odin@hotmail.com