| Quotables |
"Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. ... I felt
very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar |
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"On the surface, it sounds irresponsible, but to flourish in a rapidly changing world, you actually need to make more mistakes. Fail quickly. Fail often. If you do something and it
doesn't work, just recover in a hurry and try something else. ... Help develop a culture that is willing to fail its way to the future."
-- Price Pritchett, Culture Shift |
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"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction -- every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar |
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| dear students |
| Tuesday, June 9, 2009 |
Are you adults... or are you children?
No, you're not what's considered traditional college students. Most of you are quite a bit older. With this fact in mind, it seems reasonable to assume that you would need less babysitting... not more.
Now if you're a first-term student, fine, ask a million questions and look lost for a while. But once you've been at this for three, four, five, six terms or more, you should have a pretty damn good idea of what's going on.
Unfortunately, most of you still have your heads as far up your asses as you ever did.
Do you think either of the colleges I attended had someone waiting inside the door to direct me to the proper classroom? No. It was up to me to plan in advance: arrive early enough, schedule in hand, to figure it out my damn self. And figure it out my damn self was what I did, because I was an adult... even though I was less than half your age.
Are you really going to show up on the first day of class without your schedule? Really? You have no idea the name of the class, the instructor, or the classroom; somehow it's our responsibility to babysit you. What do you think this is, a bed and fucking breakfast?
Where I went to school, no one issued new copies of schedules in the front lobby on the first six days of the term because we'd lost the umpteen originals we'd been issued. No one retrieved my books for me on the first day. These were things we had to do on our own, in advance, with no hand-holding, and we pulled it off our damn selves because we were adults... even though we were less than half your age. Are you seeing a pattern?
To an extent, it really is our fault. Granted, that's a collective "our," meaning the school, not mine personally; if it was up to me, you'd either sink or swim and I wouldn't be there to see it. "We" have babied you for so long and to such an extent that when you walk in those front doors, you're not capable of doing anything on your own. And that is sad, because do you really think future employers, assuming you have any, are going to hold your dicks while you pee? Oh, a little to the left? Of course not. So I don't see the benefit of doing it now.
I will do my job according to its parameters. And when you ask hare-brained questions, like if students are alphabetized according to first name or last, I won't respond wittily. I'll just give you the same look I did that monkey behind the shit-stained glass... because for all intents and purposes, is there any real difference?
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posted by N.T. @ 8:19 PM  |
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