Website - School Unpleasantness
Website - School Unpleasantness
By Michael Olson
Written 2006-05-11
As my GPA gradually converges to 3.0 and below, I am trying to figure out why I should keep attending college. A corollary of this is: is it feasible for me to make the environment feel less futile?
One aspect of school that I can see as beneficial is the making of social connections. Examples: PLUG and other student organizations, commiserating over coursework with classmates, dialogue with professors. This has already helped me get an improved job, compared to my first few jobs.
The classroom environment, however, stinks to high heaven. (1) The seating is uncomfortable, (2) the knowledgeable speaker to listener ratio is far too low (and perhaps necessarily so due to the large class size), and (3) the topics are all re-treads — there is no reasonable expectation of encountering some fun new discovery in class.
The fix to Issue 1 is up to the institution, and there is really no way for me to make that any more bearable, besides complaining about my back, but few people like a complainer.
Issue 2 could perhaps be remedied by reading ahead on the material before class. There would still plenty of uncertain ground in the social acceptability of participating in class — too much participation by non-professor characters is annoying.
Issue 3 seems like an unavoidable evil due to the need for having some fair metric for evaluation — most of these metrics assume that the content is relatively canonical, and are supposed to be impersonal.
I can conclude that I definitely should be reading ahead whenever I next resume schooling. This, because the classroom is a terrible place to pick up knowledge, but only a slightly annoying and boring place to reinforce knowledge.
It makes me despair that I can only conceivably address Issue 2.
There is no conclusion for the "why am I doing this" question yet that is free of hand-waving, so I will avoid delving into that in this essay.
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