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After four years in university, I have finally discovered that university students tend not to care much about the majority of things that go on in campus life. We could eat an occasional crappy meal, wear dirty clothes... or laundry [where's the dividing line between clothes and laundry anyway?], skip tutorials and lecture [more frequent that one thinks], and strikingly even defer exams for perposterous reasons i.e. "who sets exams in these unearthly hourts, its far too early in the morning". From what I understand, we North Americans operate on a very different system than say Europeans where class is mandatory and most students tend to be well dressed [kind of like commerce in U of T maybe but there are certainly people that defy the norm myself included ]. I suppose for most of us, skipping [or skiving as we use to call it] lectures or tutorials is like avoiding getting fat. That one extra biscuit wouldn't make much difference [for certain courses], but once the kilos are on, its hard to get them off. Students will become increasingly complacent about attending lectures once they are lost in the sea of material and it gets progressively difficult to try to reorient themselves again. Our economics prof told us a short fable of one of his student in a second year courses who missed 3 opportunities to write his midterm. Apparently, he missed his first opportunity cause he slipped from the stairs and fell. Yet again he missed the make up midterm because he slipped and fell from the stairs. You wouldn't believe his excuse for missing his third consecutive test, the makeup for the makeup [what a generous prof I must say]. Yes, its the unconvicing "I slipped and fell from the stairs" excuse. What is the likelihood of a grown, self sufficient adult falling from the stairs 3 times in the span of half a year? If he is accepted into a tertiary institution, I would suppose he's more than capable of walk properly, or semi-properly. Perhaps the greater question is what was that kid thinking of giving the same reason to excuse himself from his test three times? Yet again, I digressed. Okay, sadly, it wasn't until my trip to the health service on to check up a complication that I discovered just the place where I found students with sufficienet self-motivation to rise in those unearthly hours. Well at the end of the day, students DO unanimously care about some things in university life - restoration of physical health.
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