Trying

(originally posted on Myspace)

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Trying Current mood: tired Today in a psychology class, half awake, I looked around. Not just wandering eyes, but truly examining the situation for perhaps the first time since I moved to Logan last July. What I saw was both sad and inspirational. I saw a teacher trying her best to explain at a pace to get through the material while answering as many questions as possible. I saw two or three students who were absorbing everything, commenting, and challenging the teacher. Then there were those, maybe fifty, who were truly trying, desperately scribbling notes, all about ready to pull their hair out over the complexity of the material. "Applied Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences." A difficult task for anyone. Then there was the third and final category: about ten people trying not to be disrespectful. Seventy-five minutes is a lot to ask of these people. I drifted back and forth between the last two categories, listening, sleeping, trying to listen. I noticed something else about the third group. They were all nodding off, granted, and trying to even recognise that the professor was, in fact, speaking English, but there was one more thing they had in common. They were all quite thin. All at once, it hit me. These are the full-time college students. College must be like a concentration camp, and I guess, in a literal sense, it really is. We move here to "concentrate" on our studies while starving to death, depriving our bodies of sleep, working our hands to the bones just to afford tuition, and let's not forget all the time we spend studying. We also need to participate in service, clubs, and research; it's the only way to get into grad school. Somewhere in there, we're expected to make lifelong friends and find ourselves. Yet professors wonder why we can't always make the grade. I wonder if they have any idea how hard we really are trying.