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Title:	The rant I said I'd do in the last rant
Author:	Toam	Posted: 03-03-2008
Ok. Here is a link to the youtube video I mentioned in my last rant. First they start off by trying to say the education system is currently outdated with a quote that is outdated. Next they show some false graffiti for some sort of dramatic effect. The dramatic effect is required to a purpose being absent. They end with “Of course, walls & desks cannot talk. But students can”. This is true. This is obvious (except in the case of Mute students, but I shall ignore this little oversight). Students can talk. And if they don’t understand something in a lecture then they should say so in the lecture. “My average class size is 115” I don’t know much about this university or what year this student is in, but for a first year lecture that isn’t really a big deal. The point of a lecture in for the lecturer to present information, ie: to lecture. This is most efficient in a large class. It is not a tutorial. “18% of my teachers know my name” My first thought, again, was “So?” The lecturer has 114 other students – knowing your name isn’t fundamental to teaching you. I have had lecturers not know my name, and it was usually due to my poor attendance or participation in their classes. Next I wondered about the statistic. How many teachers do you have for you to be able to actually have 18% of them as a whole number of teachers? 2 out of 11 is pretty close. I might have had 11 teachers in the entire year in first year, when I had large class sizes. And I’d say about 2 knew my name. And I don’t have a problem with that. “I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me” From here on in I will ignore the incredibly questionable statistics given. The student does less than half the work they are given? Quick, someone discipline the teacher! But then they use some cinematic wonder to complete this quote. “I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me. Only 26% is relevant to my life” I am trying hard not to question these statistics. I’d say almost none of the reading I do is directly related to my outside-university, everyday life. But I am not studying my life, so I don’t expect it to be. “I buy hundred dollar textbooks I never open” I don’t understand how this could be, in anyway, taken as a problem with the education system rather than a problem with the student. “My neighbour paid for class but never comes” The nerve of these teachers! “I will read 8 books this year” Good for you. I wasn’t sure what the point of this was, but then they finished the quote: “I will read 8 books this year, 2300 web pages & 1281 facebook profiles” And I still didn’t see the point. Wow, a student is wasting their time reading 1281 facebook profiles?! That is ridiculous. I don’t mean how far the education system has fallen, I mean how fucking many facebook profiles that is. “I will write 42 pages for class this semester and over 500 pages of email” I do not understand what the point of all this is! I have written over 16 pages (16 pages that I am keeping, and many, many more that I have written on to check things and then re-written on one of the, at least, 16 pages) for one subject alone, which isn’t even assessed. And I have only had classes for one week so far this year. “I get 7 hours of sleep each night” You probably need to stay up late to read all those facebook profiles and send all those emails. The education system should definitely work around that. “I spend 1 and a half hours watching TV each night” In my opinion there isn’t even that much TV worth watching in a week, let alone a night. “I spend 3 and a half hours a day online” Assuming this is the same everyday, then you need to look at roughly one facebook profile every hour in order to meet your quota. “I listen to music 2.5 hours a day” I could do that almost on my bus trips alone. “I spend 2 hours on my cellphone” JESUS CHRIST “Spend 3 hours in class” 3 hours of class per day is not much. Assuming that you are attending all your classes, you must be doing on which involves a lot of reading, of which you doing 49%. “2 hours eating” I remember in primary school someone said this when we were doing some activity which involved working out how much “free time” we actually had in a day and we all said “what the fuck” then in much the same as I am saying it now. “I work 2 hours every day” And with only 7 hours sleep a night? You poor thing. “3 hours studying” Well you do spend 3 hours in class and I have heard that you should spend at least the same amount of class time studying the material (not including doing assignments, which I assume that this statistic is including) “That’s a total of 26.5 hours per day” I knew I was right to question the statistics! This isn’t possible! Obviously the point that they are trying to make is that the students have a workload which is too heavy. However they are spending 6 hours a day doing study related things. The standard working day is 8 hours, so I shudder to think what will happen when these sooks enter the workforce. “I am a multitasker – I have to be” Then you should combine these things you are doing. You can easily watch TV or listen to music while you eat. You can listen to music while you study or are online. This pretty much voids the already void complaint about the workload. “I will be $20,000 in debt after graduation” I owe more than that in HECS debt and I am still studying. I have no complaints. I think that I should pay for my education – but that is a whole other rant. “I’m one of the lucky ones over one billion people make less than $1 a day” Lets assume that the average course takes three years to complete, and will cost $20,000. To be financially “lucky” compared to someone who has earned $1 per day for that 3 year period while you worked 2 hours per day, ignoring all expenses, you would need to be earning just over $10 per hour (remembering that these are US statistics). “This laptop cost more than some people in the world make in a year” This and the last quote, while they may be true, are completely irrelevant to the characteristics of students today. “When I graduate I will probably have a job that doesn’t exist today” I am very interested as to how they came to this conclusion. One of the main things people enter university for is basically as a pathway to a specific job that they want. It seems a bit of a gamble to do a course in the hopes that the job will be invented in the time it takes you to complete your course. While I don’t necessarily agree that you should enter university only with a job in mind at the end of it, I still find it very unlikely that, during any point of your degree, you can make this claim with any sort of authority. “Filling this out won’t help me get there or deal with it” I’m not sure what it is this student has or hasn’t filled out but if it is some kind of exam or something then it certainly will help you get there because if you don’t fill it out you will fail and hence not graduate and obtain your mystery job. “I did not create the problems but they are my problems” This makes me want to vomit so hard that I throw up everything I have ever eaten, ever. “I facebook through most of my classes” This is not the teachers fault. I cannot stress this enough. This is not a problem with the education system at all. This is students being lazy idiots who do not want to do any work. Why does no one else see this? “I bring my laptop to class but I’m not working on class stuff” Again, this is the students fault. Why do they come to class at all? They then end with an even more irrelevant quote. I am forced at this point to question the statistics that I said I wouldn’t question. Part of the seminar I went to was about how a lot of learning is delivered online. Is this time deducted from the time spent online? If the students are using there laptops in class to use facebook is this 3 hours of class time deducted from the total time online? This whole thing pisses me off because of how suspicious it is. I assume that it is trying to make a point but the closest I can see to a point is that students today are useless and lazy.
Toam has looked at 435 facebook profiles this year