Times have changed

I was thinking about this this morning. I had to carry my Big Book of Soil Lab Recipes back to the teaching lab where it resides (I had used to to order the necessary chemicals for next semester - the class is full, nay, it is oversubscribed, so I need to be sure I have good stocks on hand of everything needed).

There were fliers posted on our bulletin boards. We have these up mainly for things like job and graduate-school postings, and the Wildlife Club and the environmental club and the pre-meds club have sections where they post announcements, but we also get some of the general campus stuff.


There were fliers for "Stress Free Week!" This is stuff that they do here during exam week to, as you might guess, relieve stress among the students. They had, I think a make-your-own-stress-ball experiment, and they had "late-night breakfast" (for which they solicited faculty to come and act as servers. At 11:30 pm. My reaction: "You're kidding, right?" I suppose there were some who offered to do it, but there are two things that would prevent me from it: (1) If I am not asleep already at 11:30 pm, the next day is going to be a Very Bad Day for me. and (2) walking out from the cafeteria to where I would have to park my car at midnight? Even though this is a very low-crime area, that's still not something I would have wanted to do.

But anyway. Times have changed, and just as I feel, when I see some of the toys for sale now, "Why didn't they have those when I was a kid? The 1970s hated kids, I guess" I feel like, "Why didn't my alma mater - to which I paid considerably more in tuition and fees, at least in today's dollars, than the students do here - try to do ANYTHING like that for us?"

And yeah, yeah, I might not have partaken of it and I might have even rolled my eyes a bit back then, but the idea of recognizing that students feel stress about finals might have been a nice thing. (Then again: I generally didn't stress out about finals. In MOST of my classes, I had a sufficiently good grade going in that I just had to not crater on the final to keep it. I do remember one chem class - it was team taught and the first half of the "team" was awful, and confusing, and I earned a D - which darn near broke my heart - on his exam, until he let it slip that rather than following the textbook, he was using Fermi's book on Thermodynamics, so I ran to the old, flagship Borders (may it rest in peace) and found a Dover edition for $4, read it, and finally understood what he was going on about. Anyway, for that class I worked my BUTT off studying for the final because I was desirous of bringing my grade up. In fact, I studied so much for that that I sacrificed the A I had in Genetics (I wound up getting a B+, which was still okay) by not studying so much for it. But I earned the second-highest grade on that chem final* and brought my grade up considerably - better than merely passing; I think I finished with a B or B+ in that class)

(*That was also back in the days when profs posted exam scores. Not by name; they used our student numbers. No idea if that would be considered  FERPA violation now).

Most of the time, though, I saw the exams more as a game or a challenge than something to be really scared of. I tended to study over the entire course of the semester (and in really tricky classes, do things like rewriting and reorganizing my notes) so I was pretty well prepared. And I was good at time management, so I could block out, "Okay. I need to study Chemistry for two hours Saturday morning, and then after lunch, I will study Linguistics for an hour and Genetics for two hours...." (And wow. I don't know if I'd have that kind of concentration now, to work on something like that for two hours at a go. Maybe I could, especially if I did like I did then and go over to the Grad Library and find an unused carroll and sit in there because there were no other distractions.)

But anyway. I don't know if all the exam-week fun (and the welcome-week stuff they do in the fall, we never had much in the way of welcome-week stuff) is modern-day catering to the students (she says while shaking her cane) or if this is the difference between a very small campus (the one I teach on now has some 4000 students) and an enormous one (I don't even know how many Michigan had back in those days. 20,000, maybe?) But still, you'd think the dorms or the majors-groups or something could have organized something. I never felt much of a sense of community as an undergrad and it may be that my university never tried to foster one....