College: Where people pay big money to do nothing
September 3rd, 2009 • chatter
As I sat in LIT4930-003 yesterday, I had a real revelation. Aside from vacations, college is the one thing that I know of where people pay handsomely to do as little as possible and still expect a reward at the end. Yesterday, our professor was asking some very basic questions such as where did the Bible come from and why the books are in the order they’re in. Well, most responses to the former question were “the bookstore”, “Walmart”, or something equally asinine. It took a good fifteen minutes of constant asking and drilling through answers to figure out we get the Bible from religious institutions. However, the latter question took longer as it was more than apparent most people did not do the required reading at all. Which is extremely sad given the fact that we had to read the first chapter of The Old Testament: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Coogan. If you’ve ever seen these books, they’re slightly larger than a 3×5 index card and are less than 150 pages thick. Our reading was the first chapter, a total of 12 pages. Twelve. Pages. In a normal sized book, that text would have comprised less than six full pages, probably even less. That took me just a few minutes to read and I’m a slow reader. I read Genesis in about 2 and a half hours and in my Bible, it was only 56 or so pages, so I’m not exactly a fast reader. The time between classes at FAU is more than enough time to have read the first chapter of the book. Maybe it’d be different if these were all freshmen but it’s not, it’s almost all juniors, seniors, and Learning For Life students.
I just ran across a video of a “chupacabra” recently found in Texas. This goes along with people not reading things in school. So Jerry Ayers says it’s “like no coyote he’s ever seen” but is so obviously canine in form and modality. So this guy’s never seen a canine with long, sharp canine teeth, basically hairless with “leathery” skin, and “longer than normal” legs. Has he ever seen an actual coyote then?! Aside from being hairless, that’s a coyote. Now, it’s probably hairless because of disease akin to the mange or another skin disease. Gee Jerry, I’ve never seen a hairless canine either with “leathery” skin. Except chihuahuas. And all those other hairless dogs with leather-like skin. I need to find something stupid to get on CNN so I too can have a pointless fifteen minutes of fame.
And I just had to watch this after finishing my Ancient Israel mapping project. I will never get those brain cells back.