From Where I Sit: Class stress? Ignorance is bliss

Now is the time of the semester that I am reminded of the bumpersticker, “If it weren’t for the last minute panic, I’d never get anything done.”

As usual, the semester started innocently enough. I purchased my texts, bought plenty of school supplies, and even began making plans to attempt to get a social life — and half of my instructors had not even finished passing out the course syllabus. This ain’t so bad, I thought to myself. This semester will be fine.

Even a couple of months later, I was fending off, with varying degrees of ease, the quizzes, tests, and the occasional paper. I can manage, I thought to myself. Plus, I can still drop a class if I need to. And I definitely have time to raise my grade in this or that class.

Yeah, right. We’re now in the last days of the semester, and my workload has grown from a manageable, respectable little bundle of classes to a menacing hulk of courses that are daring me to show them who’s boss. Gone are the nice platitudes about how werre all so happy to back at school with our friends, blah, blah, blah. Now, droves of bleary-eyed students stumble across campus just wondering if and how they are going to make it to Dec. 17 alive.

Across the campus, people I talk to are expressing the same thing. The Riverfront Market and Java City in the University Union are filled with students who, at the last minute, are struggling to pull off a decent grade in each of their classes. The residence halls, I think, are providing a more complete snapshot of the approach most students are finding themselves having towards school right now. The student residents I observe earnestly and convincingly explain to their friends reasons of schoolwork demanding to be done as an answer to why they are not available to go out or do something fun. This practice of explanation is so effective it starts convincing even the explainer, and gets easier to repeat to the next friend that invites him out. All this serves quite well, I might add- to create a wholly acceptable mantle of near martyr-hood around the homework-bound student. After all, no one wants to disturb a good, honest student from doing his or her work and getting good grades. Meanwhile, that student is so busy reflecting on his mountainous workload and what heroic effort he is planning to put forth to accomplish it that he develops a rather perverse admiration for his predicament, and forgets to actually do any work at all.

Elsewhere in the residence halls other students have given up any hope of passing their classes and are carefree as they toss their footballs and run around with reckless abandon. They do not pretend to still be concerned about finals or any such nonsense: why lie? These folks, half-witedly ignoring the looming end of the semester and religiously practicing the creed “ignorance is bliss,” are probably the happiest of us all.

May we all do our best as this semester’s classes come to an end.