A caveat for potential slackers
Pastiche
Benjamin Baxter |
THERE ARE TWO common types of slacker students.
To illustrate this point, imagine it’s the end of the first week of school. A bit of a stretch, I know, but just bear with me a moment.
One signed up for six kinesiology activities, the botany class about weeds — disappointed when it wasn’t as Rastafarian as he had thought — and that health class about sex. He’s not worried about graduating before the next Mayan long count.
You, on the other hand, might just have a casual token concern for your studies if only when your parents are around. In this case, this semester will most likely involve calm passages of time punctuated by moments of sheer horror when the crunch time comes around.
You may or may not have already bought and returned books, overslept or was merely hungover, added or dropped a class. Maybe you’ve even done some of these more than once.
Don’t judge.
Whether you have or not, the time you can safely do this is in the next week or two. The classes probably haven’t done so much that you can’t catch up in a half-hour of dedicated study, and the books you bought for that class you dropped are still worth some big money.
This won’t stick around for long. This first week is the time that things haven’t started happening. You haven’t even gotten into the daily grind yet.
No late night study groups with friends that quickly disintegrate into gossip sessions yet, no griping to your buddies about how much homework you had that you should have done while you were on MySpace just yet, no last-minute cram sessions for finals, no finally tracking down your advisor for the first time in five years to get back on the fast track to graduation.
All this comes later. If you’re new to this sort of thing, don’t fool yourself into thinking that this is as hard as it’s going to get, and don’t think you’re fully back in the swing of things. The school year hasn’t even started yet, and, unless you’ve forgotten, the pace of things happens to pick up quite a bit in most classes after the third week.
Professors meet every July to coordinate their schedules so that every major test or paper due date on campus is within a ten-day period. It’s true. I read it in a book.
The point is that all this work hits the fan at once. If you’ve already hit a comfort zone of blissful apathy in this first week, you’re going to be in bad shape for when it hits the fan.
But maybe you don’t care. After all, there are two basic groups of slackers.
You have a fever, and the only prescription is more studying in advance.
Go to class, turn in your homework, and, for academia’s sake, try to put some effort into your studies this year. Your education is only as good as you are.
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