Fresh-faced Honesty: Students have lives, too

As I was spending my entire day Sunday in the Maxwell Library, something struck me. Professors must not realize that students take more than one class. Wait, let me rephrase. Some professors must not realize that students have more than one class, and that students do not spend their entire lives doing schoolwork. Personally, I have a busy life. I devote countless hours to The Comment, work roughly ten hours each week at the Maxwell Library and volunteer Saturdays with the Children's Physical Developmental Clinic. In addition, I have not one or two but four 400 level courses, and just for fun two other not quite so stringent courses. Oh wait, I need to be accepted into my professional program and submit an application for study abroad.

I am sure that about 75 to 95 percent of this college's student population would join me in a collective groan about the lack of space their personal schedules allow for actual, productive study time. With midterms rapidly approaching, students who are already crunched for time become stretched to the maximum.

There are only so many hours that a student can devote to reading before his or her eyes become blurry, and a headache begins or sleep descends. There are only so many different subjects that can be crammed into a head at a given time. Field trips and group projects are time consuming and require massive coordination.

There are some professors who require students to read a fairly large book over one weekend. This daunting assignment is combined with the homework assigned to a student in four or five other classes. And so marathon reading times are set aside, like the five hours I devoted Sunday to coursework. Unfortunately, not all students have an entire Sunday during which they can catch up or get ahead on their work. I would guess that more than 50 percent of the student body works one, if not both, days every weekend.

As a student who has to coordinate my schedule to accommodate both a group project and a field trip this semester, I am really feeling the hurt from trying my best to fulfill these course requirements.

Firstly, creating the group for the aforementioned project requires that I not only attend class, but that I also make an effort to contact several of my classmates. Now this is not the hard part by any stretch of the imagination. Next, we have to agree upon a topic, gain approval of the professor and then, if needed, revise our topic. When we have finally gotten our collective act together and finalized our topic, our schedules need to be synchronized so that the project can be worked upon by all members of the group. This requires research, planning, and several out of class meetings; heaven forbid that we have programmed group meeting time in a class session.

As if trying to coordinate the lives of just four or five students were not enough, imagine having to get roughly 30 to 40 students to show up at a particular place, all at one time. Field trips are really great for creating these problems in life. I appeal to professors to make these as pain free as possible. Now, I know, you know, we all know that to have 30 students with exactly the same time frame free is impossible. Half the class is always free at one time, the other half at another, and at neither time is the professor available. I therefore offer a solution.

Create "On your own" field trips. Students can visit a certain locale, such as a museum, on their own time, when it is convenient for them. Hand out a rubric for students to complete during the field trip. By all means, have a deadline for completion of the assignment. However, this would solve the availability issue for all involved in class trips.

I understand that some things must be coordinated, like seeing a performance. However, these should be announced prior to the first day of class. Just as professors have a job to do, I would assume that about 99 percent of their students also have jobs. These jobs might conflict with said performance dates and time, and students need ample time in order to request time off from work.

If anything, I am stating the obvious to students. We know the time crunch, the stress, and the lack of time that is involved in doing anything school related, never mind social activities. Hopefully, I am not the first student to raise these concerns. In fact, I know I am not the first, and I am positive that I will not be the last.