...Real Students don't do Management!

....By SimonT

Back in the good old days, Studenting was STUDENTING, and it was HARD YAKKA
matey!  Let me tell you!  None of this Arty liberal Managementy/Social Sciency/
Humanitarian garbage people settle for these days!  
And back then there were REAL STUDENTS - people who knew what taming the wild
frontier of science was all about!!!  Real Students were a coveted BREED, and
now, sadly, they've all but died out, having been replaced with Management
yuppies, Computer feebs, SocSci weirdos and fake Scientists.  We need to
return to the days of the Real Student, and let me tell you what real students
were like:

  Real Students took Science, and majored in STRONG technical subjects, so
complex  that  the  lab  notes  are  almost  totally in greek with lots of
subscripts and superscripts and things.  If the labs were too easy, labnotes
were  transcribed  into  Latin,  just  for the practical experience.  A Real
Student  wouldn't  be  seen  bereft-of-concious-and-unconcious-motor-function
doing some dead end Arty subject with no purpose.  Like English.  What use is
an English Major if you're not going to teach English?  What if everyone
stopped teaching English?  There'd be no reason to have English Majors and
they'd be all sent to the wall where they belong (and good job too!)!

But back to Science.  Students used to revel in the good, old fashioned
sciences, like PHYSICS for instance.  These days a physics student is too
busy applying the right hand thumb rule to get a lift to varisty to get into
the nitty-gritty of real science that used to be the cornerstone of learning.
What's the use of knowing which way electrons flow if you can't work out
Earth's distance from the sun (in your head) to the nearest 5 metres?  It's
pathetic!  Biology students aren't what they used to be either.  It used to
be that your average Biology student would dissect a frog with his/her Swiss
Army combination Knife and Thing for getting stones out of horses shoes (what
the hell's the name for those things anyway?) whilst eating their lunch and
doing the Herald crossword {and not mixing up the frog and lunch} with consumate
ease.  TODAY, your average Biology student can't touch their scalpel without 
turning green and heaving their muesli and peaches into their neighbours Pencil
case.  It's just not what it used to be!   The Management/Feeb decay has taken 
over, and the mental-moral fibre has decayed to the consistancy of Weet-bix 
after 5 minutes in warm milk!

Real students didn't use desktop calculators!  (Of course, when real students
were in their prime, desktop calculators were the size of desktops, but that's 
beside the point)  Real students KNEW Pi to a thousand decimal places and can
do 6 figure multiplication in their heads WITHOUT MOVING THEIR LIPS!

Real students never fell off their chairs in lecture theatres.  How could they,
they never needed to go to lectures in the first place!  After reading the
course text in the library, turning up to lectures would be pointless!

Real students never worried about grant payments.  They never had to once it
was common knowledge that they'd got a duplicate key to the dangerous goods
store.  Why sometimes they were even paid ahead of schedule; 2 or 3 times even!

Real students didn't use Rulers.  What for?  A line's a line and on some other
non-linear plane it's could be a point anyway, so who cares?

Real students didn't use pencil cases.  Why buy a bag to keep ONE PEN in?

Real students didn't use pencils or erasers!  Why would they?  If it was a 
mistake, they wouldn't have written it down in the first place!

Real students never handed in assignments.  Why bother, the coursework/exam
ratio was 50/50, so all they needed was 100% in the exam.

Real students never choked up in exams either!  They knew what it was going
to be about - they just judged the imagination of their lecturer and prepared
accordingly.  For instance, if a Real Student had ever done a Psychology paper
they would have judged the imagination of the lecturer and looked at last
year's test.

Real Students wore real clothes - Jeans and Teeshirt.  They never wore anything
with  Dayglo  colours  or  designer  tears,  if they wanted to look like a road
accident, they'd step in front of a bus.  The only designer name they knew was
"This Weeks Special"

.Real Students rode real bikes.  If it could take a V-Six head on and
still be ridable, it was a real bike.  If it couldn't, you probably weren't
around either, so it didn't matter.  Real Students also  drove real cars; cars
made out of metal, not shiny plastic.  If a Real Student's Car hit another
Real Student's Car, it was all over, no survivors.  Real Students believed in
fate.  If you called someone "Darwins Missing Link" at the pub, and they beat
the daylights out of you, that was fate!  If you hit yourself in the head with
a hammer and it hurt, well, that was fate too.  (Admittedly, this relgious
blind spot did tend to be viewed with a little cynicsm, but that was fate too)

So there you are, that's what it was like.  You don't believe me do you? 

You Wimp.

spt@waikato.ac.nz.            
