Sandwich Post
Hey, it's a long entry. Why? I came up with a great idea for a new college class today!
It came to me as I was sitting in a lecture hall in Marston, waiting for my calculus professor to start lecturing on three-dimensional vector functions. He was taking his time explaining the schedule for the final three weeks of class, and I was bored, so I read my copy of the Tribune. I finished that, and I was still bored, so I picked up a copy of the Daily I found on the floor and... read today's Daily! Three minutes later, the professor was still rambling on about his schedule and grading scale, and I was still bored, so I took out my calculator and my registration fee schedule and did some number crunching.
Right now, an out-of-state Iowa State student with an average fifteen-credit schedule pays $5,225 per semester. That figure will go up about $2,500 next year, bringing the per-credit cost to $515 and the hourly rate to about $28, up from the present $348 per credit and $20 per hour tuition costs.
Twenty-eight dollars for every hour spent in class.
I thought about this as I sat in my plush red auditorium chair, and I thought about what else could be done with twenty-eight dollars, some of the other things that could be done to earn college credit, and how good the vegetarian hero sub I ate for lunch was.
Then came the revelation. It went a little something like this:
The college administration should create a new one-credit class for this fall. The class will be offered satisfactory-fail, with attendance optional and only one or two teaching assistants administering the class to save on costs. For the same reason, there will be no hand-outs, no paper tests or exams, and no student textbook. The usual administrative fees will have to be paid, of course, but since this is probably no more than $150, and because the TAs are working for lowered tuition rates instead of American dollars, each student will have about $20 of fees each week to be used at his or her discretion. $19 of this will be given to the TAs once a week, and they will take this money, go to a local supermarket, and purchase some vegetables, bread, meats, cheeses. (Maybe some vegan alternatives for the last two too.) The TAs will then bring these supplies to class, break out the recipe book they bought by pooling the other $1 of each student's tuition fees, and everyone will make sandwiches. FS HN 166L: the Sandwich Lab.
What makes this such a great idea is that the course could be offered in a number of different formats. It could be taught as a design course, an art course, an anthropology course, a consumer science course, an English course (the English invented the sandwich), or as part of a number of other courses by simply eliminating all of the time wasted on inane nonsense and using the spare time and money for something productive!
~
So I dunno... I shouldn't complain so much, and not so loudly, especially when I don't feel that passionate about the matter at hand. It's just that I'm paying large amounts of money to sit in a room and not learn things now (as opposed to before, when someone else paid large amounts of money so I could sit in a room and not learn things) and it is alerting even me, despite all my self-absorbed hubris, to how much this can suck, and to the fact that the ladies and gentlemen in food services can really make a good sandwich. I'm not kidding; this college has some very pronounced talents and strengths, and for whatever reason, making sandwiches is one of them. Teaching math classes is another, which is probably why the thirty minutes of pandering to the whims of obsessive students today upset me so much—it doesn't happen too often.
But I definitely shouldn't rant like this. Ranting gets people in trouble, as proven by the case of Steve Skutnik in this article in today's Daily. Skutnik, a senior in physics and a columnist for that very same esteemed news publication, fancies himself to be a pretty political guy, and he rants about things political on some regular maniacal whim of his. (Rants like these.) He used to have a KURE show, but he stopped doing it for some reason. He used to be a big-shot on the forensics team, but that collapsed recently. I don't even know the guy, but he keeps appearing here and there, apparently with some odd cloud of disreputability constantly surrounding him, a cloud that was probably a major factor in the student body government denying him a position on their election board, even though he was the only one who applied.
Zounds.
So... I'm going to stop ranting now (maybe), and let you all get back to your doughnut-filled lives. If you ever want to rant, though, I'm always listening. It's why I maybe don't post so often—it's really hard to listen and talk at the same time. Y'know? I think you do. Now, if someone would only come up with some kind of Perl listening script...
