I got in this morning at about 7:45. What traffic we get on the west side of Lethbridge can be avoiding by leaving the house at 7:30. But, at that hour, University Hall is already buzzing with activity. I have noticed that classes in the early morning have grown more popular as time has gone by. This, of course, belies the reputation of students as night-owl bedheads. In fact, the relative popularity of morning classes reflects, I suspect, a desire on the part of some students, at least, to spend their afternoons -- no longer just their evenings -- doing other things.
Now, do not get me wrong. There are diligent students who want to start their days early. There are diligent students who find the courses (or even the instructors) they want are only at an early hour, and so they register with a shrug. But the relative health of 8am classes, itself an optimistic sign, is often accompanied by something that is unambiguously bad: the stacking of classes. How many of these students, this morning, followed that first class with a 9am, 10am, 11am, and noon class, I wonder? It is possible, this way, to finish the day, unless one has labs, by 1pm -- while taking off Tuesdays and Thursdays.
The deplorable state of loans and grants in this country pushes students to accept more and more part-time work, seemingly the only reliable work. But, in exchange for a small amount of money and negligible amount of relevant work experience, we ask students to trade away something significant from their undergraduate programs. Long gone, seemingly, are the days when students had to attend class four or five days a week, virtually guaranteeing their legitimate full-time participation in our undertaking. Long gone, seemingly, are the days when students regularly had a couple of hours off between classes when they could talk to their profs or their peers about their work, where they could reflect on what they had just heard before running into another session to pile on another hour of material in a different subject. Long gone, seemingly, are the days when students would haunt the libraries between classes. Too often, when students do have a couple of hours between classes, they jump in their cars and head off campus.
I do not blame the students here. They have an obligation to scratch together what living wages they can, and if they are not helped to finance better their education, we cannot fault them for not getting the balance right. If we do not make our campuses places where people want to spend their time in the fashion I describe, we have considerable responsibility. But while students still write letters, and protest, and sometimes still march in outrage, I wonder if they even know they have lost something here, something of whose loss they should be outraged?
Sitting in their 8am classes, I wonder if they can know they are being deprived of something they have never known?
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