Students Work Too Hard (was Re: students)

[John Kawakami]

At 12:53 AM 2/12/99 -0500, Yoshie wrote:
>Anyway, despite what lots of American profs (and nowadays I myself) say
>about American students, it continues to amaze me that students here seem
>to work so damn hard, on and off campus--reading, going to labs, churning
>out papers, working low-wage jobs (for typically 15-20 hours per week!),
>socializing, maintaining families--and on top of all these tough ongoing
>commitments, some of them even manage to put in some activist stuff. When I
>was an undergrad in Japan, I hardly attended any classes, except for the
>seminars given by professors I liked, and I probably wrote only four or
>five (very short) papers in my entire undergrad career. I had no lab work
>to do either.

Way back when, Doug wrote:
>When I talk to undergraduates I'm impressed by they don't seem to give a
>fuck about anything. They sit there, blankly. People tell me it's fear, but
>if it is, it's disguised as a great ennui. Maybe it's just me, or what I
>have to say, or maybe it's been the colleges I've been to. There are enough
>exceptions to make me think that maybe it isn't just me or what I have to
>say - Pace, the CUNY colleges (both of which are filled with motivated
>immigrant and native working class students), and the 2 Canadian
>universities I've visited (UBC & Laurentian). And then there are the
>seniors at Trinity, the elite Manhattan private school (George Soros' kids
>go there). They're very smart, very interested, and full of comments and
>questions. Of course, the school spends something like $23,000 per student.

So, which is it?  When I was an undergrad, I was pretty blank in some
classes because I was so damn tired from working 15-20 hours a week.
Somehow, I did manage to get addicted to the Usenet, and discovered the
periodicals room of the library, and got pretty good at reading journals
unrelated to my studies, and also developed my skills spitting out 1200
word Usenet flames. 

There were intoxicants in there too, somewhere.

John Kawakami johnk at cyberjava.com
http://www.riceball.com/ethnoveg - the ethnic studies + vegetarianism list