In response to April 28, 2010 Letter to the Editor:
The unfortunate truth on campus is that many students feel as if they are in college to be taught.
As a student who is having similar problems this semester, I understand the frustration of language barriers; I have a teacher who is so green to the english language that they make mistakes trying to put sentences together and get flustered and the class has to help them find the right words. I also understand the frustration of “tough luck” style teachers; my economics teacher told the old fable of the scorpion and the frog after failing a majority of the class on a test. I got a 79 after studying and have a 3.7 GPA, so basically, it was a tough test.
The fact of the matter is, University is here to provide a forum for education, and prepare you for the rest of your life. That is what’s happening here. The education is available, and if you don’t feel as if you’re getting enough out of a class, every department has free tutoring! As far as preparing you for the rest of your life, this humbling experience is an important lesson. No one in life is required to make things easy for anyone else, although its nice when they do, and as far as the contractor metaphor goes, that actually is how it works. Then you have to go the unfair extra mile to find someone to fix it, and calculate whether or not lawyers fee’s outweigh the benefits of suing the shifty contractor.
Life is like the fable of the scorpion and the frog; at the end of that story, after the scorpion convinces the frog to bring him across a river, then proceeds to sting the frog, killing them both.
“you fool!” croaked the frog, “now we shall both die! Why on earth did you do that?” The scorpion shrugged, and did a little jig on the drowning frog’s back. “I could no help myself. It is my nature.”
You cannot, blame the scorpion (the school/the system/the politics) for taking you down, you have to learn from the experience and use your resources to make sure this never happens again. You are judged in life by how you react to what happens to you, not by what happens to you, because you cannot help that people act with self-interest and in ways not purely beneficial to you. It is in their nature.
Eric Bergenn, CCSU ’12
