Heat please

Anyone who has ever been to our campus can tell that our dorms are old. Usually this is what I love about them...the hardwood floors, the fireplaces in the rooms, the stone buildings all create for a wonderful living place. My only real complaint is the heating. When one first arrives to move in, the day is generally a hot one. While carrying boxes up the stairs the absence of air conditioning is very apparent. The absence of overhead fans in apparent. Basically it is sweltering. My first purchase for my dorm room was a fan. So we can establish that when it is hot outside it is sweltering inside. Now, when the weather outside turns colder, there is generally a week where it is freezing inside. This is the week before they turn on the boilers in the winter. Eventually the boilers are on, but sadly this is not a good thing. The boilers have one control: on or off. There is no varying temperatures by floor, and certainly not by room. So what this means is that the for most of the winter a window is cracked to alleviate the boiling heat coming from the basement. Once again, it is hot. Then the boiler gets turned off after spring break. Generally there is about a week where the weather is still cold, but we have no heat. I have to say that this year the heat could have stayed on longer. As we have been waiting for the weather outside to get warmer we are also waiting for our rooms to be warmer. With no heat on at night, the rooms are freezing. I have found the unfindable: the one time when the dorms or too cold. Amazing! I never would have guessed...their trend, if it has not been noticed is to the hotter side. But now all I want is a bit of heat for my toes. I know the second they turn that boiler on though, the rooms will be too hot, the weather outside will warm, and once again I will be begging for some ac.

Self grading

I understand the value in self-evaluation, it gets the student to think about their progress in the class and forces them to reflect on what they have learned in the class. But I can't get over my pessimistic view that the teacher is just trying to get their students to do the teacher's job. The teacher gives the grades and evaluates the student's progress: that is their job...that is what they get paid for. Sure it is good for the student to have an idea about their progress, but ultimately that determination is done by the professor. Most students are going to believe that they did their best and achieved progress...that is what we do in each assignment and paper we turn in. That is precisely why students aren't the best judges on their work...they put time and energy into making the best when before they turned them in...why else would they turn it in if it wasn't the best they thought they could do? I understand not wanting to read everything carefully and add comments and then come to the conclusion of a grade, but that is the teacher's job...not the students. We do our job all semester long by doing the assignments and turning them in, it should not be up to the student to grade themselves...we cannot be objective graders for ourselves. It's just not possible...no matter how much one believes in the honor code.

Image

At BM, students and faculty members have this idea of the BM woman. This idea wraps up all the ideal student and woman who attends BM should be. She must be her best at all times, smart, independent, never appear weak, never ask for help, or show any weakness associated with the female sex. She is better than the average woman and is held to standards most women couldn't meet. At least this is what I have gathered from the hints that have been dropped. Of course no one ever talks about the standard of perfection, we all just work towards it. She changes depending on the student always embodying the strongest ideal for that particular person. She is a Mawrter, strong, independent, and worthy. She does not exist. She cannot exist, yet there is this unmentioned goal for every student to become her. That is what drives us to do well, to compete, and to take pride in our success. Normally i would say something like this idol would be a constructive idea, helping us all grow, but in reality she hurts us all. We are driven to become an ideal and work towards becoming something that is impossible. No one is perfect..."except us," we think. I can't when and where a freshman is introduced to this woman, but I can say the we all know her and idealize her, secretly hating her for making our lives that mush more stressful. Nothing we can do measures up to her, and nothing ever will. Why would the collective school put this extra pressure to achieve greatness on our shoulders? We all come in feeling it, and leave feeling it, knowing that the ideal will follow us throughout our lives, and knowing that we will never truly be the BM woman.

Sustenance

One of the many things that colleges are rated on is their food. It is something of common knowledge that college food isn't the best...it's mass produced by students, why would it be good? Yet we eat it day in and day out. As it turns out, BM has 'great' college food. The Princeton Review rates us at number 5...lucky us. And yet I still find myself eating the same old thing every day: a bagel with cream cheese for breakfast, nothing for lunch, and a peanut butter, honey, and banana sandwich for dinner. I of course add in the occasional cereal, the fruit that kind of looks good but really isn't, and every once in a while I will actually make myself a stir-fry (although the dinning hall seems to think that olive oil is what one uses for stir-fry instead of peanut-oil). What do people do at schools that don't have 'good' food? I suppose we have a good selection, as selection goes, but the selection is the same every night. You can only eat so much mac-and-cheese and pizza, and french fries really do get old. So then I turn to the salad bar, which doesn't change from night to night, so you have a good salad for two nights and then it gets old really fast. Why can't schools make the food they feed us good? We are paying good money for it. I feel that it must be possible, but maybe I'm just an optimist. At least my dining hall is rated. I can't imagine what they serve elsewhere.

The wonderful world of wireless

So our dorms just recently went completely wireless...about a week after I bought a new ethernet cable...oh well. But I think up until now I've been looking at this the wrong way. Of course it is great that I can write an essay on my bed and watch a movie somewhere else and not have to worry about the cord stretching, but I recently found a flaw. You can't really turn it off. When I sit down to write a paper, I like to disconnect my computer from the internet to entirely rid myself of the possibility of procrastinating any longer once I actually sit down to write the paper. But now, with snazzy wireless, my computer is constantly hooked up to the internet...and I'm not sure my will power is strong enough to deal with it. It is of course nice to be able to pop onto the internet to check a source or something, but once on the internet an entire world of distraction is open to me. This is not good, seeing as I generally wait until the last minute to write a paper and don't have any time to play around after I actually start writing my paper. Now I must work on my will power which is pretty week when it comes to things that don't really have consequences...or rather only have minimal consequences that don't make a difference in my life. Sure I loose ten minutes of sleep, but I don't think about that when procrastinating...an art I had perfected before the internet became so readily available. Oh the problems technology create for me.

Finals

One things I love about BM and our finals system is the self scheduled exams. I'm not sure if many schools have this or if it is unique to the tri-co, but it is a system that I love. Instead of being told to go to a specific classroom at a specific time and then sitting down for three hours to complete the test, BM students are given more leeway by most of their professors. We have what are called self-schedualed exams. During the two week exam period, a student can choose when to go and take their exam as well as where they take them. All the exams are kept together and can be handed out at 3 times most days of this final period. The student picks up their final, goes to any one of the designated testing rooms on campus and takes their test. Our exams are proctored by fellow students not in the actual testing room. They sit outside and basically make sure that people are not talking and disrupting other test takers. There is a time limit on the finals, but it is up to you to keep track of your time and turn your final in when finished. Few finals are given in another manner, and those mostly lie in my department...Art History. Understandably, all students in an Art History class need to look at the same slide, for the same amount of time for the final to be fair. So these so called 'slide exams' are given at specific times in a specific classroom with a professor or TA coming into the room to change the slides. There is something so nice about being treated like responsible adults in this manner. Our honor code, a big deal on our campus, holds each student to the same criteria....that we not cheat, that we follow the instructions, and that we do so ourselves. Because of this honor code we are treated like adults and are allowed to act as such...something one rarely saw in high school and I believe something that is rarely seen on college campuses. It is a great feeling knowing that your professors trust you so completely that they do not need to monitor your tests. Of course with this freedom comes responsibility, but the responsibility should be there with or without the system. We are in fact all adults and any adult should have certain values and virtues they live up to...at least that's how we see it here.

The land of TV

When I lived at home television was not an important part of my life. I couldn't watch TV after my dad got home, and my mom didn't like me watching TV so it was never a big after school activity. I was however allowed to watch it when I was home sick. 'Allowed' is of course a cute way of saying my parent's weren't home and I couldn't sleep ALL day. When I was little, I watched Saturday morning cartoons until my parent's woke up, but that was about it. I remember the kids in my high school talking about their favorite shows and what big surprise was on the latest episode, but I never joined in. I didn't watch those shows and frankly liked to do other things better. My mom says that TV made me cranky and put me in a bad mood for the rest of the day, whether or not that is true, I don't know, but TV wasn't a part of my childhood. For the sake of honesty, there were always a few shows I liked to watch if they were on when I was watching, like say Boy Meets World, and I am still a huge fan of West Wing, but that's about where my passion stopped. Until I got to school.
Even though I have never had a TV in my room, the new phenomena of TV online caught me. I started following certain shows, and I hate to say, I still do. Not that it matters, and it's not why I watch TV, but I do fit into those conversations a little bit, and I understand how enthralling the story lines can get. Why I found this out at college is somewhat of a mystery, but I can guess it is one of those things that happens when there is no parent supervision. Netflicks and Hulu don't help either...free TV whenever you want. I would never say that TV has gotten in the way of my studies, it hasn't, but I still feel guilty when I put down a textbook for a break and go online to catch up on a show. I guess my parents did a good job with me.
I certainly never had a problem with Turn the TV/electronics Off Week. It so happens that today was the start of that for my mother's second grade class, and oh how complicated it is now. All we were to avoid was TV, but now they want to know about video games, i-pods, computer games, and every other electronic they own. I certainly love the age we live in with all the gadgets we have, but I do sometimes miss the simplicity of electronics in my childhood. I guess I'm getting old.