Thursday, January 26, 2012

A friendly letter to students

Dear students,

Your friends are idiots. I say this with conviction drawn from of many years of experience. Occasionally, a student does something so utterly stupid that it forces me to question my already dim hope for humanity’s future. When confronted with the consequences of his or her own idiocy, the student exclaims, “But my friends said...” I have been told that a student’s friends said:

  • It’s ok to miss the first three weeks of lab.
  • A note from your mother is a valid excuse for missing class.
  • You can make up a missed final exam.
  • I don’t take attendance.
  • College is just like high school. I provide calculators for all students taking my exam.
  • Students don’t need a calculator when taking my exam.
  • Students can copy lab reports as long as the original report is for the same class.

Other students can be a wonderful source of many things: laughter, sex after a night of drinking, heroin, a ride home, and friendship. They can offer you these things better than anybody else at college. However, they are not good sources of information. This leaves you in a predicament, doesn’t it? Who can you turn to for accurate information about classes and university policies? If only there were people at our school who were knowledgeable about such things. Here’s a thought: ask your professors if you have questions about classes. Maybe they can recommend somebody.

With as much caring as I can possibly muster this afternoon,

Beaker Ben

8 comments:

  1. "My ex said I got gonorrhea from riding a tractor in my swimsuit!"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What was your ex doing wearing your swimsuit while riding a tractor? That's pretty weird, even for CM.

      Delete
    2. Worse yet, there was a tractor in the swimsuit. It's getting kinky in here, folks...

      Delete
    3. Not as kinky as the elephant in my pajamas.

      Delete
  2. One thing I learned while I was teaching was to never underestimate the stupidity or deviousness of people.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Beaker Ben, you copied your text from some Micro$lop program like Word and it has lots of formatting crap in it. For example, the tag line is a comment.... You need to go in, look at the HTML and scrape it all out.

    Oh, and ask professors something? You mean that guy is there for real and not some kind of movie? Or we start to offer courses in syllabus reading...

    Just Plain Suzy

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  4. As soon as I hear a "but my friend said" excuse, I know I will reply with a lie having the introductory phrase "I'm sorry, but..." No friend said anything and I'm not sorry.

    ReplyDelete

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