A little light relief.

On Thu, 22 Aug 1996 16:42:34 +0100 (BST)  Gillian Austen <[log in to unmask]> 
wrote:

> DAVE BARRY ON COLLEGE
> 
> ********************************************************
> College is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly two
> thousand hours and try to memorize things.  The two thousand hours
> are spread out over four years; you spend the rest of the time
> sleeping and trying to get dates.
> 
> Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:
> 
> 1.  Things you will need to know in later life (two hours).
> 2.  Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours).
> These are the things you learn in classes whose names end in
> -ology, -osophy, -istry, -ics, and so on.  The idea is, you
> memorize these things, then write them down in little exam books,
> then forget them.  If you fail to forget them, you become a professor
> and have to stay in college for the rest of your life.
> 
> It's very difficult to forget everything.  For example, when I was
> in college, I had to memorize -- don't ask me why -- the names of
> three metaphysical poets other than John Donne.  I have managed
> to forget one of them, but I still remember that the other two
> were named Vaughan and Crashaw.  Sometimes, when I'm trying to
> remember something important like whether my wife told me to get
> tuna packed in oil or tuna packed in water, Vaughan and Crashaw
> just pop up in my mind, right there in the supermarket.  It's a
> terrible waste of brain cells.
> 
> After you've been in college for a year or so, you're supposed to
> choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and
> forget the most things about.  Here is a very important piece of
> advice: be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts
> and Right Answers.  This means you must not major in mathematics,
> physics, biology, or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual
> facts.  If, for example, you major in mathematics, you're going to
> wander into class one day and the professor will say: "Define the
> cosine integer of the quadrant of a rhomboid binary axis, and
> extrapolate your result to five significant vertices." If you don't
> come up with exactly the answer the professor has in mind, you fail.
> The same is true of chemistry: if you write in your exam book that
> carbon and hydrogen combine to form oak, your professor will flunk
> you.  He wants you to come up with the same answer he and all the
> other chemists have agreed on.
> 
> Scientists are extremely snotty about this.
> 
> So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy,
> psychology, and sociology -- subjects in which nobody really
> understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve
> virtually no actual facts.  I attended classes in all these
> subjects, so I'll give you a quick overview of each:
> 
> ENGLISH: This involves writing papers about long books you have
> read little snippets of just before class.  Here is a tip on how
> to get good grades on your English papers: Never say anything about
> a book that anybody with any common sense would say.  For example,
> suppose you are studying Moby-Dick.  Anybody with any common sense
> would say that Moby-Dick is a big white whale, since the characters
> in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly eleven thousand
> times.  So in your paper, you say Moby-Dick is actually the Republic
> of Ireland.
> 
> Your professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never
> liked Moby-Dick anyway, will think you are enormously creative.
> If you can regularly come up with lunatic interpretations of simple
> stories, you should major in English.
> 
> PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding
> there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch.  You
> should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.
> 
> PSYCHOLOGY: This involves talking about rats and dreams.
> Psychologists are obsessed with rats and dreams.  I once spent an
> entire semester training a rat to punch little buttons in a certain
> sequence, then training my roommate to do the same thing.  The rat
> learned much faster.  My roommate is now a doctor.  If you like
> rats or dreams, and above all if you dream about rats, you should
> major in psychology.
> 
> SOCIOLOGY: For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and
> away the number one subject.  I sat through hundreds of hours of
> sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never
> once heard or read a coherent statement.  This is because
> sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most
> of their time translating simple, obvious observations into
> scientific-sounding code.  If you plan to major in sociology,
> you'll have to learn to do the same thing.  For example, suppose
> you have observed that children cry when they fall down.  You
> should write: "Methodological observation of the sociometrical
> behavior tendencies of prematurated isolates indicates that a
> casual relationship exists between groundward tropism and
> lachrimatory, or 'crying,' behavior forms." If you can keep this
> up for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a large government grant.
> 
> 
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> 
> 
> 

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