The New Game

I'm at the point where the semester has started to wind down--thank god--and I start to think that I was crazy (more crazy than usual) for subjecting myself to all this shit again. Being on campus, I mean, has reminded me of the university's ability to support a greatly extended adolescent state in students, so much so that I've heard my fellow twenty-three to forty-five year old classmates being referred to as "kids" (which pisses me almost as much as when people refer to women as "girls"). I've never been one for adapting to being treated like a kid, even when I was a kid, and I find it enraging to be treated now like a kid simply because I am again a student.

Don't get me wrong, I'm in the minority when I say I don't want to be treated like a child. Most of the students I see really love being treated as though they were as irresponsible and untrustworthy and lacking in self-awareness as children. And professors and instructors and teaching assistants practically cream in their pants at the ease with which they assume superiority over these adult "kids." The whole thing is a game (one of them anyway) that stands in the way of education and I hate it.

Two things:

1. I was talking to Judi recently and trying to break it down for her, this experience. The evidence I used was the intimation to me by the professor teaching the class I am taking that she rarely gives different grades to individuals working on a group project; Everyone gets the same grade on the project. And I, who put in the lion's share of work on this "group" project, could barely contain myself at this news. Judi remarked, "It's that 'everyone is just as good as everyone else so everyone gets a participation trophy' mentality." Right?

That's right; I'm the moron who worked extra hard even though it's going to net me the same reward grade-wise as every other member of my group, some of whom did absolutely nothing and whose chief contribution consisted of not jeopardizing the project through their indifference.

That's the way the game is played these days apparently. (See also: George W. Bush gets to be president.)

2. I've been Netflixing episodes of a National Geographic series about the U.S. prison system. One of the things that strikes me again and again is the fact that a single guard will sometimes be in charge of a hundred or two hundred prisoners. Despite greatly outnumbering the guards, the prisoners stay in line most of the time because they've largely been conditioned to act like prisoners.

That's what's going on here at uni, too. Students have largely been conditioned to act like children, so it's easy for a single professor to have control over them.

That's the way the game is played apparently. If you stick around long enough, you get to be a guard, too! You still have to come to the prison everyday, but at least you get paid, right?