Newspapers / University of North Carolina … / March 21, 1996, edition 1 / Page 2
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March 21, 1996 The Blue Banner The Blue Banner Editorial Get off your lazy butts! Seems to me the problem with the library is sheer laziness. Not the librarians’, but the students’. If you wait until the last weekend before the Monday due date, of course ABC Express or Interlibrary Loan won’t be fast enough. This is fairly self- explanatory. Of course, it is easy to assume that the library will have the books and that it doesn’t really matter when you start working. Speaking as a habitual procrastinator, I can say that I have done that, and still do. But the fault rests on none but my shoulders. If you find yourself stuck because the library doesn’t have access to the materials you need, regardless of time restrictions, then it’s time to search for other alternatives, such as Pack Memorial Library, or local college libraries like A-B Tech, or Warren Wilson. You might also try asking the Ramsey lirarians for help. They can be helpful, and they do get paid for helping students who tend to be completely clueless. If you have a problem with starting project^late, maybe you should try to start a little earlier so you don’t get trapped into a project with no books. Finding souixes is a pain, especially when there’s no time to go dig up other ones. For most people, starting a project is the worst part of the whole thing, but the best way to get over that is to just get off your lazy butt and start. In many different areas, anticipation is the worst part of the experience. It is true that the library has a small selection, but if we make sure that the problem with sources is the library’s and not the result of procrastination, a larger selection might be sooner forthcoming. If the librarians hear over and over again how horrible the library is, when the trouble is with the students, how willing will anyone be to expand the selection? Make sure that before you complain, you have done every thing as accurately and as far ahead as possible. It is completely unfair to gripe about a problem that you have caused. And as a habitual procrastinator, I know how easy that is. So, please, give the librarians the courtesy of starting projects with enough time to spare, and don’t complain unless you have a legitimate grievance. —Catherine P. Elniff Editorial Board Catherine Elniff Andrea Lawson William Davis Anne Kuester Jeannie Peek Jeanette Webb Editor-in-Chief News Editor Features Editor Sports Editor Copy Editor Photo Editor Staff Kenneth Corn, Shawn Culbertson, Marissa DeBlasio, Nick Foster, Troy Martin,Wendy McKinney, Susan Sertain, Denise Sizemore,Michael Taylor. Jennifer Thurston, Christine Treadaway, Jack Walsh Karen Brinson Advertising Alice Hui Business Manager Greg Burrus Circulation Mark West, faculty advisor The Blue Banner is the student newspaper of the University of North CaroHna at Asheville. We publish each Thursday except during summer sessions, final exam weeks and holiday breaks. Our offices are located in Carmichael Hall, Rm 208-A. Our telephone number is (704) 251-6586. Our campus e-mail address is UNCAVX::BANNER. Nothing in our editorial or opinions sections necessarily reflects the opinion of the entire Blue Banner editorial board, the faculty advisor, or the university faculty, administration or staff. Unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of a majority of the Blue Banner editorial board. Letters, columns, cartoons and reviews represent only the opinions of their respective authors. The Blue Banner welcomes submissions of letters and articles for publication. All submissions are subject to editing and are consid ered on the basis of interest, space, taste and timeliness. Letters must be typed, double spaced, and must not exceed 300 words. Letters for publication must also contain the author’s signa ture, classification, major or other relationship with UNCA. The deadline for letters and classifieds is noon on Tuesday. If you have a submission, you can send it to: The Blue Banner 208A Carmichael Hall ; One University Heights Asheville NC 28804 Cool professors, apathetic students Nate Conroy Columnist Being a professor might look easy, but it has its hard points. Having to act like you know what you’re talking about in front of a room full of glazed- over faces can be tough. Us drooling-on-the-desk jack asses might be paying atten tion, and then again, we might not. All we care about is what you write on the board. We will all immediately begin scribbling down whatever you say if you say its important. Hmm... you could have some fun with that. But it might be stressful for someone with eth- icsor concern for the students. Then again, having people write down everything you say can also be a big ego boost, and sometimes it shows. After all, someone thought you were important enough to have your own office, computer, and secretary. And you may find yourself in a beautiful house,' with a beautiful wife. And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. And you may ask yourself, “Well... How did I get here?” You worked hard! You de serve it! As long as you try to make it in for your office hours, people will be banging down the door. That’s how much they want to see you. But, when you are left to teach and teach without any one really checking up on you and none of the zombies in your classes questioning any thing, its easy to lapse into just trying to be cool. How to be a cool professor; - Use the words “germane,” “caveat,” and “deluged” in the same sentence. See how many times you can do it in one class. Make a game out of it. - Preface things you say with “therefore we can extrapolate,” “thus Marx teaches us,” or some other intelligent-sound ing, extraneous phraseology. - Translate Humanities texts yourself, because the transla tion in Witt isn’t good enough. - Write your own textbook, sold only in the UNCA Book store, then complain that it doesn’t cover the material well so you’ll be using your own handouts. - Say it “eu-man” as if the “h” is silent. - Take studious notes during other professor’s Humanities lectures. Pretend you give a rat’s ass. - Threaten your students with bad grades if they don’t cheer during your Humanities lec ture. -•Say that you can’t do any thing high-tech like getting an overhead the right direction. (“I have a PhD, I don’t have to know how to make the VCR stop flashing 12:00.”) - Hold three opaque pieces of paper facing different direc tions on the overhead so no one can skip ahead. - Talk crap about other profes sors to your classes. - Trivialize other fields of study. Say “Oh those Sociologists...” - Joke about the fact that they actually have you teaching a hu manities class. - Lie to your class, make them write it down, test them on it. They’ll never know. - Run five minutes late every where you go. You’re doing im portant things after all. ; - Swear in class to emphasize a point, - Swear in class because you can. - Never learn one person’s name the entire semester except for the one kiss-ass in the front row. - For a catharsis, get an intramu ral basketball team and knock the hell out of some students. - Talk about listening to cool musical groups like Pearl Jam. - Play hip music before and after your Humanities lectures. - Describe your experiences with drugs in the 60s. - Tell stories for the first forty minutes of class. - Secretly think “I wish / got to play the piano for ‘lecture.’” - Let your night classes go an hour early. - Promote things you are in volved in with extra credit. - Get a web page with a picture of yourself, a link to “Here’s what I sound like,” and a long bio that tells how great you are. Write your bio in third person so it seems like someone else wrote it. - Tell your students to send you e-mail. Check it ten times a day. - Add cutesy clip art to your handouts. Pretendyou just did it for fun, when it actually took three hours. - Attempt to sound sophisti cated by saying “This will take a little longer... it’s a 386.” - Put Far Side cartoons relating to your field on your door. - Get really into your classes. Be emotional. - Use your hand as an eraser. Get so into your lecture that you don’t notice you have wiped chalk dust all over your black pants. - Write verbosely and illegibly. Draw a lot of arrows. - Never keep track of what number you are on in your outline. When the class is fin ished, make sure the board looks like a total incomprehen sible mess. Don’t erase the board for the next class. - When an annoying student asks a superfluous question, make him go research it and report the results to the class next time. - Eat lunch in the caf only to show you have your finger on the pulse of the student body. - Refer to the first hour of class as “the first half of today’s show.” - Strut around. - Greet the class with “Howdy!” - Flip the chalk up and down like a badass. - Scrunch up your face, half shut one eye, and turn your ear towards someone to indicate deep contemplation of their question. Unhappy with politics? So is everybody else. James Hertsch Columnist What has happened to this country? When did we lose our humanity, our compas sion, our loyalty? When did we decide that careers account for nothing, that the bottom line is all that matters? AT&T decided to sacrifice a few thousand workers for some stock value; meanwhile, every single big company CEO I read about seems to be making more money in one day than some people in this nation can make in an entire year. At the same time, we see stories about a record high... or trading... or something. A couple weeks ago, we had a panic as the stock market hit a lull... a low of some sort. I’m no economist here, but it seems to me that, while AT&T is playing chess with people’s livelihoods to squeeze every single penny they can out of the bottom line, the stock market as a whole is swinging back and forth and back and forth like one of those Viking boat rides you see at all the amusement parks. Some people tell me that in the 80s, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Other people tell me that all of the wealth is going to trickle down to the workers and still other people rage about a worker’s revolution, and still others would protect us from outside workers and still other people want a level playing field and still others say we need the old times and others say the new times are here and why should we fight? Meanwhile, the economists and analysts and brokers and bankers toss around numbers upon numbers and with the same facts prove whatever they want and assail us with figures and derivatives and God only knows what else. And, through all this, our government struggles to do something, anything, but all that they can do is spend and spend and spend on this, that and the other and the public wants this but doesn’t want that, and, somehow, by reduc ing our revenues we can re duce the debt and keep every thing running just the way it always was? Everything’s going to Hell in a handbasket; I think many of us can agree on that much. Every single bigwig in office has a solution, knows what’s best for us. But, invariably, these solutions all seem to boil down to numbers. All the an swers come in generalities and phobias. I’m beginning to think that all the damned numbers in the world don’t matter any more. I think that, by attending a'state- sponsored school. I’ve become more than a little spoiled. Yet, I need it to make a living for my self in the future. I need this education to, someday, pass on a decent life to my children. Agricultural subsidies have no doubt spoiled some of America’s farmers. But, as I think about it, I can’t help but think that maybe, just maybe, a farmer may need these subsidies to survive as he can, to grow, to prosper, to pass on a good life to his children. The question of subsidies is more complicated than it seems. Should the government cut welfare funding? Somebody tells me tales of the immoral acts of teenage mothers, yet I can’t help thinking of a teenage woman’s face, her body bruised, broken, her child hungry, scared, and her, afraid to return home to her parents, for fear of what they will do, what they have done, to her. Should the rich be taxed on a graduated scale? One person tells me tales of corporation CEOs making all this money, and AT&T laying off employees for the bottom line. Another paints for me a picture of some rich man resting in a pool, without a care in the world, knowing that his money takes care of it all. But, what did he do to get there? How many times did he stumble on his climb up the corporate ladder? Do the CEOs sleep well at night after ordering a layoff? At first look, it seems so simple. At first look, the world is black and white, a study in blatant contrasts. Us vs. them. What it turns into, eventually, is overlap. That black-and- white photo of the two faces becomes the vase, and then it’s the faces again. It all depends on how you look at it. Our politicians have played on our innate sense for an en emy, I think. Our political and media culture has bred this psychology on us, and feeds it to us constantly. The enemy is different for every issue. Cor porations. Welfare queens. Big government. Heartless conser vatives. Bleeding-heart liber als. What ever happened to a de gree of realism? Realize that things aren’t as simple as they seem. Instead of blatantly cut ting this, or spending on that, think about the people for a moment, and, somehow, make a decision. And, by all means, don’t generalize. Of course, when I think about it, I generalize, too, in this column, right here. Are politicians humar^, too?
University of North Carolina at Asheville Student Newspaper
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March 21, 1996, edition 1
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