As many of you know, but some of you don’t, I am proudly a student at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Canada. I am enrolled in the faculty of Applied Health Sciences which is, as you may have guessed, a sciences program. Most of my friends are in AHS as well, just by virtue of the fact that it is a very small faculty and we tend to clump together for protection against our natural predators: Engineers. Anyway, some of us occasionally venture outside our faculty to take courses that are not offered within. It is in this manner that I found myself sitting in a psychology lecture. I was looking forward to getting a chance to learn some things of personal, if not professional interest to me. The prof began and I was all set for a fast-paced class with lots of new ideas to think over…

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Then the hands went up.

If you have never had the extreme pleasure of taking a psych course at university, DON’T. You would be better off spending your time reading an Archie comic and putting a live wolverine in your underwear. This method roughly approximates the intellectual challenge and unbelievable pain of sitting in a class with a collective IQ of “no”. The problem isn’t that the material is difficult to follow. Quite the contrary; much of it is rather intuitive. The problem lies in the fact that the students who have made psychology their chosen academic focus are too bloody stupid to follow a simple lecture. Faced with new information, their brains shut down and their hands shoot up. Most of the time, the questions are of a normal variety: asking for further specifics and whatnot. However, they quickly progress to the land of the idiotic. Questions like “Would a person who is blind in one eye be able to eat an entire pie, or would they only eat half of it?” (I really wish I was making this question up. To the moron who asked this, I pose a question in reply: WHO EATS A WHOLE PIE?”).

Once precedent for moronic questions is set, it’s like a dam bursts and all the idiocy flows out unabated. “If you keep breathing in, will your chest get bigger?” “Has anyone seen my pants?” “Uuuuuuungha?” They are the kind of questions you would expect an 8 year-old to ask in that tender age before they learn that not all questions need to be asked or answered. Despite the fact that information has never been more readily available and people are supposedly more educated now than ever before, it seems as though these arts students have an innate fear of learning things on their own.

I can’t lay all the blame on the knuckle-draggers in the seats however. If I were a professor (and I’m sure everyone is glad I’m not) I would have a “question quota”. Once the number of moronic questions has exceeded the quota, I would just refuse to answer any more. Not so for psych profs however. They treat even the most thoughtless question as though it was of utmost importance. As a result, fully half of the class time is wasted answering people’s dubious inquiries, while the sciences students languish (if you are thinking of taking a psych course, bring a newspaper or a GameBoy).

But at least it all stays confined to the 3 hours of class per week, right? Wrong, bucko. Thanks to the magic of the internet, anyone in the class is capable of sending e-mail notices to everyone enrolled in the course. This is when arts students reveal themselves to be far beyond the bounds of ordinary idiocy. If you’re stupid, so be it. There are many stupid people in the world. However, it takes a special class of idiot to advertise to an entire classroom of people that you are completely incapable of independent thought. As we approached the first term test, I received about 10 e-mails asking Dubya-quality questions about the exam. Keep in mind, all these questions had already been answered in class several times. It is also possible to send these questions to JUST the prof or the TAs. Not so for these geniuses: the whole class gets a bulletin. Because it’s not enough that only some people know how brain-damaged you are, EVERYONE must know!

The worst part of it all is that there is no escape from these people if you are at all interested in the field of psychology. I can’t speak for other universities, but I would imagine that this problem is endemic in the field of psychology… which makes me fearful for the future. These are the people who are going to be building our rocket ships and doing our heart transplants…

Oh wait, they’re ARTS students… never mind then. Let’s just hope the guy pumping the gas doesn’t put up his hand to ask a question and spill gas all over my BMW.