Arts students - The 11th plague
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.
As one of your predators, I have to agree with you. I’ll even push it further: business students are just as dumb (Not all of them. I hope.) Thanks to my minor in management, I now understand your pain. And these are the people that will be VPs, CEOs, leaders, unfortunately.
Comment on October 9, 2005 @ 4:34 pm
Yes, I am also one of the predators, and I was quite surprised to find that business students will occupy the top positions in an enterprise. In my university, they have the easiest classes (which they don’t pass very frequently, either), and I am quite concerned that I will have someone I made fun of in uni giving me orders on my job. Well, hopefully I will be indispensable enough to tell him to shut up and sit down or risk having all the PCs stop working :P.
Comment on October 9, 2005 @ 5:34 pm
Dumb business students in command? That’s what The Bastard Operator From Hell suffers from!
Comment on October 11, 2005 @ 5:53 pm
link tags don’t work :/
See theregister[dot]co[dot]uk /odds /bofh/
Just incase links are filtered as well…
Comment on October 11, 2005 @ 5:55 pm
What’s wrong with just “http://www.theregister.co.uk/odds/bofh/”?
Comment on October 11, 2005 @ 8:26 pm
Wow. I was actually contemplating taking a Psych course in my last term in the Winter (I also go to Waterloo… crazy). I guess it wasn’t enough of a hint living with a kid in psych named ‘Nirbo’ in res (his real name is Robin but made us call him by his clever pseudonym before being kicked out for growing pot in his room…). Thanks for saving me from the mental breakdown.
Comment on October 12, 2005 @ 12:27 pm
psych classes aren’t
thatbad…at least not once you get past the lame first year ones. besides, where else can you find a major where sexual asphyxiation is a legitimate topic? or where your text book is written by your prof and dr ruthComment on October 12, 2005 @ 8:01 pm
You could almost say that Psychology is intuitional! (Much like linguistics)…
spoken like a true Arts-kid
Comment on October 13, 2005 @ 12:31 am
shit
Comment on October 13, 2005 @ 3:47 pm
Well said.
Comment on October 13, 2005 @ 6:24 pm
Hehe, the only arts student I ever properly knew was my ex-girlfriend… And sometimes, you just gotta nod, smile and ignore them
Comment on October 15, 2005 @ 6:57 pm
As an engineer, I feel as if I’m missing something big when looking at art. There were two things I kept missing: First, there is an aesthetic which is simply inexplicable. It’s the same thing I feel when I look at two solutions to a technical problem. One of them is definitely elegant and the other one is brutish. Both get the job done, but one of them is obviously “better” and more creative.
The second is simply where art students are playing with technique. It’s no different than engineers trying new techniques. For example, an electrical engineer who designs a new type of coupling for a regenerative receiver is not breaking new ground in performance. It’s a new technique, but one that only engineers can appreciate. Lots of art is like that too.
That said, it’s much easier to fool the public by calling stuff “art” than it is to do the same with engineering. The former merely needs a good sales job to prove that it is art and not nonsense. The latter either does what it claims or it doesn’t.
Now you know why so many idiots gravitate toward the arts and social studies. It’s easy to BS a random person who doesn’t know you. Refuting the claims is not nearly as easy as refuting the claims of an engineer. They have the laws of physics to contend with.
And the BS factor even extends across decades. Witness the Snow Job that Freud perpetrated against the study of psychology. His work has been almost entirely debunked (but for a few whacko cling-ons). Yet: when someone does good work it canlast for centuries. Does anyone claim that the Mona Lisa is garbage? Does anyone think that William Shakespeare’s plays were third rate?
Don’t judge the arts by the incompetence of the many. There are good artists out there. Unfortunately for every one of them, there are at least 10 more who pretend. Likewise, I’ve had the good fortune of working for a very creative and capable boss. He knew how to lead and manage smart people. I’ve never seen his like since. There are good bosses out there. Unfortunately, it’s also true that he never attended business school. You see, this isn’t something you can teach. It’s something that you pursue.
And therein lies the rub. You can’t learn art in school. You can only learn about it. That’s why you see so many idiots in liberal arts schools.
Comment on October 15, 2005 @ 8:50 pm
It’s true that there are people who are influenced by the opinions of others, but if I look at a painting, sculpture, etc and it’s crap, I’ll say it’s crap. People may say “bah, you wouldn’t know art if it bit you in the nuts” but they’re just pushovers who succumb to peer pressure. And there’s a lot of them. Many times I happen not to like famous works by famous artists, and no matter how many people say they’re good, they’re crap to me.
Comment on October 16, 2005 @ 6:20 am
As a former student of a college of business, I must say that there is wide variation in business classes. Information systems, transportation logistics, and management students have it easy (aside from programming courses), but finance and accounting are more like math & engineering. They are similar to engineering in that they both use a focused bit of math for their respective field of study and are usually filled with serious students. I’ve got a degree from each side and I’ve been through some horrid but mandatory “extra” classes from the college of liberal arts that have nothing to do with any potential career, unless you plan to teach the same thing as a professor. I’m no longer surprised to find a lot of blissful ignorance in those classes.
You must have found the center of liberal thinking (every school has at least one); if not, I pity all those innocent minds at the University of Waterloo.
Comment on October 16, 2005 @ 11:59 am
This has generated more discussion than I could have ever expected. I think you are missing my point though… arts students are dumb. Thank you.
Comment on October 18, 2005 @ 6:52 pm