School/College Related 1

Fun Things to Do on the First Day of Class

*Smoke a pipe and respond to each point the professor makes by waving it and saying, "Quite right, old bean!"
*Wear X-Ray Specs. Every few minutes, ask the professor to focus the overhead projector.
*Sit in the front row and spend the lecture filing your teeth into sharp points.
*Sit in the front and color in your textbook.
*When the professor calls your name in roll, respond "that's my name, don't wear it out!"
*Introduce yourself to the class as the "master of the pan flute".
*Give the professor a copy of The Watchtower. Ask him where his soul would go if he died tomorrow.
*Wear earmuffs. Every few minutes, ask the professor to speak louder.
*Leave permanent markers by the dry-erase board.
*Squint thoughtfully while giving the professor strange looks. In the middle of lecture, tell him he looks familiar and ask whether he was ever in an episode of Starsky and Hutch.
*Ask whether the first chapter will be on the test. If the professor saysno, rip the pages out of your textbook.
*Become entranced with your first physics lecture, and declare your intention to pursue a career in measurements and units.
*Sing your questions.
*Speak only in rhymes and hum the Underdog theme.
*When the professor calls roll, after each name scream "THAT'S MEEEEE! Oh, no, sorry."
*Insist in a Southern drawl that your name really is Wuchen Li. If you actually are Chinese, insist that your name is Vladimir Fernandez O'Reilly.
*Page through the textbook scratching each picture and sniffing it.
*Wear your pajamas. Pretend not to notice that you've done so.
*Hold up a piece of paper that says in large letters "CHECK YOUR FLY".
*Inform the class that you are Belgian royalty, and have a friend bang cymbals together whenever your name is spoken.
*Stare continually at the professor's crotch. Occasionally lick your lips.
*Address the professor as "your excellency".
*Sit in the front, sniff suspiciously, and ask the professor if he's been drinking.
*Shout "WOW!" after every sentence of the lecture.
*Bring a mirror and spend the lecture writing Bible verses on your face.
*Ask whether you have to come to class.
*Present the professor with a large fruit basket.
*Bring a "seeing eye rooster" to class.
*Feign an unintelligible accent and repeatedly ask, "Vet ozzle haffen dee henvay?" Become agitated when the professor can't understand you.
*Relive your Junior High days by leaving chalk stuffed in the chalkboard erasers.
*Watch the professor through binoculars.
*Start a "wave" in a large lecture hall.
*Ask to introduce your "invisible friend" in the empty seat beside you, and ask for one extra copy of each handout.
*When the professor turns on his laser pointer, scream "AAAGH! MY EYES!"
*Correct the professor at least ten times on the pronunciation of your name, even if it's Smith. Claim that the i is silent.
*Sit in the front row reading the professor's graduate thesis and snickering.
*As soon as the first bell rings, volunteer to put a problem on the board.
*Ignore the professor's reply and proceed to do so anyway.
*Claim that you wrote the class text book.
*Claim to be the teaching assistant. If the real one objects, jump up and scream "IMPOSTER!"
*Spend the lecture blowing kisses to other students.
*Every few minutes, take a sheet of notebook paper, write "Signup Sheet #5" at the top, and start passing it around the room.
*Stand to ask questions. Bow deeply before taking your seat after the professor answers.
*Wear a cape with a big S on it. Inform classmates that the S stands for "stud".
*Interrupt every few minutes to ask the professor, "Can you spell that?"
*Disassemble your pen. "Accidentally" propel pieces across the room while playing with the spring. Go on furtive expeditions to retrieve the pieces. Repeat.
*Wink at the professor every few minutes.
*In the middle of lecture, ask your professor whether he believes in ghosts.
*Laugh heartily at everything the professor says. Snort when you laugh.
*Wear a black hooded cloak to class and ring a bell.
*Ask your math professor to pull the roll chart above the blackboard of ancient Greek trade routes down farther because you can't see Macedonia.

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.