Time wasters plague student life

Earlier this week, while pulling a late night and struggling to get my homework finished before the next morning, I realized that I needed my Calculus book to finish my homework. Too bad I sold my Calculus book two and a half years ago after completing the Calc III course here at Tech.

This need for the Calc book got me thinking. Why am I taking a senior level class that requires me to fish out someone else's old math book to find integral tables (easily located on the book's end sheets) that I haven't actually seen or thought about in years?

Wouldn't it be just as easy, if not easier, to add these same items to the book that I have to have for this class? They could even be located in the same place as they are in the massive Calculus book. This would not add that much more cost to the printing of the book or to the purchasing price of the book. Or, the professor could provide a sheet with, say, the table of integrals needed to complete this homework and the subsequent mounds of work that I'm sure are on the way.

Honestly, what purpose is there in teaching students something and then expecting them to be able to remember precisely how to do it when the material hasn't been used for two and a half years? This loss of memory and standard of teaching is in no way good for any of those involved.

Memory loss is something that I've been encountering regularly lately. I've found that the more knowledge we're forced to absorb during our stint here at Tech, the more information gets pushed to the back of our brains in the hopes that we'll be able to save it for later when we actually need it. The problem with this is that the longer we hold on to this knowledge, the less of it we have left floating around in our brains.

For example, after I finished Calc I, I had a pretty good grasp on integrals; I could even do most of the nasty ones given to me without looking at the end sheets of the book. After Calc II, these nasty integrals didn't show up very often or if they did, they were extremely simplified. This means that this knowledge got pushed to the back of my head in hopes that if I ever saw something similar to an integral, I'd be able to recognize the problem and solve it.

Fast forward to Tuesday night. Because I couldn't remember how to solve the complicated integrals required to complete my homework, I wasted at least an hour finding tables of integrals and trying to relearn how to use them, integrals that should have accompanied the text for the course. I could have used a time machine to go back and get them but alas, the construction of that probably required the use of those oh-so-difficult to find integrals.

Not that the rediscovery of integrals was the only waste of my time this week. Wasted time goes hand in hand with this loss of memory and Tech ranks No.1 in lack of proper time management. For instance, if a professor is going to read straight out of the text for the class, why should I go to class? I may have lost my ability to do math but I know I can still read. That's at least three, maybe even four, hours of life each week that could be better managed.

Another thing that wastes time is pointless meetings. True, sometimes it is hard to focus at group meetings and the like. (Case in point, I met with a friend one day last week and we did anything but focus on completing the aforementioned homework-probably because we were thrown off by the lack of integral knowledge).

But gathering at 5:45 a.m. to gain accountability or, in other words, "make sure everyone in the group is still alive" seems a little extraneous. Those of you who were there know what I'm talking about. Or how about having required meeting on Thursdays at which you sit around for an hour and a half because someone thought it was a brilliant idea to have extra people hanging around? Somehow this seems pointless, especially when there are other pressing issues in life, like relearning math from two and a half years ago.

Another time waster is the new bus route. Instead of being able to get outside 10 minutes before your next class and still make it there on time, you now have to get out there between 15 and 20 minutes early just to make sure that you don't arrive to class late and that you get a seat on the bus. Of course, you have to make it to class on time in case you have to turn in homework that required multiple trigonometric identities.

And then there's the classic waste of time we all go through: listening to friends who don't attend Tech complain about how hard their course load is. I guess they were given the magical table of integrals. Or those people on campus who aren't engineering majors who complain about their course load. That doesn't even seem logical.

Most people hate having their time wasted. Seeing as how we are all struggling to teach ourselves how to join the real world with what we have to know for our particular majors, we don't have the time to be wasted. No wonder graduating here is called "getting out." We're all waiting to get out into the real world where we don't mind wasting time, but that's a topic for a different day.