Editor:
Your opinion piece dated April 27 states that you would prefer that we “older students” refrain from speaking during class so the younger ones can “get finished and have some fun.” I don’t think your parents wrote “fun” in the memo section of your tuition check.
Maybe in the future, you’d have “older students” sit in the back of the class or drink out of “old people” drinking fountains. (Older than what, by the way? 30? 40? Or just older than you?). Hey, I know, let’s sew a big emblem on our clothes so people will know we’re old and can persecute us en masse.
Isn’t college a place to learn and share ideas? I don’t recall any catalog declaring college a post adolescent retreat for those yet unprepared to face life on their own.
You have the audacity to refer to the “older students,” whose tax dollars fund your student loans, as a plague? Comparing us to drugs and alcohol in an attempt to justify a group of students’ Lack of scholastic prowess is ludicrous. Didn’t your mother teach you not to say anything if you didn’t have something nice to say? Perhaps not, considering your aversion to motherhood.
In your piece, you mention mothers twice and would consider muzzling a talkative one. Freud would love that. I suppose you don’t need to ask questions in class when you plan on dropping halfway through the semester because the professor wants you to do something silly like study. Have this “vast majority” of students you allege to speak for taken advantage of office hours lately? I’m there, and guess what? They’re not waiting in line! Rest assured, if you feel neglected by your teacher, they would support you getting off your pampered rear end and fighting for some of their time.
I spend time with a tutor occasionally as well, or is that another resource you would prefer we old folks don’t make use of? Perhaps, as in the world of Logan, euthanasia is in order?
I will assume that you do not consider the children who continually arrive late to class (or not at all), do not complete their homework, and then chat with their friends on their cell phones during lecture as distractions? They sure waste my time and money! Oh, and by the way, turn the damned things off while you’re in class.
Maybe you simply don’t understand why we take our education so seriously, making “every second count.” Do you realize that a significant number of the people that you are referring to had good jobs but are victims of downsizing, injury or having our companies relocated to foreign countries? We don’t want to be there again. You should be listening to us, and maybe you will be fortunate enough to not be in our position 10-15 years from now. (having been here “a few years” already Ian, that should be enough time for you to finish up here at BC and move on, yes?). Maybe you are one of those Remora-like living at home leeching room and board out of parents who, in good faith, promised you a place to live until graduation?
I would encourage you to use your talent for the good of our student body, not to isolate and discriminate. You must surely rank somewhere between the “teenage hoodlums” in the back of the class and the “older students” but someday will become what you fear. By the way, I sit in the back of the class.
Dan Olive
Bakersfield
Editor:
It’s nice to see that ageism, as practiced by the editor-in-chief of The Renegade Rip, is alive and well at BC. I’m referring to Ian Hamilton’s opinion column in the April 27 edition of The Rip in which he vents against “old people” as a plague in the classroom, and in advocating a policy to muzzle their classroom discussions. Shades of totalitarianism, Ian! Shame on you, especially considering your position as a member of the “free press.”
But then, I can’t get too upset, because you also make my argument for me by stating that ” … younger students just want to get finished so they can have fun while older students want to make every minute count.” Well, duh! That’s what we’re ultimately here for, Ian. It’s not about having fun, it’s about learning and pulling every minute out of a class to make that occur.
If I have noticed one pattern in my years as an instructor here at BC, it is the intellectual stimulation that “older” students bring to the classroom. They are often the best prepared, the most likely to contribute to class discussions, and the most likely to do well on exams. Why? Because they “get” the fact that it’s not about having fun, or getting out of class early, it’s about learning and preparing oneself for the real world.
Ian wrote that if he had a dime for each time a student talked about his or her life experiences in class, “I could buy Bakersfield College.” What he seems to fail to understand is that those life experiences often provide a valuable contribution to classroom discussion and to the learning experience in general, and he is so much the poorer for missing this point. But all the dimes in the world cannot buy wisdom. That is just something that comes with age. Party on, dude.
Ernie Tichenor
Political science instructor
Bakersfield College
Editor:
Your opinion column on the more mature students at Bakersfield College contained some vast generalities that brilliantly display your youthful arrogance. I find it ironic that a journalism student would advocate muzzling anyone with insight to share. And your assumption that all older students are annoying pseudo-intellectuals would be like my thinking my photojournalism classmates, who are all the same age or younger than my own children, are nothing but drugged-out slackers.
Nothing could be further from the truth, however, and I would hope that they have benefited from being in class with me half as much as I have from my interaction with them. Try opening your ears and your mind, and you might find these older students have a perspective that will help you as you move into professional reporting. As for me, I have to muster every bit of self-restraint not to whack you in the knees with my cane.
With tongue firmly in cheek,
Marcia Hirst
Bakersfield
Editor:
I’ll never know if you were writing about me in the April 27 issue of The Rip, but it sure sounds like it. For the record, I am 50, focused and yes a front-row sitter. And I do “contribute” in class. I am sorry – oh, no – not for my behavior but for yours. I feel sorry for you and the time you are apparently wasting at BC. I feel sorry for your professors who work hard – both in class and out – to try to reach people like you. When I leave BC after the fall Semester, I will probably have a 3.88 GPA. Will you be able to say that? I’ll start my four-plus years at CSUB in January of 2006. And I’ll sit in the front row, and I’ll tape all my lectures so I can re-listen to them before an exam, and I’ll get A’s! I think you are a tired and frustrated young person.
Dianne Adams
Lake Isabella