Student myths

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

Dedicated to the 2001 entrant …

In our time, life is somehow especially spontaneously organized, which now, as never before, is a particularly wide field for myth-making. It's just not being, but some kind of ancient mythology with its gods, satyrs, nymphs and other archaisms.

Student life and everything connected with it, in this case, cannot be called an exception. But here the clinic is special - myths and reality are closely intertwined and form a monstrous symbiotic relationship.

Constitutional myth

Just please don't laugh, now I will quote the Constitution of the Russian Federation (forgive me, Lord!). You don't have to get up. So, paragraph 3 of article 43 of chapter 2 reads:"

As soon as a citizen of the Russian Federation decides to use this right, then this terrible word “competition” appears in front of him. The rules of the contest are simple and straightforward - keep your pocket wider! Does not work? And then what kind of a fig are you climbing, where they don't ask? However, personally, I am still, by virtue of my natural optimism and light faith in a person, I am sure that geniuses with seven spans sticking out in different directions in the forehead are out of competition. Stories of similar examples are known.

Let me be taught

People go to a higher educational institution for knowledge. There is also such a myth. Of course, they don't go there, but the number of those who go only increases every year. The point is not that there is no knowledge in universities. Yes, but, firstly, no one will teach anyone by force, and secondly, no one will teach anyone, even if you really want to learn. Future specialists will have to master most of the skills on their own, as they say, in free swimming. And here are the paradoxes. For three whole years, we, students of the journalism department, were literally starved in physical education classes for four academic hours a week. At a certain moment it began to seem that we were participants in a secret program for training personnel for special forces. When, after the next five kilometers of running in five minutes, I crawled into the office of an already experienced journalist with the words: "Our coach is just a beast!" ? Well, it must be, it must be so!

However, in contrast to physical education classes, alas, there is nothing to imagine. In the fourth year of study, we were offered the course "Actual problems of modern science". Extremely useful and interesting in all respects, in my opinion, the course consisted of … six hours. That is, a week and a half hours three times and now it is over. Offer us at least half of the physical education classes to replace "Actual problems", we would agree and would not believe our happiness. The same is the case with psychology, sociology, imageology. I was more lucky with philosophy, but still not enough. So the university curriculum is for you a work that will be stronger than the works of Montaigne, Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and so on combined. And you can't argue against her. In the first year, students are still trying to console themselves by talking about overseas Harvards, Oxfords and Colubia University, where students choose the disciplines in which they would like to study. But ours is still better, because in the end it is not necessary to strain too much. But I already started to tell about the next myth.

Easy to learn, hard to fight

A session for freshmen is still something mysterious, dark and scary. And do not believe those who say that the students on the eve of exams and tests (which the session consists of) drink unrestrainedly. At least not freshmen. Everything is much more prosaic: all the lectures are frantically flipping through and the gaze glares at every written word in order to a) remember, b) reproduce correctly, c) try to understand the meaning, and on the morning of the next day tell the teacher with expression about anthropomorphism, legitimacy and singularity … All this happens in the first session. In front of all the rest of the students (of course, not all) are already drinking and an hour before the exam, with a hangover hiccup, they write cheat sheets. For there is nothing easier than passing an exam. A parable is wandering among the student community about how one day, with a terrible hangover, a particularly resourceful student turned to the teacher at the exam with the words: Listen, Ivan Ivanovich (let's call the teacher that way), we are adults and we have enough of our own problems. And Would you like to hear for the thousandth time the boring story of how Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy portrayed the people in his novel War and Peace? The teacher agreed to the student's proposal … However, where is the myth, and where is the reality, it is difficult to say.

Alexander Maksimovsky