writedenzil@yahoo.com

Feeling like a student again

I stood at the Examinations Section counter, I and eight other forlorn-faced folks, waiting, waiting and waiting in woeful quiescence. After 20 minutes, I was sufficiently livid, disgusted and disconsolate to be imperturbably rude.

At some point between the fall of man and the second coming, a woman appeared and, by all appearances, something would have indeed fallen if she didn’t reach her destination in time.

“Um, miss, should the eight of us come back tomorrow when you all have some spare time? Or should we wait another 20 minutes and hope someone would see Jesus back there and come out and help us?”

In the hospital-like lifelessness of the new, pallid Student Administration Centre, I didn’t realise my voice would carry. But apparently Miss Hot Pee didn’t ketch.

“Somebody should come just now,” she said curtly.

She even had the temerity not to look at me in the eyes.

“Somebody will come, okay?”

And as suddenly as she had appeared, she vanished, into the heavens beyond, swallowed up by the afternoon sunbeams in between the white walls, never, I am certain, to be seen again—by any of the eight of us.

Student-centredness

Lord, what a horrible feeling—feeling like a student again, especially now that I’m not only a graduate, but also a staffer: compromised, insignificant, humiliated.

I had gone to the spanking new admin building to make some requests, where I sat in the large entrance hall with its high, intimidating ceiling, taking a number as if I were in Passport Office, only to be told after waiting for my number to be called that I was to go upstairs.

So No 72 went upstairs where I got some forms but was then told I needed to go to the old admin building to pay, then return to the new building to submit.

Of course. How silly of me. I somehow expected things had improved since I was last there.

The only thing different was that all the admin staff were now “suffering” from air-conditioning, which seemed to further frost their attitudes.

Naturally, however, it was near closing for the cashier, so I had to return some other time.

The gods seemed to smile on me that other time by gathering the buckets of rain and instead cloaking me in squelching humidity; I began to sweat as soon as I exhaled.

I recall seeing—and writing about—all these big, glossy, full-colour posters pasted across walls in faculty offices and the administration building speaking of being “student-centred,” how to treat students and what to expect in return.

But, really now, student-centredness is more than just glossy posters, especially when it comes from staff with “stink” attitudes. The fact is members of staff at a university are there to serve students—clients who pay for a service that does not include tuition only. As a result—just as a waiter in the hospitality industry is hired and trained to serve diners and do their bidding—people working in a university should never be averse to serving students, no matter the age/culture/intellectual differences.

If any staff member displays this attitude, he should have his employment terminated because he is clearly in the wrong workplace.

Both sides

Maybe the UWI staff has become acclimatised to the same thing over and over, and, so, ossified into indisposition: irate, know-it-all students who come and ask either stupid questions, or questions the answers to which are right in front of their faces, all in all wasting time, money and energy—theirs and the staff’s.

Today, being on the opposite end, I see why lecturers and other staff members at UWI behave the way they sometimes do. I remember certain lecturers who loathed this behaviour, and whose feedback conveyed as much. I realise now that it wasn’t necessarily as a result of a “stink” attitude, as we used to like to say about them, but simply that they were tired of students not finding things out for themselves. And, really, it doesn’t take a whole lot of critical thinking training to get to that point.

Too often, one would encounter the student who doesn’t bother to read the sign outside, the notice board, the e-mail, even the course outline, and instead prefers to come a-knocking and a-bothering and a-wasting precious time seeking all sorts of answers from all sorts of improper sources.

I am, though, full of admiration for some of the students I teach who “bother” me with genuine interest in their work and a constructive attitude towards authority. In fact, I welcome it; that’s the kind of interruption a scholar embraces: a student who espouses the scholarly tradition. Those are the students by whom one longs to be bothered.

Exams are in full swing, and the first semester is almost over. The lecturer of the course I tutor reminded me just before I left her office the other day: “Don’t make those papers too hard, eh Denzil. Remember just last year you, too, were a student.”

Last year? Humph. Try last week.