Amidst gourds and ghouls and roasted pumpkin seeds our studies remain a lingering ghost within all that we do. No matter our course load, or even if we’re between courses or embarking on personal research, the struggle to learn and grow runs headlong into the reality that life has oh-so-many distractions. Proverbial dark forces seek daily to carry us away from the good fight of bettering our minds and our lives; sometimes these powers even masquerade as fun. All well and good until our assignment deadlines come due.
In my neighbourhood, Hallowe’en decorations have taken on almost Christmas-esque proportions, a reminder of the phrase many an adult has been known to say to their offspring “if you spent half that much effort on your homework you’d be a straight A student”. But lest we have our home toilet-papered if we fail to participate, we’re wise to play along and not be a seasonal party-pooper. Balance in our lives and studies is crucial and that means being aware of how we can enjoy our holidays while also making time for our studies. Where we focus our leisure effort matters even more because we’re distance students, given the raw fact that time pressures mean that studies can be cast aside like that flimsy orange and black crepe paper used to decorate entranceways.
We can only benefit from taking some time for sheer fun. Over in the Boston area a bio-engineering student (and if ever there were a Frankenstein academic discipline it has so got to be bioengineering, as genes are spliced and diced and medicines incorporate mRNA and all that) named Benjamin Chang carved out a niche of fun for himself. He bought a 1,500-pound pumpkin from a farmer in neighbouring New Hampshire. Then, with the precision of a horror movie doctor, he carved himself a circular canoe seating space akin to those little Alice in Wonderland teacups at Disneyland where everyone whirls and twirls and gets generally a bit tipsy in their ear’s Eustachian tubes. Carving complete, he set off to paddle across the nearest river. Despite facing many “roadblocks”, presumably among our good friends the guardians of safety who suspected his ship would capsize and cost the student body one its finer specimens, Chang succeeded in taking his carved boat across the local river not unlike a latter-day Robinson Crusoe.
Rowing the Distance ‘Tween Spooky Fun and AU Studies
To carve out a niche for our studies requires, as with a Jack-O-Lantern, a prior mapping process on paper or in the mind. Time in this sense is a canvas upon which we project our planning. With priorities in tow, we can enjoy festive times without deadline duress. So, instead of racking our brains like we’re in a medieval torture chamber, why not incorporate some spooky fun into our studies by writing about Hallowe’en in our next essay? Topics in many courses are loose enough to allow learning outcomes to be applied in all sorts of ways.
Or, as students without a campus, more or less, we might feel cast adrift or isolated in our studies so why not spend some time telling our surrounding friends and family about the scariest moments facing an AU student?
A few spooky conversation ideas spring to mind:
Exam anxiety leading to a sense of famous last words prior to being eaten by The Monster of Procrastination.
Finding oneself immured within a hideous thicket of disorganized notes while the ominous, Edgar Alenn Poe-esque full moon bears down on us as an eternal and cyclic reminder that precious time is slipping away before we are discovered by the Unforgiving Wolves of Inefficiency
Signing up merrily for a course like one of several teenagers exploring, with doobies in hand, a haunted mansion, only to systemically have our cherished values eaten alive by the facts of the matter as reported by the Course Textbook Beast. When beliefs run up against facts, we have to be brave to not head for the hills!
Finally, and maybe scariest of all, entering a brave new world of course material only to discover that behind the curtain of opportunity lies an egoistic and irrational professor who has only one thing on his mind: his cherished pet beliefs! Like the ogre mastermind in the 80s kiddie cartoon Inspector Gadget, day after day you wake up to realize that this gatekeeper to good grades is busy plotting the demise of one or many academic or formatting or linguistic pet peeves instead of furthering the success of his students, and all this while lovingly cooing sweet nothings while stroking his kitty-cat.
Happily, few if any AU tutors are so self-aggrandizing as to put their own interests and biases ahead of a proper pedagogical application of the relevant study material. My experience has been that even classroom professors are not so nefarious as to discount alternative takes on the facts, theories, data and general discursive landscape of a given discipline. The menacing dogs of dogmatism are real, however, especially in cultural time where taking sides is a hobby akin to choosing one’s favourite pizza topping – despite the lingering consequences of such binary thinking. Like a dichotomy lobotomy, if you will, we must beware of anything in our education that seeks to brainwash us into a zombie state of silent compliance with unreasonable ideologies. Then again, maybe the greatest danger of all is that, unbeknownst to our noble brains, we’ve already become trapped in an endless house of horrors where every idea we think we’ve addressed rationally has actually been programmed by the hidden but effectual Ideological Masters of the Universe. Such a supposition, like all suppositories, is scary enough on the er, face of it to make us dive back into the relative safety of our textbooks!