10
Thursday, September 11, 1975
University Daily Kansan
Class advice shaky
For the incoming freshman facing almost 2,000 hours in the University's classrooms, any suggestions that would further his while look good on the surface.
Many of the preliminary recommendations made this week by the Commission on the Quality of Classroom Instruction have merit. Tightening the 13-week drop policy has long been championed by those who see enrollment as a two-way commitment, an attrition use of the oneward credit option to four times during a student's undergraduate enrollment would please many educators who consider the option an unmarked minefield for students.
There are even some professors who wouldn't mind including themselves in the report's suggestion that teaching assistants and assistant instructors be videotaped to improve their last one department, psychology, already practices such show-and-tell methods with good results.
However, while some of the commission's recommendations might prove to be valuable exercises in improving University instruction, others more likely will be exercises in futility and folly.
To avoid possible slurs on individual backgrounds, perhaps the proposed requirement of a "high proficiency in English" shouldn't be restricted to foreign student instructors alone. It ain't any American who can talk real good, and we oughta weed out them that can't real quick.
Changes also are proposed for Feedback, a modern-day Lazarus, but nothing short of a miracle will turn it into a useful course selection tool for students. Students will always take the classes that appear in this book and study this summer by E. Jackson Baur, professor of sociology, indicated that students considered Feedback more important to faculty members. There probably would
be widespread reluctance among faculty members, though, to accept even the modified Feedback as a valid critique.
The commission report encourages teachers to use "new and innovative ideas" in the classroom, such as audiovisual equipment and dialogue teaching. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned lectures? Granted movies, slides and tapes do add to this, but many teachers might as well sell popcorn and provide ringseats seats for all the educational value their zinnies offer.
The commission also suggested that 10 student advisers be put on the University payroll to counsel freshmen and act as KU ambassadors. Such advisers would be inadequate for advising freshmen, not only in sheer numbers but also in expertise. If full professors can't guide a student through the University maze, how can even a battle-tested undergraduate hope to?
Finally, the thought of promoting the Office of Instructional Resources to the status of a vice chancellor's office, especially Research and Graduate Studies, tinges on overkill. There is no comparison between an office that acts in an advisory capacity and an office that handles millions of operating dollars through hundreds of research grants.
Ed Rolfs, student body president, prefaced the commission's report by saying the commission wasn't implying that the University had shoddy teaching. However, he also didn't rubber-stamp KU's teaching as excellent. The University certainly has both kinds.
Whether the commission will improve the darker side of KU's classroom teaching instruction is perhaps secondary to the attention now ousted from the classroom, possibly, the weather, classroom teaching reforms won't be merely talked about.
Debbie Gump
Associate Editor
Beer 'evils' told
Carrie Nation rides again
Repent, you foul, sin-crazy students! What horrible demons have possessed your minds and have you want to turn your respectable student union into a "drug den," teeming with the repulsive stench of that addictive 3.2 beer?
protest tactics from those darling "Have a drink, starve a child" billboards to letter writing.
Kansas' modern-day Carrier Nation, the rev. Richard Taylor, is off on another trade against the evils of alcohol. But he still is one of the Kansas United Dry Forces, decided to change his
In a valiant attempt to save the students of the University of
Jain Penner Contributing Writer
Kansas from sinking to the murky depths of degradation, Taylor wrote to the Lawrence University and Kansas Board of Regents,
saying he opposed the sale of 3.2 beer in the Kansas Union.
In the letter, reprinted in today's Kansan, Taylor described beer as a "recreational drug" and said, "If beer sales are permitted on campus, every citizen of Kansas becomes a partner in recreational drug pushing."
He paints a pretty ridiculous picture: Beer will go on sale and immediately students will begin getting "drugged" on campus. KU will become a place where drug-crazed students high on alcohol are arrested acting aggressively and irrationally.
(but forgets its high caloric count).
Taylor enumerates the horrors of the dread malt liquor and its aggressive behavior and loss the ability to think rationally
Just look at the implications of selling this evil "drug" on campus:
-Students will become rowdy and disorderly in class.
—More janitors will have to be hired to clean up beer can debris in the Union.
larger desks will have to be ordered.
Readers Respond
—Teachers will have to allow students to take frequent bathroom breaks.
-Taxpayers in Kansas will be eternally doomed for paying their taxes and supporting such a den of sin.
To the Editor:
Taylor is entitled to his opinion. But he seems to have blown the issue out of proportion. If buying or selling 3.2 beer makes you a partner in recreational drug pushing, then anyone who has ever bought food coloring, used cooking wine or acetic acid medication, or visited a restaurant is also engaging in recreational drug use, because all those things contain alcohol.
—Beer addicts will sell their books, then their souls, to get another brew.
"Alcohol is a mean, sneaky drug. First it giveth, then it taketh away." words spoken to 15-year-old Sarah by her doctor and friend in the pres- ent room of "Portrait of a Teenage, Alcoholic."
Should a tax-supported educational institution encourage or discourage recreational drug dependence? If beer sales are permitted on campus, every citizen of Kansas becomes a partner in recreational drug pushing. Does
KSA 41-2703 permit such a license?
Some say, "But it is only beer!" A recent Department of Health, Education and Welfare report stating "Alcohol is the most abused drug in the United States" indicates more absolute alcohol is consumed in Kansas from beer than from wine and spirits. Another study alleges alcohol is the major drug problem in the United States, then beer is the No. 1 drug problem in Kansas.
Alcohol is a recreational drug that causes addiction in approximately one of eight users, produces aggressive behavior, and reduces the rational ability of the brain to make responsible decisions.
The drug effect isn't altered by the place where it is consumed. If getting drugged causes students to be disorderly they will just as disorderly if drugged on campus.
Persons smoke pot for the
'JUDGE CRATER!' 'JIMMY HOFFA!'
- Students will burn in class.
- Less money will be made on soft-drink machines because students won't be as thirsty.
Drug den forecast if Union sells beer
Taylor doesn't seem to realize that you can't dictate morality to people. KU students who want to drink beer will do so, whether Taylor or anyone else is morally opposed to drinking.
—Drunken students will fall down stairs and break their necks.
same reason persons drink beer. They desire the drug induced feelings of pleasure, the release from fears and tensions, the release from delusions, Procedures listed in the Controlled Substances Act and used to determine that marrijuana should be illegal fit alcohol so that it can be legally sold or illegal unless specifically excluded. "Authority to control under this section does not extend to distilled spirits, wine, malt beers)." (KSA 65-4102 written in Kansas law.)
The question of selling beer in the Union isn't a moral one. The important issues are the price, the product, the make from beer sales and the convenience that will be afforded to homeowners near the bar. A place is an alternative place for students to drink beer is provided.
Somewhere, sometime, some persons who love this land and care for it, some youth are going to have to find the guts to take a stand for less recreational drug use—be it or pot. May you take this stance?
—Students will get such mammoth beer guts from wanton drinking that new,
Concerned persons regret that the Lawrence City Commission is plagued by complaints about bars on 14th Street, but will the answer be yes? Union is a recreational drug den? Is this why taxpayers should support the University?
Editor's Note: The SUA is paying $2,000 for the William Shockey-Richard Goldsby debate Nov. 13, according to Mike Miller, SUA program adviser. He said there was no way to determine Shockley's percentage of that payment.
The question is not one of free speech. We are paying $1,250 to have William Shockey "debate" racism. His doctrine of racial inferiority serves to antagonize and polarize an already fragmented society. His theory that racism is no less objective than disguised racism of the KKK and the Nazis. You pay him to spread his disease of racism is abhorrent.
How the decision ever was made to pay someone to come to our University to expound upon the issue of a harangue or a "debate," is beyond me. ISU trying to incite a return of the '89-71 years of racial violence on campus in legislative funds to KU?
I suggest that we offer Shockley a soapbox on the corner of Eighth and New Jersey streets. He could pass a hat and would deserve whatever he would get.
To the Editor:
Kansas United Dry Forces Editor's Note: Taylor's letter was also sent by him to the Board of Regents and the Board of Regents.
S. Dian Lee
Racist debate
Executive Director
The Rev. Richard Taylor
Executive Director
Lawrence Special Student
Thoughts of a passing semester
By PHILIP C. McKNIGHT
Director of the Office of Instructional Resources
The beginning of the semester is a time of positive expectation. Most of us are convinced that given our present attitude toward the work ahead, there is nothing to stop us in progress in our academic goals. Unfortunately, a retrospective view at the end of the semester is not always as satisfying. What happens in between? I have a feeling that the answer may be some kind of reflection on the collection of thoughts which occur to many students during the semester.
BEFORE THE first day:
Well, there are they. Seventy-seven dollars worth of texts and supplies, nicely and efficiently arranged at the front of the clean blotter in a quiet part of the room with light coming over my left shoulder. I've arranged them in two pockets, a variation prepared an iron-clad study schedule, divided my notebook into sections for the various courses, included handouts and syllabi from the courses in these sections, and have stocked one desk drawer with rains, which will save considerable amounts of time going back to class. My semester will be absolutely no trouble. Classes start Monday and this is only Saturday.
SUNDAY EVENING before classes begin: I have just spent 45 minutes going through the prefaces of my textbooks. I have never been this far ahead before.
EVENING OF THE first day of classes: I had only one class that met today. The professor spent most of the hour discussing school policies, examination dates and so forth.
As an assignment he indicated that we should read the preface of the text and begin to read it from the start, so that we take notes on the first three chapters. I have already read the preface and it should only take about an hour and a half to read all of the chapters. Let's see, it's 7:30 now. If I take an hour out to watch "All in the University Family" should still be able to watch professors and get to bed by 10:30.
10:30 TOH same night; 10:30 already! Where did the time go? Well, at least I can get to bed early.
FRIDAY EVENING of the same week: Well, let's see, there hasn't been a great week. We haven't been week. At least I can catch up on those chapters this weekend for sure. I wonder how I got a little bit behind this week? Oh, well, not entirely. I caught a whole weekend. Well, not entirely. I work from 9:30 to 3:30 tomorrow. But Saturday evening and all day Sunday are caught up by Sunday evening.
ABOUT THE sixth week:
Midterms! Next week! Oh,
come on, can't be serious.
I'm too nervous for
readings. If I can just
get through these next 10 days,
can regroup for the second part
of semester and for finals.
I can't be its the fifth week
already.
SUNDAY EVENING: Well, see it. Luckily there are no tests coming this week. What did I do all day? I'd better get started. I will just clear the desk here and get started. Then I will wait until Monday morning. I might as well relax while I can.
UPON RETURNING from Thanksgiving vacation: Now, why in the world did I take all of those books home? I don't think I even took them out of the box. Now I'm really in trouble.
DAY BEFORE Thanksgiving
vacation: Well, I made it fairly well through midterms, but I'm going to have to really buckle down now if I'm going to get a four-point. Luckily, most of the day is spent with the latter part of the semester.
Let's see, I need a big box to carry all of these books home with me for vacation. I'm going to get more work done than anyone would ever believe. I believe in Thanksgiving dinner and a couple of football games.
DURING FINALS weeks: I will never, never let this happen to me again. I still cannot understand how I got so far behind. I may just have to request an incomplete in one of these courses. I have never learned it, but under the circumstances. . . And it would give me a chance to really hit it hard during break. I could take the books along with me to Vail. . .
I doubt seriously if many of us have suffered such a total collapse of the semen about the other hand, I have a sneaking suspicion that every once in a while we get the feeling that somewhere along the line we lose a little bit of control.
I have nothing to add to the great inventory of wise sayings and warnings that have been passed down to generation upon generation by students. How can you improve up "Get your minimum daily requirements of protein, carbohydrates, exercise and sleep?" And would one dare take a break from one frequently smokes a breakfast square into the stacks at Watson he can save precious minutes of study time that would otherwise have been walked to and from the University or the dormitory for lunch?
Perhaps we should take a different approach to the problem and encourage unorganized organization. If you can't get organized, Maybe I will start with the drawer of rains.
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