Life is too short to spend time doing certain things.
For young lovers, life is too short to stay in a relationship
that’s grown stale and lifeless. For young professionals,
life is too short to stay at a job that is boring, repetitive and
unchallenging. For people with a brain, life is too short to spend
more than ten hours every weekend watching grown men chase balls up
and down a field.
And for UCLA students, life is too short to spend in classes
that are a jaw-dropping waste of their time.Â
There are two types of classes at our fine university: the
classes worth sitting in and the classes that aren’t. Let me
help you understand the difference.
Valuable classes are classes you get something out of. If
you’re going into a certain career and taking a class that
gives you the necessary skills to pursue that career ““ like a
future accountant taking accounting ““ you are in a valuable
class. If you’re in a class that helps you learn something
important about yourself or the world around you ““ like some
political theory classes did for me ““ then you are in a
valuable class. You should attend those classes.
You should also attend any class to turn in work, to take an
exam, or pick up the final exam question. (I learned this the hard
way.) And you should attend a class enough to get a grade you can
live with.
Other than those reasons, however, I can’t come up with
justification for attending class. If a class doesn’t give
you one of those reasons to attend, what’s the point of being
there?
One type of class requiring your absence is a class where the
professor simply regurgitates the reading for the entire lecture.
If you read and understand the book, there’s no good reason
for you to go to a class like this. Don’t buy into the
argument that you should go to class because the professor spends
time and works hard preparing their lecture either.
If you were at a restaurant and the chef spent an hour preparing
a turd sandwich, you wouldn’t eat it just because of the
chef’s effort. By the same logic, you shouldn’t attend
a poorly planned and executed lecture.
Another type of class to ditch is the one with a professor who
views class as a way to inform students of his life experiences
instead of actually teaching them the material. I’m not sure
why professors feel compelled to do this, but unless you really
care about what it was like to be an undergraduate at Berkeley in
the ’80s, this class is a mandatory ditch.
But the main and important reason to ditch class is simply if
you’re not learning anything valuable. I’m aware of the
“you get what you put in” philosophy and that every
class has something to offer, but is it worth “putting a
lot” into a bad class if you could be putting a lot into
something else?
If you spend any time in UCLA lectures, it’s painfully
obvious many classes are just not the best place to maximize your
education. A professor stands at the front of the room, lecturing
to a mildly interested audience. Most of the students try to write
down all the “important” points in their notes, but to
me they look like machines taking dictation.
Students usually don’t ask questions; they just wait for
class to end so they can leave. At some point during the quarter
they memorize their notes, and often don’t have to understand
things thoroughly or explain them articulately in order to do well
in the class. Then, like putting an MP3 they no longer enjoy into
the recycle bin, students engage in a physical memory dump, and
forget almost everything they’ve “learned.” Is
that the process that produces great minds? I don’t think
so.
Instead of wasting time in classes that don’t stimulate
your mind, you need to figure out what activities you learn from
the most and spend your time doing those. For me, the best
activities are reading and writing. And I think those activities do
a lot for most people. But for you it might be something different
like working at a job you love or simply conversing with other
intelligent people. I know I had a conversation in my jacuzzi last
month from which I learned more than I did in my political science
class about state-building.
So if you’re sitting in class one day wondering why
you’re there, and you can’t come up with a really good
answer, get up and leave. Life is too short to spend it doing
things that aren’t worthwhile.