Ditching for your health

Tyler Cole

Dear Mr. School Official, stop trying to tell students when, where, and for how long to sit in class. They need to forget your constricting rules and remember to ditch.

The young students at Saddleback and Irvine Valley College should remember there are a million things to learn outside the classroom, while only a thousand to learn within.

Ditching a class is the student’s way of providing checks and balances on the system. How dare you tell these kids to sit in a room from this time to that time, or run the risk of being dropped for a petty three absences.

Who died and made you boss?

Students at Saddleback and IVC are onto your little games. They check your power by ditching class, a simple act to show you truly have no control. Unfortunately teachers take it personally, but it isn’t anything students have against teachers, it’s the constraints of the system.

A student should have the right to come and go as they please. That is why the student pays you money; to provide teachers to teach in a room, from this time to that time, so students can come and go as they please during those times. Let them be free to choose whether they want to attend class; the school gets the money regardless.

You would find that most of the time, students would show up to class even if all rules against absences were stricken from the books. It’s not that students don’t want to learn, they just don’t want to be confined for 16 weeks to a schedule.

Or maybe if instead of sitting in a classroom every week, once in a blue moon class could be held outside in the quad area, and have everyone in the class sit in a giant circle Indian style, and just talk about life or something. Knowledge can only take a person so far, but wisdom is the last great thread keeping our souls attached to the cosmos.

Sorry to break the news to the faculty out there, but wisdom is not learned in a classroom. It comes from sitting down at the beach smoking herb and staring at the waves for two hours, things like that. Not sitting at a desk in a four-walled room looking at a PowerPoint presentation. Sorry, but that is a fact of life.

So students please heed this call: next time you don’t feel like going to class, don’t go. Go get lunch with friends. Sit on the couch and watch novellas. Go to the beach or a park. Talk to a homeless person. Do mushrooms. Just please every once and awhile remember not to go to class.

Saddleback and IVC students should organize an official ditch day. Let’s say Wednesday, October 17. Every student who has a class scheduled on this day (unless you have a test, then you should probably go) should in a non-violent protest against the restraints of the system, not show up. Please spread the word, print flyers, do what you must to plan this noble protest. Instructors, that goes for you too. There is no reason why Mr. School Official should be telling you what to do; so what if they sign your paycheck.

And to my fellow students, if any teacher or faculty member gives you a hard time about ditching classes on October 17, tell them Tyler Cole gave you permission, and if that upsets them, well too bad.

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