8. Should I, should'nt I ....Sleep

They came, they taught, we slept ……this is the story of every engineering student(may be every student even). “Hall sleepers”(of the lecture hall) is a new generation of people, a new race with an attitude, still in it’s evolving stages. Will come back to this later.

Have encountered so many profs over the 6 semesters, there’s one common element in all of ‘em. That being, their incapability to understand a student’s reluctance to voice his/her questions in a huge classroom!! Come on man, these people have done such superb specializations, done double-triple PhD’s , earned god knows how many gold medals, but cant figure out this one basic thing! We (students of my college) are all habituated to sitting in a normal classroom (one of max strength 60) all our lives. Even there it’s only after a lot of hesitation did I manage to call a lecturer and get a question answered. Here, it’s a lecture hall, a class with 300 capacity, with about 200 people sitting!

The professor, like stands on the podium, 50 feet away from the nearest row of students, speaks into a mike and uses a huge slide projector and all sorts of gadgets to substitute a basic chalk + blackboard combination. How is this different from, say , a distance learning program, or an online education program? Even there you get to see a screen with slides from a power-point file and the interaction is one way. I am comparing it with distance learning also , because many studs ( I am one of them ;) ) aint accustomed even now to this environment and end up sleeping through most of these lectures. Now sleepers come in 2 baskets themselves, one group of sleepers are the ones who don’t care going to the lecture hall and sleep in their rooms, while the other group care enough to come to the Lecture hall but have a good nap there. In fact, distance learning is still better, don’t have to go through this drudgery of “only physically” attending these lectures while being “mentally snore-driven”. Then there is this guilt feeling that crops up every now and then.

Rahul - Arey, we should not sleep in our rooms during lectures man, we should try to atleast attend lectures.

Me – What’s the use bey, u’ll go and sleep there too.

Rahul – But that gives a different, some sort of a satisfying feel dude, we can say that we atleast tried. Atleast get to see girls naa. i know whom you look at all the while....You Chupa rustham, bastard!!!

Me –yeah right! but she's like always first row baap, hard to catch a glimpse of hers from the last benches sadly :( Anyway, see the practicality behind it, at least you get to sleep in the cosy blanket in your room, you need to crouch, bend and sleep at awkward angles over there …. Hahaha

Rahul –The profs are always armed with those sleep missiles in their tongues baap. The minute they start talking, we all fall down immediately..lol

Me- It’s more like a lullaby, the moment you hear it, it takes over you and closes your eyes for you. These people can be great hypnotists man…..or they can even offer Sleep-therapy.

Rahul- Ya, that will be great. We’ll open a new health service, caption “For all the sleepless people of India…Come, welcome into the world of Signals, Probability and Microelectronics….we have experts from all over the country, gold medalists…If you don’t fall asleep in 5 minutes, we’ll give you back your money.(by the time you wake up , we’ll be off with your money …LOLZ) ”.

Very few professors even care or give a thought to the student’s inhibitions to raise his/her voice in a classroom. A better communication mechanism between the prof and the students will certainly improve the student’s learnability and throughput of the system as a whole. Till a solution to this problem is found, you’ll find lecture halls filled with sleepers and girl – gazers like me ;)