Budget Sucks Life Out of Education

It has been a ridiculously long week.

The pain finally started to go away Wednesday afternoon and I finally gave in that night and went to my favorite Chinese grill so I could eat food that wasn't saltines, jello, yogurt, and applesauce. It hasn't gone away completely (the pain) but, as I munch on a bowl of Frosted Flakes, I don't feel guilty for giving in and not giving my stomach an extra day of soft food.

Pain aside, school has been incredibly insane. On Wednesday, I went to my Computer Applications in Health class and found out the my teacher is completely out of his mind. He's forcing us to write a book in about 4 weeks, a collaborative book, about a little wooden boy named PinoChico who attends Chico State as a freshmen and is trying to find the head fairy so he can become a "real boy." And we, the brilliant class who have no idea of what we are doing, have to punch out a chapter with our groups by next Wednesday and come up with freshman boy experiences for little PinoChico to have. Except I went to a community college with all the boys from my high school so I have no idea what freshman boys are like. They seem exactly like high school boys to me!

Also, currently, the state is doing this thing with big universities called Furlough Days. It is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard of. If you haven't heard of it, it's where the state issues a certain # of days off of the school year and requires that the professor choose 2 or 3 more (I'm not sure how many they have to take), and, on those days, the teacher cannot sent a student an email, work on school work, or set foot on campus or they will be penalized. For the teacher, it just means that they have 3 or 4 days in the semester that they don't get paid for when they would normally have class and get paid. For the students (and especially for me, because I have a different 3 hour class every day, Monday-Thursday, instead of taking my classes twice a week for 1 1/2 hours), this means that we have to miss class, we miss out on getting material that we would otherwise get in a full semester, and we are left unready for jobs and our masters/doctorate degrees. In my case, if I have a Furlough Day (and I think I have about 10), my professor is stuck with trying to teach us 6 hours worth of material in about 3 hours in order to catch us up, or just cut part of the information out of the curriculum entirely.

If I wasn't already frustrated by the budget cuts, I'm very frustrated now. Cutting education is the WORST idea that our idiot governor has ever had, if he ever had an idea in the first place besides lift weights and shoot down the bad guys. Not only am I affected by these Furlough Days, but my statistics class is basically taught online (and I don't have the choice to take one in a classroom because they are all like this) and I come in, once a week, to talk to a professor who helps us confused people out with the online material that we don't understand. What if I want to sit in a classroom and let the teacher lecture at me so I can learn it that way, huh? Some of us can't learn things online like that! They tell you in high school that college is full of opportunity and they have things for everyone, so you can learn in all kinds of ways, and then they cut the budget, decide on one way, and then it's either "my way or the highway, buddy!"

At the community college that my sister is going to, they cut 168 classes and basically fired all the part time professors, just so they could make do. And they canceled a lot of classes the WEEK before school started, or even 2 or 3 DAYS before, so students were scrambling to find classes and many couldn't be full time students even though they had originally signed up to be full time and paid all of their fees.

You know what could save money for the state? If they turned down the amount of AC in the classrooms. It was about 90 degrees outside on Wednesday and, when we went inside, it was about 60 degrees in our classroom. That's a huge difference! And who, honestly, brings a jacket with them in 90 degree weather? I bet if they kept the temperature between 75-80 degrees in classrooms, they would save a TON of money. If we're already wearing shorts and tank tops, who cares if the classrooms are a little warm? It's better than getting frostbite from the temperature change!

I am ready to take this to the governor himself, since I live about 1 1/2 hours away from the state capital. Because this is absolutely ridiculous. He's giving my state a bad rep, to the point where I am strongly convince that I am going to move out of state for my Master's degree, even if it means more fees. At least I will get a decent education that way.

What do you think?