Remember the days when you were in K-12 and you played sick just to stay home and watch cartoons, or play video games, or just not go to school? C’mon, we’ve all had them.
But do you remember your first week of college and going into those huge lecture halls and finally noticing, ‘Wow! There are so many people here and my professor is 15 rows away from me, I will probably never even meet them.”
The next part may be a little tricky, and one I’ve fell victim to one too many times, “This lecture hall is so huge, the notes are online, and I can just skip and enjoy my day!” If you have had those thoughts, then you are probably someone like me, and sorry, folks, but we are really dumb.
See, the rush I get from skipping wore off pretty quickly, and it started to become a strategy to avoid having to deal with boring lectures, annoying forced class discussions, and just about everything in-between. Now, I never let my skipping get out of hand to the point where I’ve failed any classes, but the cons outweigh the pros.
Sure, that lecture may seem boring, but what if we are missing out on a perspective we never thought of? Or, what if you end up meeting a colleague to help you study, or just unwind with before the class starts. Those are just some small little tidbits that we could be missing when we hit the snooze for the fifth time. But there also is a bigger loss that we might fail to see until we get later in life.
My chronic skipping has still cost the same amount of money to go to school, and I’ve slept through parts of it. I have jeopardized relationships with some of my professors because I am too scared to meet with them in fear of being outed as someone who shows no regard for their content. Maybe they are right, but then again, it is my decision, and if I can pass your class with showing minimal effort besides being a ‘yes’ man, then maybe they are wrong.
My philosophy of skipping is one built on laziness, but is riddled with excuses that somewhat makes me live with myself at the end of the day. Sometimes I am up so late working on projects that I simply just evaluate the ‘worthiness’ of the class I’m skipping. Sometimes I just skip because the professor provides nothing more than what the book says, and the only outside resource they bring is from my Facebook newsfeed. I am not going to willingly sit there and hear one more time, “Hey, did you see what Donald Trump did today?” Yes, I’ve seen it probably 30 times since scrolling through my “news” feed trying to find out what is going on in the world of my other interests. So, to that I say, well, I can read the textbook and study guide and look at Facebook and I’m prepared for my 10 a.m. class.
But even in the end of that rant, I am still an idiot. I am dumb for not experiencing that, and maybe seeing what other people think to gain perspective, sure, it may seem irrelevant to me, but this is the only time I get to experience this.
So, with that I will wrap up by saying, playing hooky can be fun, and even beneficial, but don’t overdo it. Take the approach from a movie that starkly contrasts my whole argument, "Ferris Bueller’s Day Off": “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you just might miss it.”
What you might miss is the importance of learning; if I could go back, I would. But that odometer will never dial back.
