Just to share 2 random emails i received. The first one is not that random considering that it's friendship week...
Mail 1Subject: Memories...
Everyday when you return from your school, whether or not it is from a secondary school, a junior collage, a polytechnic, or ITE, you would probably think that school sucks. All that work and torture under your lecturer's or teacher's homework or assignments, or tutorials...
But think about this, i mean really think. All the time spent with your classmates, all the laughter, sorrows, and happiness of knowing that your friends are there in your class. Now imagine them gone, perhaps part of them or even all of them. You may not realise it, but when advancing into the next level of education, it is inevitiable that some friends will be parting with you. What is all this you ask yourself, what i ask is of you to think, for those who received this mail, what do those people who were once or were still your classmates and friends meant to you.
Anyone who has at least finished their o levels and has graduated from respective schools would know the feeling of parting with your classmates and friends. Even for those faces whom you do not talk to much in your class, one day you will think about them and ask yourself what would have happened if you had gotten to know them better. You could have gotten anyone in your class as your classmate, but it is perhaps by chance for most of us that your classmates are who they are. Not giving a chance for themselves to know you better, or yourself to know them better is surely a mistake worth mending. But perhaps it is too late, now that you think of it, or maybe not, only you won' t know when you will see them again. Perhaps the next day,the next week, month, years, or even decade.
Perhaps one day, you would realised how bitter sweet those memories were, if you had let yourself seek out the sweetness that is buried amidst the piles of school work,and how memorable those days were, and the fun you had with your classmates and friends. That is why ever so often when you asked someone which is the most fond memories they had in their years in education, they would often have that sadness in their eyes, and besides saying that they were glad they did this and that, they would also say that it is in those years that they wished they could have done this and done that, for what chance would they have to going back into the same old campus and find the time to chat with those whom they shared their classes with? Those unforgettable years of laughter,happiness,hardship and tears will remain soaked in our memories forever.
In school, each classmate suffered under the same stresses in school. The various kinds of teachers everyone in a class meets, weather they are kind or extremely strict, are the same.
Jokes that only those in your class will understand will still bring back flows of laughter from your classmates when repeated constantly, but they may mean nothing to another friend who did not end up in your class by fate. So treasure your schooling days, don't complain, because you never know when you will miss them dearly. And perhaps, shed a tear for those treasured times in your youth, and shed yet another for the times that COULD have happened but now lives in your own fantasy.
Let those whom are weak and tormented in the spirit find strength in this letter, knowing that there will always be people who will still remembers them, and care for them. No matter the circumstances.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of
death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me
-Psalm 23-
Mail 2Subject: The Truth about University
Uni is a bunch of rooms where you sit for 2,000 hours or so and try to memorise things. The 2,000 hours are spread out over four years. You spend the rest of the time sleeping, partying, and trying to get dates.
Basically, you learn two kinds of things in uni:
1. Things you will need to know in later life (two hours).
2. Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours).
The latter are the things you learn in classes whose names end in -iology, -osophy, -istry, -ics, and so on. The idea is you memorise these things, then write them down in little exam books, then forget them. If you fail to forget them, you become a Professor and have to stay in uni for the rest of your life.
After you've been in uni for a year or so, you're supposed to choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorise and forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: Be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers. This means you must not major in mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, or geology because these subjects involve actual facts.
If, for example, you major in mathematics, you're going to wander into class one day and the Professor will say: "Define the cosine integer of the quadrant of a rhomboid binary axis, and extrapolate your result to five significant vertices." If you don't come up with exactly the answer the Professor has in mind, you fail.
The same is true of chemistry: If you write in your exam book that carbon and hydrogen combine to form oak, your Professor will fail you. He wants you to come up with the same answer he and all the other chemists have agreed on. Scientists are extremely snotty about this.
So you should major in subjects like English, Philosophy, Psychology, and Sociology - subjects in which nobody really understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve virtually no actual facts. I attended classes in all these subjects, so I'll give you a quick overview of each:
ENGLISH: This involves writing essays about long books you have read little snippets of just before class. Here is a tip on how to get good grades on your English papers: Never say anything about a book that anybody with any common sense would say. For example, suppose you are studying Moby Dick. Anybody with any common sense would say Moby Dick is a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly 11,000 times. So in your paper, you say Moby Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland. Your Professor, who is sick to death of reading essays and never liked Moby Dick anyway, will think you are enormously creative. If you can regularly come up with lunatic interpretations of simple stories, you should major in English.
PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch. You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.
PSYCHOLOGY: This involves talking about rats and dreams. Psychologists are obsessed with rats and dreams. I once spent an entire semester training a rat to punch little buttons in a certain sequence, then training my roommate to do the same thing. The rat learned much faster. My roommate is now a Doctor. If you like rats or dreams, and above all if you dream about rats, you should major in psychology.
SOCIOLOGY: For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and away the number one subject. I sat through hundreds of hours of sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never once heard or read a coherent statement. This is because sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most of their time translating simple, obvious observations into scientific-sounding code. If you plan to major in sociology, you'll have to learn to do the same thing. For example, suppose you have observed that children cry when they fall down. You should write:
"Methodological observation of the sociometrical behaviour tendencies of prematurated isolates indicates that a causal relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory behavior forms."
If you can keep this up for 50 or 60 pages, you will get a large government grant.
