The Educational Ecosystem
By Rob Cleaver
January rattles by as quickly as a power nap through an Adam Sandler movie, and before long the textbooks are permanently open and dipped into with increasing frequency. Eventually the library doors beckon and the clock hands spin and biochemistry mocha benders are a thing of the present. With your sleep lined semi-conscious eyes, the rich tapestry of library goers is unveiled. Attenborough has never broadcast from this eco system and neither is he likely to.
For this is a harsh environment, full to the brim with creatures never before committed to jaunty BBC footage of botched visits to dutch zoological parks.
Here there are the migrant birds; girls popping in at lunch for a snack at the cafe and to watch The Only Way Is Essex. They go on Wikipedia. You think they are studying. They are in fact googling Ryan Gosling. You copy them. You fall in love. Then as quickly as they sat down and stole a valuable place in the computer cluster for brain numbing mockumentaries, they disappear off to continue their loveably fun degree in Film Studies.
The ancient creatures; they’ve been the same for a long time. Stuck in a book forever, scraps of A4 in their hair, they exist only to study. Bookworms look up to them as if they are the masters of their dominion, chewing their way through chapters on anything from the Krebs Cycle to American Cinematography from the 1950s. They are never going to change. So if, by chance, you go the library in September on a resolution of year round study they will still be there, in the same seat, chewing their way through the same book they were in three years before. Skeletal, knowledgable, unapproachable. These are the people who constantly renew every book you’ve ever had to buy second hand off amazon because the library has no available copies.
The nocturnal species are somewhat intertwined embryologically with the ancient creatures, they succeed and flourish because only they are brave enough to sit through the night shift. To run the gauntlet of security guards and PhD students is the definition of bravery. There is also a plethora of computers to be logged in to, the absent migrant birds are at home with their friends having a much more wonderful life than anyone else.
The entire ecosystem is in a precarious balance. Predator/Prey cycles loop the loop down corridors of Rock Classification, and all of it’s loyal subjects pray to their deity, the Dewey Decimal System, and the applaudable order it gives to the lives of these unique creatures.
One of the last identifiable clusters of life in this fleeting corner of the campus is the crammers. This is where many of us niftily slip in to the grand order of life. We are omnivourous; chicken tikka wraps, red bull and super noodles are at the top of our menus. Sleep is at the bottom, and we learn our way through the night, everything we should have been doing all year.
We grow oldest in those moments as continents come together on our foreheads forming great chains of mountains. We have to accept that all our lives have become is a twenty four hour struggle to juggle acronyms and drug names in our heads until we spill them out in single best answer sheets.
Found this article interesting - Tweet or Facebook to share with your friends and followers!