College offers puppies and coloring books to deal with finals stress

[Pea-n-Me]

I commuted to school which was about 30 minutes away. I went to school full time for Engineering. I also had a part/full time job 15 minutes in the opposite direction from my house so 45 minutes away from school. In between I had to do my school work, socialize and sleep when I could. I barely did anything at my university that wasn't about school No time for fraternities or societies, etc. Because I didn't do well in one class, I had to drop it and I went from 4 years to 4 1/2 years. By senior year I was already interning for Engineering.

School wasn't paid for either. I took out loans that I had to pay off like 6 years after school.

So, it's hard for me to have sympathy for "some" college kids because I would have liked to gone away to school, not have to pay for it, not have to work, and go to parties. I know that's not everyone's college experience but it certainly wasn't mine.

I could have used some therapy puppies/kitties sessions.

Working 40 hours a week along with full time school was stressful. My weekends were working. So the rare breaks that I got were a few hours after work to spend with friends or in between classes to sleep in the library.

Do you have kids in college yet? When you commuted to school, did you live at home, or live on your own?

My college experience was similar to yours, but I worked two jobs, also a good distance from both school and home, lived on my own (so had those bills to pay, without parental help), and it took me longer than that to finish (due to the dumb mistakes I made). Fortunately, I did have my dog with me in my apartment, though. (And I did fairly recently realize that even though I lived through the 80s, I don't "know" much from the 80s, and that's because I mostly worked and went to school, really didn't get to know popular TV shows or music at the time.) I got an amazing education and have no regrets; wouldn't change much if I had it to do over again.

Yet, I don't see the issue we're discussing here as coddling at all, as my pp indicates. (FTR I do NOT agree with altering a cirriculum or cancelling exams and such, but I do not have a problem with coloring books and puppies!)

My DD is in her first year at my alma mater, studying in the same program I graduated from. She also commutes, by choice, and works at a job she's held for several years. It's been interesting seeing her course of study as it compares to my own of thirty five years ago. Courses have the same content (Bio and A&P don't change much) but testing is different. I think they try to mirror the way many of the standardized and licensing tests are today, and as we all know, some of those can be quite tough; they are formatted differently (and IMO more confusingly) than the tests I took years ago. Obviously, this generation has grown up with them that way, so it may be a moot point for some, especially those who are better test-takers. But then again, many people struggle, particularly when they have difficulty with the material being tested, as well. In DD's program, many have dropped out, and dropped classes already (and she's on edge about her grades much of the time, too, seeing some of the friends she's made either disappear or struggle with classes, even fail some already).

In one way, students today have things a lot easier than people of my generation did because information is right at their fingertips, and you don't even have to know how to type very well in order to bang out a paper. I remember my friend and I having to physically go to the library at night, even in the throes of winter, to do our research and having to xerox pages out of books (@ I forget how much, but at a certain cost per page), then trek home, sort through everything again, etc, all before beginning to write. I also wasn't the greatest typist on a typewriter (as this was in the 80s, before even the word processor came out) so I actually paid a lady $3/page to type my papers for me after I finished writing them. Given that some of my papers were 50 pages long (not a typo), it was pretty pricey to get my papers completed by the time all was said and done. I had loans (although, in comparison, the total amount was only a little more than it was for one semester for one kid this fall), but was able to pay them off fairly quickly, and DH and I were able to buy our first home two years after I graduated.

But despite having laptops, printers, easy ways to communicate, high tech classrooms and the like, costs of virtually everything are drastically elevated and the pressure is on! They can't really afford to make as many mistakes as I made for that reason. They have to make decisions and expenses count, and do well in classes in order to graduate and get out into the working world in order to pay off loans and exorbitant COL. It will probably take a lot longer than two years to save for and buy a first home. Traffic is WAY worse than it used to be, and day to day costs - even for commuters - are high (gas, food, parking, supplies). There is also a different atmosphere to deal with on campus than there was before. Many urban universities have taken on an extreme political edge, at least where I am. (And I am in an area which has always been a political hotbed.) Students, at times, can't walk to class without being confronted with something, not only by individuals, but by many of the professors and administrators as a whole, in media postings and even classrooms. Not everyone wants to get involved in political movements, or maybe their views are different, so this can be difficult for those who aren't really interested in supporting causes or becoming activists. The youngest in colleges right now have also just voted in their first elections, which happened to be one of, if not the most, contentious in history, and now they have to live with ongoing fighting on both "sides". Not to mention the stress of local and world events and worries whether an active shooter will show up on campus or if you know what to do when you get a tweet to "Run, Hide, Fight". So no stress, really!!

Look, we know that suicides in that age group are on the rise, as is aggression on campuses, yada yada yada. Many here have said that even years ago they had things on campus to relieve stress during difficult times, and we've learned a lot since then about the health consequences and ramifications of stress, so I'm not sure why we should even compare interventions of today to those of years ago. (Would we do that with cancer, or other health advances?) Coloring and puppies are a brilliant, simple way to help with stress reduction and something today's college students can build on later on. Win-win is right. Again, dumbing down the cirruculum or eliminating testing during times of strife, not good for anyone. But I don't think that's what is going on in most colleges, as far as I can tell.

 

[kamik86]

I've almost run the gamut

Full time student at home
Full time student on campus
Full time student off campus (apartment)
Part time student, full time employee

By far, the on campus experience was the least stressful for me.

Lets see I didn't do full time student at home (unless you count high school)

but I did the other three. I actually found on campus to be the most stressful. Not because of acedemics but due to the living situation. I'm an introverted person and sometimes just need my space. I hated not having my own space where no one else could bother me. Even now my husband (he is the same way) and I joke that we have split the house. I spend most of my time upstairs and have an art room or hang out in our room. My husband spends most his time in the living room or in his "geek" room (full of comic books, collectables and things he likes).

 

[Magpie]

Yeah I know some students now that go to that school (they have internships where I work) and I wonder if things like this project and the complications of having a "class" that is really two classes helped drive them to go to a semester system finally. They had been talking about it the whole time I was there for other reasons but it finally got pushed through shortly after I left.

For that class it was bad enough that he did this with the first quarter, but if you had a student to that in the second quarter after passing the first class what then? You couldn't make him take the first class he paid for and passed over again but it would be incredibly unfair to others to make another group take him and catch him up to speed. Which means he would likely not know enough to even have the oppurtunity to pass if taking the class again -if I was a student with a group that had worked on a project for 3 months and knew it well I wouldn't want to let the new guy do anything but documentation and busy work because he would probably just get in the way, espeically if I knew the reason he was being forced into the group is that he already let down another team I would assume he would do the same to us.

Now due to being a semester school the senior project is slightly shorter but it is all in one full semester, it is one class.

As for plagerism type things our school had those regulations too even in software engineering (although in ours reusing open source code was fine we were just expected to site it, I definitely did a project where 1/3 of the code base was an open source plug in I found and I still got an A. My presentation and my readme talked to the use of this plugin for all reporting functions) however apparently they didn't think that extended to what was basically time card fraud (he would say he spent 6 hours in meetings in a week where no one else reported more then 3 and we had meeting minutes available to the advisor that showed the start and end times to our meetings.)

I think that's why schools often call it "academic fraud" versus plagiarism - it covers a wider range of offences.

 

[sunshinehighway]

The colleges or the media? It seems to be common right now for people to denigrate groups, and media feeds right into that. Students are having fun with puppies and coloring books while taking a break from studying for exams, but it's turned into immature, coddled students require puppies and coloring books for stress relief or they'll crumble. It seems as if the "You won't believe what happened next..." mentality is making its way from social media to the mainstream media. Everything gets an added a bit of hyperbole.

You've hit the nail on the head. the whole thing has gotten exaggerated and turned into something it's really not. Of course some people don't want to hear that. It goes against what they feel is true so therefore it must be true.

 

[Liberty Belle]

Do you have kids in college yet? When you commuted to school, did you live at home, or live on your own?

My college experience was similar to yours, but I worked two jobs, also a good distance from both school and home, lived on my own (so had those bills to pay, without parental help), and it took me longer than that to finish (due to the dumb mistakes I made). Fortunately, I did have my dog with me in my apartment, though. (And I did fairly recently realize that even though I lived through the 80s, I don't "know" much from the 80s, and that's because I mostly worked and went to school, really didn't get to know popular TV shows or music at the time.) I got an amazing education and have no regrets; wouldn't change much if I had it to do over again.

Yet, I don't see the issue we're discussing here as coddling at all, as my pp indicates. (FTR I do NOT agree with altering a cirriculum or cancelling exams and such, but I do not have a problem with coloring books and puppies!)

My DD is in her first year at my alma mater, studying in the same program I graduated from. She also commutes, by choice, and works at a job she's held for several years. It's been interesting seeing her course of study as it compares to my own of thirty five years ago. Courses have the same content (Bio and A&P don't change much) but testing is different. I think they try to mirror the way many of the standardized and licensing tests are today, and as we all know, some of those can be quite tough; they are formatted differently (and IMO more confusingly) than the tests I took years ago. Obviously, this generation has grown up with them that way, so it may be a moot point for some, especially those who are better test-takers. But then again, many people struggle, particularly when they have difficulty with the material being tested, as well. In DD's program, many have dropped out, and dropped classes already (and she's on edge about her grades much of the time, too, seeing some of the friends she's made either disappear or struggle with classes, even fail some already).

In one way, students today have things a lot easier than people of my generation did because information is right at their fingertips, and you don't even have to know how to type very well in order to bang out a paper. I remember my friend and I having to physically go to the library at night, even in the throes of winter, to do our research and having to xerox pages out of books (@ I forget how much, but at a certain cost per page), then trek home, sort through everything again, etc, all before beginning to write. I also wasn't the greatest typist on a typewriter (as this was in the 80s, before even the word processor came out) so I actually paid a lady $3/page to type my papers for me after I finished writing them. Given that some of my papers were 50 pages long (not a typo), it was pretty pricey to get my papers completed by the time all was said and done. I had loans (although, in comparison, the total amount was only a little more than it was for one semester for one kid this fall), but was able to pay them off fairly quickly, and DH and I were able to buy our first home two years after I graduated.

But despite having laptops, printers, easy ways to communicate, high tech classrooms and the like, costs of virtually everything are drastically elevated and the pressure is on! They can't really afford to make as many mistakes as I made for that reason. They have to make decisions and expenses count, and do well in classes in order to graduate and get out into the working world in order to pay off loans and exorbitant COL. It will probably take a lot longer than two years to save for and buy a first home. Traffic is WAY worse than it used to be, and day to day costs - even for commuters - are high (gas, food, parking, supplies). There is also a different atmosphere to deal with on campus than there was before. Many urban universities have taken on an extreme political edge, at least where I am. (And I am in an area which has always been a political hotbed.) Students, at times, can't walk to class without being confronted with something, not only by individuals, but by many of the professors and administrators as a whole, in media postings and even classrooms. Not everyone wants to get involved in political movements, or maybe their views are different, so this can be difficult for those who aren't really interested in supporting causes or becoming activists. The youngest in colleges right now have also just voted in their first elections, which happened to be one of, if not the most, contentious in history, and now they have to live with ongoing fighting on both "sides". Not to mention the stress of local and world events and worries whether an active shooter will show up on campus or if you know what to do when you get a tweet to "Run, Hide, Fight". So no stress, really!!

Look, we know that suicides in that age group are on the rise, as is aggression on campuses, yada yada yada. Many here have said that even years ago they had things on campus to relieve stress during difficult times, and we've learned a lot since then about the health consequences and ramifications of stress, so I'm not sure why we should even compare interventions of today to those of years ago. (Would we do that with cancer, or other health advances?) Coloring and puppies are a brilliant, simple way to help with stress reduction and something today's college students can build on later on. Win-win is right. Again, dumbing down the cirruculum or eliminating testing during times of strife, not good for anyone. But I don't think that's what is going on in most colleges, as far as I can tell.

Exactly!

We wouldn't say students had to figure out how to cure their own cancer or alleviate cancer symptoms, why say it about dealing with stress?

 

[sam_gordon]

You've hit the nail on the head. the whole thing has gotten exaggerated and turned into something it's really not. Of course some people don't want to hear that. It goes against what they feel is true so therefore it must be true.

I think you can say that for some proponents also. Making claims that people "against" it think the students aren't stressed or that they should just "suck it up".

 

[Magpie]

Exactly!

We wouldn't say students had to figure out how to cure their own cancer or alleviate cancer symptoms, why say it about dealing with stress?

Because we still ascribe a moral dimension to mental health.

If you admit to having problems managing your stress on your own, you're admitting to (at best) weakness and (at worse) a complete absence of character and moral fiber. And by extension, if we provide students with tools to deal with their stress in a healthy way, we're encouraging the development of weakness and lack of character in them. And moral failings are often treated as if they're contagious.

I mean, I assume she was speaking tongue-in-cheek (and that when it comes to the crunch, academic quality and affordability will no doubt matter more than anything), but right at the beginning of this thread we had a poster say of her children, "I am also making a list of schools that offer this kind of crap so they can avoid going to them LOL".

 

[Magpie]

I think you can say that for some proponents also. Making claims that people "against" it think the students aren't stressed or that they should just "suck it up".

The problem is, if they agree that students are stressed, and they agree that the students shouldn't have to just "suck it up"...

Then why are these people opposed to the (entirely voluntary and inexpensive) colouring books and puppies?

 

[Cannot_Wait_4Disney]

The problem is, if they agree that students are stressed, and they agree that the students shouldn't have to just "suck it up"...

Then why are these people opposed to the (entirely voluntary and inexpensive) colouring books and puppies?

WHAM!!!!! DOWN GOES FRAZIER!!! DOWN GOES FRAZIER!!! DOWN GOES FRAZIER!!!

 

[sam_gordon]

The problem is, if they agree that students are stressed, and they agree that the students shouldn't have to just "suck it up"...

Then why are these people opposed to the (entirely voluntary and inexpensive) colouring books and puppies?

Speaking for me personally, I'm not opposed to the coloring books and puppies. I just don't think the college should be providing them. If a student finds coloring helps relieve tension, go to the bookstore and get a coloring book. If a shelter wants to provide pets, ok. There's just something strange to me with the school itself providing it. And yes, I know schools have done things for finals for decades. But it makes sense to me to provide food late because people will be staying up late.

Just my .02.

 

[sam_gordon]

WHAM!!!!! DOWN GOES FRAZIER!!! DOWN GOES FRAZIER!!! DOWN GOES FRAZIER!!!

Calm down there Bucky. Frazier may have left the building, but he's not down.

 

[Cannot_Wait_4Disney]

Calm down there Bucky. Frazier may have left the building, but he's not down.

Face it. He or she pwned you.

 

[Magpie]

Speaking for me personally, I'm not opposed to the coloring books and puppies. I just don't think the college should be providing them. If a student finds coloring helps relieve tension, go to the bookstore and get a coloring book. If a shelter wants to provide pets, ok. There's just something strange to me with the school itself providing it. And yes, I know schools have done things for finals for decades. But it makes sense to me to provide food late because people will be staying up late.

Just my .02.

Well, except the shelter did provide the pets - all the school provided was space for them. It's not like the school's running a puppy mill and sourcing their own puppies.

So, I guess you're okay with pairing students up with puppies, then? The puppies get socialized and the students get de-stressed, and the college isn't providing anything other than a space in which this can happen.

Which leaves us with the colouring books.

College bookstores already sell adult colouring books, like practically every other store in existence these days (I buy mine at the grocery store!). I'm pretty sure, however, that the point of providing free colouring books to students wasn't to actually get colouring books into their crayon-deprived little hands. The point was to provide a fun, low-stress, non-demanding opportunity to come and socialize with other students. No drinking. No loud music. Just quiet conversation and a pleasant activity to occupy people so that they don't feel awkward being around folks they don't know very well.

The low-stress activity certainly doesn't have to be colouring books. But, unlike knitting and origami, colouring is something everyone knows how to do. So, it's a pretty good choice.

So... tell me again, why exactly are you opposed to the college providing colouring books? (Edit, just re-read the OP again... Seems even the colouring books and crayons are being donated. So, the college isn't providing anything, really, other than a room.)

 

[Allison]

But it makes sense to me to provide food late because people will be staying up late.

Why does it matter if it a coloring book instead of ice cream or popcorn? I can tell you it is much cheaper than the costs of dealing with a struggling student whether that is academically or with their health.

If this inexpensive endeavor helps both the student and the school then it is a win-win.

 

[sam_gordon]

So... tell me again, why exactly are you opposed to the college providing colouring books?

It's the impression that I have a problem with. I don't know that I can explain my thoughts very well.

 

[smiths02]

The difference is, in most cases, the 40 year old woman's supervisor isn't saying to her - "Hey, bless your heart. You look a little stressed. End-of-the-year inventory is hard. Why don't you take a break? Here's a coloring book."

But I suppose a case can be made for the college students needing to be taught how to handle stress so that, when they're 40, they know how to handle stress by themselves.

My boss gave us some coloring sheets and colored pencils as a small gift a few weeks ago. I'm not quite 40, but some of us are.

 

[Liberty Belle]

It's the impression that I have a problem with. I don't know that I can explain my thoughts very well.

The impression of coloring? I'm not trying to be adversarial, just trying to understand.

 

[sunshinehighway]

I think you can say that for some proponents also. Making claims that people "against" it think the students aren't stressed or that they should just "suck it up".

No.
Many people on this thread have said they should just stuck it up. That seems to be a common argument with these type of situations. It's not people "making claims" that those against it are saying others aren't stressed or should suck it up, it's what those people are actually arguing.

 

[sunshinehighway]

The impression of coloring? I'm not trying to be adversarial, just trying to understand.

The impression = I feel like it's coddling because that fits with what my media outlets tell me is happening.

 

[sam_gordon]

The impression of coloring? I'm not trying to be adversarial, just trying to understand.

No. The impression of schools handing out coloring books.

No.
Many people on this thread have said they should just stuck it up. That seems to be a common argument with these type of situations. It's not people "making claims" that those against it are saying others aren't stressed or should suck it up, it's what those people are actually arguing.

Quote them please.

The impression = I feel like it's coddling because that fits with what my media outlets tell me is happening.

Way to attack someone for their beliefs. So people who disagree with you must feel that way because the media tells them to? Nice impression.

I was thinking some more about this and I bet you everyone has a line that they feel shouldn't be crossed regarding students and stress. Don't believe me... how about these...

• Let's do away with finals. No finals, no stress, right?
• Let's do away with grades. Everything should be pass/fail.
• Let's cut down the number of hours for a diploma. Less hours, less stress.

I'm sure everyone would agree these are taking things too far. Personally, I find the puppies and coloring books going "too far".