I am writing this because I am currently bored. That's right. Bored. We had 30 pages of reading to do for today, specifically today at 4 pm (or 16:00, if you prefer), and I finished it all in under an hour. Dear Undergrad curriculum, you are glorious. Also, speech from last night about how we should be infinitely well prepared for lecture today, I just have to assume that this wasn't aimed at the law students, because we are relaxed, chilling, and have time to spare, so really, scare tactics were beyond unnecessary. They were superfluous even. Now to be perfectly clear, I may not be retaining every word of the articles we read (and in some cases, you really don't want me to, because the poor sentence structure was grammatically mind boggling), but speed and efficiency become your best friends in law school, and in life, so it's pretty easy to step up to the plate when your reader looks like it was printed from a High School text book. Particularly when a lot of the text consists of EU and EC intellectual ego stroking. Really. We are talking the entire gamut from quadruple negatives, to using latin phrases that are not explained anywhere in the text (hello, it's a dead language....or did you miss the memo on that?), to having sentences that go on for an ENTIRE paragraph. NOT OK.
On the upside, I am now the proud owner of a hilariously tiny, candy apple red italian cellular phone. It makes godawful ringing sounds that are highly obnoxious and is all in Italian. Baptism by fire, maybe? Anyway, I still have an hour to go until class, and have nothing left to read. Thus, I choose to write and to empty my venomous words about their scare tactics into cyberspace. For legal reasons, I refuse to identify any of the persons or the institution involved (heck yes, learning something from 1L year!). So here it goes, in itemized list form.
1. When interviewing students about their ability to survive and to not be a pain in the ass in a foreign country, you should NOT have to continue reiterating that guideline nor patronizing them about how to live on a daily basis (and I do mean DAILY).
2. If you have interviewed said students, you should know which ones are going to be a problem. Talk to them and them alone.
3. If all of the grad students in a combined grad/undergrad program have LIVED abroad before, it is absolutely belittling, insulting, infantilizing, and patronizing to make them sit through not one, not two, but THREE separate lectures (each at least an hour long) about how important it is to not put yourself in dangerous situations. We got it. Thanks, but no thanks.
4. Warning people about the potential dangers of developing a false sense of security is valid and is probably necessary both legally and just as a matter of responsibility; terrifying all of your female students by telling them the equivalent of "don't make friends outside of this program or you'll get raped" is never called for, never appropriate, and is entirely counterproductive.
5. Dealing with young adults goes like this: if you explain something to us as if we are your peers, and allow us to ask for clarification or detail when it is particularly necessary, we will respect you. If you talk down to us, shush us, and try out all variety of scare tactics to compel us to comply with your whims, we, as any other person who has been successfully infantilized by people who profess to respect them (but who clearly do not in any way, shape, or form), will be disinclined to acquiesce to your requests.
It's that simple. Don't treat us like children, unless we are actually behaving like children. If you treat us like children and do the whole hand-holding horse and pony show, we will be have as if we are precisely the unruly and disrespectful children you make us out to be.
One final word, to go along with number 4: At no point should anyone ever try to point out that an individual getting raped "really brings the whole program down", nor should anyone ever make the egotistical, self important and self aggrandizing statement that a rape would be "really hard on everyone, because the whole program has to deal with it." That is NEVER EVER CALLED FOR. If, god forbid, something so awful were to happen, everything would grind to a halt (AS IT SHOULD) to address the wounds (likely both physical, emotional, and mental) that the person impacted has incurred.
That is all for now. I feel like I have sufficiently addressed the most egregious points of failure thus far. When they start off at "just awful" on a scale of 1 to 5, the only place to go is up, right? One can only hope.
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