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Show WWW.NETXNEWS.NET MONDAY • DECEMBER 4 • 2006 One person's opinion The Christmas craze Staff views The College Times official | Naughty & Nice list for 2006 As this semester comes to a close and the holiday season puts us in a giving mood we would like to send a sincere thank you note to the students, faculty and staff of UVSC. To the good people who work in campus administration, particularly those at One-Stop and Financial Aid, we give you our humble thanks for your tireless efforts. Despite all the Banner >fj issues and the long lines we know that you do the best you can. We hope that Santa leaves you some upgraded servers so we aren't locked out during the $ busiest days of registration. To the men and women who keep the campus clean and the grounds imPapeccable, we want you to know how much your work adds to the richness of our on campus experience. Thank you. We also applaud the work of Tracy Marrott and the rest of the campus police for keeping us out of harm's way. Sure, most students don't know you exist until you pull them over, but we appreciate the effort. A big thanks goes out to the full and part time faculty that sacrifice their time in the hopes of passing something on to the next generation. May you all find a pay raise or at least a tenure track under the tree. The newspaper staff would be ungrateful if we didn't thank all of the students, faculty and staff who have taken the time to grant us interviews, provided constructive criticism, or just picked up the paper and pretended to read it. Your support is what makes our work possible. Thanks! But it isn't all gumdrops and mistletoe. There are some people on the naughty list that shouldn't be surprised to find a lump of coal in their stockings. "A We appreciate the state legislature j3 for finally funding the much-needed Digital Learning Center, but they get no love for dragging their feet in doing so. Funding should reward schools that produce excellent students. It should not be used as a weapon to enforce a social agenda...we are looking at you Utah County delegation. We would also like to take some profs to task for not showing up prepared to teach when they come to school. If you want us to learn you have to show up organized and ready to teach. This means sticking to the syllabus, keeping up on grading, and always being organized and accessible. Apathy for your job breeds apathy for the subject. Strive to challenge and excite us and we will work wonders. And finally we want to wag our fingers at the students who constantly look for the easy ways out. College is supposed to be hard, and your future employers are counting on you to have the goods. Demanding less work or asking to "dumb it down" only keeps us all from getting the most out of UVSC. Grow up or drop out. We hope everyone has a great break between semesters and comes back ready to push this school even further next year. 8 Why does the holiday season bring out the worst in people? Justin Ritter Opinions Writer J ust hours after Thanksgiving ended, the race was on. Thanksgiving Thursday ended. Black Friday began, and the shopping spree started. I have never particularly enjoyed shopping, and prefer to spend the day after Thanksgiving planted comfortably in front of the TV, watching football and eating turkey sandwiches and leftover pie. This year, however, I had the unique opportunity of working the opening shift at a major retail store in Provo. It was then that I saw with my own eyes how holiday shopping brings out the worst in people. This doesn't mean that holiday shopping brings out the worst in everyone - I personally had the good fortune to help literally hundreds of kindred shoppers on Black Friday-but it's an undisputed fact that the holiday shopping rush causes more chaos and contention than usual. When I arrived at work at 4:40 a.m., there was already a line of some 40 people waiting outside the doors. Why you would want to wake up after four hours of sleep and stand in the cold for over an hour while your body is still trying to digest Thanksgiving dinner is beyond me, but some people actually enjoy it. Others, however, simply become irritable. There's no question that the long wait outside the store fuels the insanity that breaks out when the stores open. Another contributor to the madness is that strange phenomenon: the most popular items are also the scarcest. Shoppers know this, and when the doors swing open at 5 a.m., they pour into the store, some jogging, some running, all of them making a beeline for the one item they must get. Many of them, upon finding it, run to the cash register to buy it as quickly as they can, so they can hurry over to another store and do it all over again. With several hundred people doing this at the same time, things can get downright ugly. This is where it gets ironic. For some, the holiday season culminates in a religious holiday - either Christmas or Hanukkah - and for others, it's a time to focus on family and friends. At the very least, it is "the season to be jolly." Somehow, though, holiday shoppers forget about all of this, and instead end up gouging each others' eyes out over the last Xbox 360 on the shelf. Fighting over gifts sounds ridiculous, yet it happens every year. It's completely understandable that people want to find the perfect gift for their spouse, their parents, their friends, and their children; after all, gift-giving is part of the holiday season. But the extremes some shoppers have gone to in their hunt for presents are absurd at best, and downright criminal at worst. There is nothing wrong with shopping, not even at 5 a.m., though you won't ever find me buying presents that early. As we look for the perfeet gifts, however, let's not let go of what the season really means to us. And for heaven's sake, let's be civil. SANTA OR SATAN: Some shoppers need to remember to be good, for goodness sake. * E-Mail letters to uvscopinioii5@liotniail.com on a grade, than they have too. Two, the idea of a "real" college education is cramming for tests, and that alone. As if having my entire grade based on tests is bad enough, I have a professor who makes his test sadistically hard. The usual average for his test is anywhere from 50 to 60 percent. To me there is something to be said about a test where the average is 50 to 60 percent. Some may think that this is my first year of college and I need to toughen up. Well I am a junior, and I have been to two other "real" colleges. Out of all the schools I have been, to this "college" has had the worst quality of education. The reason I am writing this letter is to ask, "Are there guide lines teachers should follow for grading that the school has set out?" If not, it is my opinion that maybe it is time that the school set some basic grading guidelines fora professor. Tyler Hall "Graduatfcn and a j o M t h -Health plan." -VegdrPedersen , ^ * The NetXNews room is located on campus in SC220. * All letters become property of NetXNews and may be edited for content, specifically clarity, length or other concerns at the discretion of the Opinions Editor. * Letters between 50-250 words are encouraged and those letters marked by their succinctness are more likely to be published. * Letters must be accompanied by full name, address, and phone number for verification purposes : Yeah.for the Democrats. Yeah for Donald "I could eat you alive" Rumsfeld being ousted. Yeah for Dick "no nickname needed" Cheney being tried for crimes against humanity. Oh wait that last one hasn't happened yet. 1 must admit, one of the few times I've had any respect for George W. Bush was at the news conference announcing the departure of Rumsfeld. When questioned he admitted that he had previously lied to the media about Rumsfeld's status within his cabinet just to get them to leave him alone. That was awesome. Here's my idea. Let's put Rumsfeld (and Cheney as soon as he's out) in military uniforms and send them over to Iraq. Let them drive around in one of those Humvees that they just couldn't find the money to armor. I'm sure that all of those companies that have Rumsfeld lined up as a consultant-lobbyist can wait long enough for this true American patriot to go experience some of what he created. Thanks Donald for the memories. Chet Bohrer What does the newsroom want for Christmas? Staff Infection "A 20 win season for the Men's Basketball team" -Johnny Boyd **' I Got an Opinion? Put a stamp on it! Letters to the editor It seems that UVSC is so obsessed about becoming a "real" university that many other aspects of learning have been swept under the rug. I have heard time and time again from my professors, that college is hard, and that we need to work twice as hard to get good grades. This is true, but in college one does not need to practically kill one self to get good grades. Perhaps it is the experience I have had at UVSC, but it appears that all of my teachers want to make the class grueling just because we arc at college, I agree that college should be hard, but there are other aspects of learning that are being over looked. All of my classes arc based on tests alone. There are no assignments due, nor any credit for attendance, not even credit given for quizzes. This is a very poor way to tell if someone has really learned the material, because some students don't perform well on tests. To me there is either one of two reasons for this. One, the professors are just lazy and do not want to calculate any more points v pugrffnoney in the bank accountto^g<* "Ping:pong table in the newsroom. To play lint after buying presents." ^ ^ ^ ' when I'm on a MySpace hiatus" -JasonAdWhs A^;^MKS^^.-MattWilliams "I want the Chicago Bears to win the ^ Superbowl" ^ ' \'*W A -BenWebster • • * \ » •*/• JThe new Playstation 3 of a Unicorn." ^ ^ : / : > y *r*** \Armen Sargsyan ':m^ ^ please!" _ _ _ J^ fV „ -MarcusJones > % /'Math 1050 credit" * * ' * ' -JessicaEllsworth ^ < v V f "My mom to visit" ^ -Jason Pyles ^N \ ; |