No matter what you tell yourself leaving secondary school about going to all of your lectures, sure you’ve been doing it for years day in and day out, the moment you start going to college everything changes. You don’t have your mother screaming at you from the car, my friend’s mother did this, he got in before 9 every day and still didn’t go to 9am lectures. Lecturers aren’t going to ask you for notes when you don’t attend. In college, there are no fucks given. You go, you don’t go, the lecturers still get paid regardless. It’s your job to get out of the haven we call bed and every 9am start makes that break up a little harder. From my experience, there are 5 main stages of a 9am lecture.
1) Sleep Deprivation:
Whether you went to bed at 11pm or 3am, you have definitely not slept enough. God, forbid you went out the night before and your mouth feels like a camel’s arse. Each moment in bed as a glorified marshmallow reduces your chances of making that atrocity they call a 9am lecture, but eventually you drag your waste-of-space ass out of bed and get ready to leave. All the while working out how soon it’ll be before you can have a nap, while throwing random stationary into your bag pretending you’re going to take notes.
2) Caffeine Cravings:
If you are a college student this is your mantra and if you don’t like coffee, you need to sort out your priorities. Coffee is the elixir of life, your best friend. Not only does it give you a boost, in the winter it keeps your hands warm. What more could you ask for? Another couple of hours in bed maybe? I love coffee, I think, or I rely on it and nobody should see 9am if they haven’t had their fix of caffeine.
3) Denial:
You think about how many lectures from this module you have missed and even on the way into college you’re considering just going to the canteen and overloading on hash browns and drinking coffee for an hour. Why? Because God loves a trier and you have already made it as far as the college building and your day can already be considered a success. You’re even entitled to that 6-hour nap you keep fantasising about. Whenever I do this I always creep past my lecture room first “sure nobody is there, clearly it’s not important”. Then that nagging voice in your head (mine has a very distinct similarity to my mother’s), starts telling you that you should go, it might be important.
4) Acceptance:
This is that stomach churning moment you realise you are going to go to that lecture. Lecturers and student have an intense love-hate relationship, not in the typical sense. You either love them or you hate them, they have no feelings towards you however, but the college does. Oh, yes, the college definitely hates you. They appear to make it their life goal to punish you by timetabling your most hated lecturers for 9am. This is something I have never understood; I mean they want us to go to college, don’t they? Well clearly fucking not, not with that attitude.
5) The Lecture:
Once in the icebox they call a lecture room, with the 5 other people that successfully made it there too, the lecture begins. You begin considering your life choices, questioning is college really for you. Ten minutes later, having scrolled on Facebook until you reached last night’s stuff that you’ve seen before, the realisation hits you. Your lecturer is talking absolute shite. It has ended up being one of the most time-wasting lectures you have ever bothered attending and you can’t cope. You are on the verge of a sleep deprived melt down, when suddenly the lecturer mentions the exams and you’re there. You are in the win; you’re definitely getting an A this year.
Ayesha Sayers