LETTER TO EDITOR: Students should arrange lives
To the editor:
We were disturbed to read the complaints regarding IVCCs science laboratories' hours. One of the columnists, Jo Zulkowsky, wrote in the April 8, 1999, Apache that the biology lab needs to be open before 8 a.m. so that students could finish their scheduled labs without having to rearrange their hectic personal schedules.
There are some people who may come to the lab at 7 a.m., but most likely it would not be economically feasible to hire a teacher to sit in for two extra hours every day unless there were a definite need for it.
The only other way that this could work would be to open the lab at 7 a.m. and close at 2 p.m. This would cause a lot of students to have to rearrange their schedules to, because many of the science students do their lab work in the afternoons between noon and 3:30 p.m.
Opening the lab any earlier in the day would be very questionable because very seldom is there more than a dozen students in the biology lab before 10:30 a.m. who are working in open lab classes.
Another reason why it would not be sensible to open the lab earlier in the morning is because the biology lab is already open one extra night of the week, usually from 4 to 6:30 p.m. This extra time is supposed to accommodate those people with hectic or busy schedules. Some students find this open night lab to be very helpful in order to complete assigned labs.
The bottom line is that if students are going to make college life work for them, they should arrange their lives around the services that are provided to them. This could be worse; not all the services, including the biology lab, would have to provide as many hours to the students as they do.
Biology lab assistants,
Paul Strack
Rebecca Schlund
The Apache April 29,1999