All parents
want the best for their children. And if said parent is a university professor,
they probably want their kids to be as well-educated as they are. What better
way to expose your budding Einstein or Plato to the joys of learning than
raising them on a college campus?
Now, real
estate in some prime areas of most campuses—the nice houses, where the rich
sorority girls live, or those big, cool looking buildings called ‘halls’—is way
beyond the budget of your average academic, or even a small country, like
Liechtenstein (scratch that. Apparently, Liechtenstein has a lot of money).
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| The lovely mountains of Liechtenstein. |
But,
anyway, there’s one place where university faculty members can really live in
close contact with the intellect of the students—the dorms.
‘Faculty in residence’ programs exist in major
universities all across the USA .
They’re supposed to teach students that professors are approachable, normal
people—just like those jerks downstairs who knock on your door at 2AM because they
think you have fruit snacks. But what about the children of these professors?
They stand to learn all kinds of valuable things, too. Here’s a few:
1. How to
operate an elevator. In a building where you’ve got tons of people going up and
down at any given moment for any kind of reason, elevators are of paramount
importance. If you want to go downstairs, and the elevator opens in front of
you, you have to actually ask the people inside which direction they’re going,
or you might end up going from floor 3 to 5 to 2 back to 3 before you actually
get down to the ground. Elevator skills are especially difficult for children,
who might not be able to push the highest buttons or intelligently articulate
where they’re actually headed. Children stand to gain both motor skills and
social skills from this exercise.
2. How to
use profanity. Whether it’s just minor expletives after being stuck in an
elevator for over five minutes (see above) or more serious language after
realizing one’s bathroom mirror isn’t actually there, children living in the
dorms will gather valuable English language skills. Sure, most children learn
dirty words when their friends whisper ‘em to each other on the playground, but
in the dorms, children will learn these words in their proper context. And as any language teacher will tell you,
it’s always better to learn a language in its native environment than by simply
memorizing vocabulary.
3. How to
study. The children of academics are unfortunately, hopelessly doomed to an
education at one point or another in their lives. Living in a community of
young adults already suffering such a fate, children learn the valuable survival
skills necessary to escape this part of their lives with minimal scarring.
Simply by watching and mimicking, children learn that the most affective way to
study is either: sitting in one’s room and watching Mad Men, lying on a balcony in a string bikini, or donning a pair
of booty shorts and a lace camisole and going to the mythical font of knowledge
found in ‘Collegetown’. As any parent will tell their child, college is a time
for studying—and when your kid sees students studying so hard they start
throwing up, they will probably conclude knowledge is a lot like the flu.
Welcome
to academia, little Johnny!
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