I don’t know if it has always been this way, but I personally have very little reason to have faith in my fellow students. What is happening, Laurier? Evaluate what it might be that could cause a declining sense of faith. Little things add up.
1. Opening the door: Do hold open the door for the next person, and say “thank you” when someone actually does extend this courtesy to you.
2. Escalators: People not moving on the escalators in the DAWB building: this machine is intended to propel you up the stairs at an accelerated rate, not to put humans on display as they go by.
3. Papers: Newspapers being left all over the school in piles so that no one else can read them. By 10 in the morning, all the Toronto Stars are gone from the stands and scattered across campus, so that you have to piece together the front section from four separate piles and look like a bum doing so.
4. Trash: Along with papers all over the place is the rest of the trash. Coffee cups, bottles, food bags, and other assorted junk. People just finish what they are eating, drinking, smoking, and leave the containers as they go off to consume more crap they don’t need.
5. Lines: Students have a tendency to let their minds go blank while standing in the numerous lines at Laurier. They go into a coma, and no longer realize they are in line. Pay attention, and it will be over much faster.
6. The Stare: Is it me, or do you get stared down when you walk into the Schlegel/Peters/Science building, as if the tenants are telling you to get out? This is their turf, or so it would seem. Everyone belongs to this school and no student should be made to feel that they do not belong, anywhere.
7. Cell phones: Why are they still ringing in class? You can’t claim ignorance anymore. I don’t pay to hear your conversations.
8. Big mouths: It’s fine to voice your opinions in class if you have them, and to raise questions, but don’t break up the flow of a professor’s lecture with minute points of contention on flimsy shreds of relevance. Do you want to show off by knowing something that nobody else knows?
Above all, let’s just start saying “thank you” more often and being more courteous to one another. There is no shame in courtesy and good manners.