DEALING WITH FIRST YEAR STUDENTS

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Today I am going back many years, because a friend and I spoke about a few funny things that happened when we were studying. 

There was a time we really we very silly as we had our own way of helping the first years get acquainted with how they should feel more comfortable in this new environment.    

 

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We were two to a room and each had his own first year student to mentor. My roommate and I decided that our two first years would have to wake us up every morning before class. 

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They had to climb up our cupboards as silently as possible and get in the top two cupboards.  Once they were up there they had to open the doors and make the sound of a cuckoo clock to wake us up. 

This was not that easy for one of them, as he was quite a big guy and we could hear him struggling to get up there. 

We never reacted as we were awake the minute they walked into the room. The fun part was listening to the two men suffering to get up there. 

This was the time we started laughing when they came out and said cuckoo - cuckoo closed the doors and repeated until we felt they had done enough exercise so we sort of woke up and said well we are now ready to get up and thank you we will see you again tomorrow morning.

We found this hilarious as you can imagine they did not. 

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Then there was a guy who had a way of always trying to give someone a fright. He had a way of getting onto the windowsill of the building, come round slowly where someone was busy with studies. He would suddenly hit hard against the window and scare the living daylights out of you. 

We had decided we have had enough of this and we would get him back. We started watching him and one day we saw him climbing out of his window again we watched where he went, and shouted to the other guys where to go. 

Once he got to where he wanted to be, they suddenly opened the window and grabbed him by the arms, they held him so that he could not move. Remember this was higher than the 10th floor of the building.

We then plugged in one of our irons and pushed it against his backside until he was screaming. I can assure you that was the last time he ever tried that again.  

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Then there was a guy who never bathed and he smelt like you cannot believe. This guy was driving us all crazy we tried to tell him that this was not the way to live, but it did not seem to make an impression on him at all. 

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Up in the roof there were many doves and we decided to catch them and put them in his room. We caught about six of them, and you all know there is nothing worse than these birds having free rein of the room. 

As you can imagine he had a room to himself because nobody could live with the smell. We locked his room and we would not let him in for at least a day. The mess these birds made was incredible and he had to clean it up just to be able to find a spot to sit never mind a place to sleep. 

That was the last time he did not clean himself and we succeeded in teaching him some cleanliness. 

The last story was if you met up with a first year he always had to tell you a joke and only one that you had not heard before. 

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If you had heard it, he had to carry on telling jokes till he told one that you had not heard. 

That must have been the time in my life that I laughed the most because they were all working hard on finding jokes to keep us off their backs. 

I personally think that some of them spent some time in the library looking up jokes, because in 1965 there were no computers or cell phones and you still had to use the library for information.

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These were just a few of the things we did with the first years, but believe me it was a very good time in my life.

Today if we think back, it was unbelievable to think we were studying education not the way we should have.

Hope you enjoyed my stories. 

Have a wonderful day here from the Wild Coast.