Royal Purple

Issue date: 3/19/08 Section: Opinion

Pink [Click to enlarge]

Does anyone remember elementary school and going out to the local Wal-Mart or wherever to stock up on the latest in school supplies? Pencils, folders and notebooks were on top of the list of things to get to start the school year off right.

As you got older, the list of school supplies shrunk and shrunk. There's no need for 1,000 count boxes of Crayons or colored pencils anymore. All that is needed is the bare minimum to get through your classes, and how could someone on a college budget argue?

The one school necessity used more than any of the aforementioned supplies is paper. As a current employee at Andersen Library, I can vouch for the fact that paper is a prime necessity for the college student. However, this need is bordering on dependency.

In my two plus years at the library, I have loaded public printers with countless reams of paper and subsequently seen those thousands of sheets dispensed to students at startlingly fast rates.

Students come into the library and print off upwards of 3,000 sheets of paper a day. For a weekday, given the 16.5 hours the library is open, that is more than 180 pages per hour.

During the spring 2007 semester, students printed 230,019 pages. Some of these print jobs are eight or ten page papers, a necessary reason, but many of the hundreds of print jobs sent to the printers are PowerPoint slides.

I've stood beside the printers, whilst long lines of students wait for the printer to be filled with paper so they can quickly print off 20 pages of the day's lesson in PowerPoint slides, thus excusing them from doing the actual reading the previous night.

I've even filled a printer of paper and stood around to watch a student print more than 50 pages of text from a Web site. There's just no reason for this.

Copy and paste the text from the Web site into Microsoft Word and highlight and write notes in the margins through that. Why during the age of technology do we still find a need to waste paper? This is all ridiculous and unnecessary.

Harp back to your elementary school days. Do you remember those handy things called notebooks where you'd listen to the teacher and write down a few key ideas; sound familiar?

Continued...

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