In col­lege we’re not priv­i­leged to school can­cel­la­tions like we were in high school

Whether it’s H1N1 or just plain old influenza, it seems that cold sea­son is upon us. Classes are now filled with cough­ing, snif­fling, germ-infested students.

Area K-12 school dis­tricts have already felt the symp­toms of flu sea­son and have been forced to close school sev­eral days in the past week. For most schools, this means that over 25 per­cent of their stu­dent pop­u­la­tion was absent due to sickness.

In col­lege how­ever, we aren’t priv­i­lege to the same ben­e­fits as ele­men­tary, mid­dle, and high school stu­dents. We don’t shut­down or can­cel classes often, espe­cially not sim­ply due to illness.

I remem­ber when I was in mid­dle and high school; I loved it when school got can­celled for any rea­son at all.

In my high school, on three sep­a­rate occa­sions school got can­celled because of mer­cury con­t­a­m­i­na­tion in the hall­ways. Not to men­tion the count­less snow days we got in the winter.

In col­lege, if we’re sick we’re just told to stay in dorm rooms and not come to class for risk of expos­ing our pro­fes­sors and fel­low stu­dents to the microbes infest­ing our bodies.

A lot of stu­dents don’t stay away like they’re told, how­ever. For some, it’s because miss­ing class, if only for a cou­ple days, means falling behind with only a slight chance of catch­ing up again.

For oth­ers, I’ve been told that it’s because some of their pro­fes­sors have strict atten­dance poli­cies that don’t allow over two absences dur­ing the semes­ter for any rea­son, even illness.

It looks like it’s time for all of us to brace our­selves for the upcom­ing months and stock up on decon­ges­tants, cough syrup, throat lozenges, hot tea, and flu shots. Conditions are only likely to get worse as win­ter approaches in the next month.

This brings me to my next rem­i­nis­cent mem­ory, snow days: some­thing that we’re unques­tion­ably not accus­tomed to in college.

Winters are one aspect of going to col­lege in Big Rapids that I was def­i­nitely not pre­pared for when I moved here last year. The sever­ity of win­ter in Big Rapids was a shocker.

I was awestruck when the snow­fall reached over 18 inches overnight. My advice to all fresh­men: invest in a shovel because you’re going to need it to dig out your car this winter.

Walking to class is also quite an ordeal, espe­cially when side­walks don’t get plowed before 8 a.m. class and you’re forced to trek across cam­pus through a foot or more of snow. And even if they do get cleared, they’re often cov­ered in ice and snow within the next hour.

I grew up in south­east­ern Michigan, where trucks begin plow­ing and salt­ing the streets at 4 a.m. and school buses man­aged to drive down even the ici­est back roads.

We also don’t get the same win­tery weather like that of Big Rapids how­ever and if we ever expe­ri­enced more than a foot-and-a-half of snow or exces­sive tem­per­a­tures in the neg­a­tive, we’d prob­a­bly have snow days for a week.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d take a day in col­lege over one in mid­dle or high school with­out a sec­ond con­sid­er­a­tion, but it doesn’t dis­count the fact that in high school, we were def­i­nitely priv­i­leged to a few more days off.