Thursday, March 28, 2024
HomeOpinionSome Students 'Left' Out in Lecture

Some Students ‘Left’ Out in Lecture

- advertisement -

It’s something Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Henry Ford, Winston Churchill, the last three U.S. presidents and Tom Cruise all had to overcome: the right-handed world.
Over the centuries, the question has been raised again and again in academic circles: Does the shunned left-handed minority flourish because of their incongruence or are they just, say, more intelligent by nature?
But more to the point, why the heck aren’t there enough lefty desks at UCI and why do all the right-handed kids always steal them?
Interestingly, though inventions like the door and automobile have been constructed to fit the right-handed world, many such technical developments are actually the result of left-handed brilliance: architects claim more left-handers than almost any other profession, and the car itself was invented by a lefty!
But as we continue to subconsciously unscrew our jelly jars and throw salt over our left shoulder to fend off evil spirits, many students at UCI and universities across America are having a wee bit of trouble taking Scantron tests on the right-handed cutting boards we call desks.
Let’s take a look at the main lecture halls around the UCI campus: PSLH has a total of 449 seats with 39 of those accomodating left-handed students; SSLH has 397 seats with 41 lefties; HSLH has 358 seats with 13 lefties; HIB 100 has 345 seats with 27 lefties; ELH has 276 seats with 34 lefties; SSH has 255 seats with nine lefties; HH Theater has 165 seats with zero lefties.
Now, perhaps it isn’t immediately obvious to the logical right-hander, but in this campuswide representation,the left-handed populous is severely ignored (if we are being politically correct).
We can compute it a bit further to make it more obvious: 2245 seats with only 163 lefty desks available. Hey!
That’s barely 7 percent! Most studies indicate that between 13 to 15 percent of the current world population is left-handed.
In fact, this percentage has been rising for a while, perhaps as social notions about the disgustingness of the left hand are slowly ‘left behind’ (no pun intended) in different areas of the world.
Now, factor in the realms of right-handers who want to pretend on test days that they are in their right mind (or maybe just want room for their left knee?) and the situation quickly spirals out of being acceptable.
But we all know there is probably some ‘design’ reasoning, or maybe no money in the budget for renovations that disperse body discrimination.
So instead, left-handed students are forced to side-saddle those god-awful plastic chairs from the 1960s while the comfortably seated right-hander next to them sips tea and shoves their elbow up somewhere it doesn’t belong.
The most awkward thing of all though, is when we have to try to slip the cutting board out from under the armpit of the kid sitting next to us, with the added announcement that, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ll be staring at you for the rest of lecture, I’m a side-saddler, sorry.’
If these figures referred to UCI’s hiring of minorities, the American Civil Liberties Union would be all over this in seconds.
We lefties are just wondering why, somehow, having to visit the chiropractor after every stats lecture doesn’t seem to apply the same rationale.
I mean, there always seem to be $40 million laying around for handicap ramps to accommodate the one wheelchair kid on campus.
But in the end, perhaps these struggles are what strengthen the lefty elite and provide us with such amazing insight.
Or maybe we lefties are just crazy.
Then again, that’s what they told Napoleon when he wanted to dig a tunnel under the English Channel to Britain. I think the right-handers call it the Chunnel.

Jesse Nickles is a second-year international studies major.