That it started. Really? Really Mendoza? Really Notre Dame? This course was at best a joke in extremely poor taste. "Foresight" is the perfect excuse for a course with no substance and no direction. If I were to rank everything that I have learned in life by order of usefulness, all things from "Foresight" would fall somewhere below my memorization of the mating habits of the Burmese mole-rat.
I could digest the fact that this is a real course after some soul-searching, but a requirement? Absolutely ridiculous. Why not have a different class that is, I don't know, useful because it covers material from a field of study that exists. But chances are good that even despite overwhelming evidence that this class should be removed from the curriculum because there is nearly unanimous hatred for it to a degree normally reserved only for telemarketers and Pete Carroll, it will return year after year like a deranged Santa Claus to spread misery amongst business juniors. It would have been less painful and much more productive for me to have spent every moment that I wasted on Foresight this semester instead repeatedly breaking each of my toes with a cinderblock. Seriously.
This course was about as intellectually stimulating as watching a season of Gilmore Girls. The books and articles that we had to read were written by somebody with the mental capacity of Miley Cyrus. Because of the sheer severity of the mental trauma that this class has caused me I am going to spend the remainder of my sad life living in a hut in a remote village in Nicaragua making 3 dollars and 14 cents a month producing plastic moldings for portable, hand-held female urinals. It is absolutely beyond me why anyone on earth would ever delude themselves into believing for one moment that this class would ever be informative besides perhaps giving a prime example of what constitutes a complete waste of time.
Have you ever seen that move "The Patriot" with Mel Gibson? Yeah, well do you remember that part in the final battle scene where the British dudes shoot a cannonball and it whizzes past Mel Gibson's character and totally just rips off this dude's leg at the hamstring? Yeah. I would much rather be that dude and have to endure getting totally jacked by that cannonball and then spend the rest of my potentially short life (gangrene treatments were pretty shoddy back then) having to lean against whatever is handy nearby than have to endure this worthless experience again.
After surviving this cruel travesty I have to restrain myself each day from smacking my forehead with heavy, blunt object in hopes that whichever brain cells tragically lose their lives through such an activity will be the ones that contain my memories from that worthless classroom.
Do you know why Charlie Weis got fired? Because he was a horrible coach. Do you know why he was a horrible coach? After the 2006 season Charlie Weis took a class called "Foresight" that Swarbrick insisted the entire football program go through even though it is clearly not necessary for 99.6 percent of those employed in the department.
What we have here is the same situation. Simply knowing that Mendoza forces students to go through such a miserable joke of a course makes the story of Lindsay Lohan's descent from a cute, popular star to a disreputable, prostitute-like caricature of a human being almost seem like a heartwarming romantic comedy. I think that maybe Heath Ledger found out that he was going to have to take "Foresight" and he did a little future evaluation himself and determined that it just wasn't worth it.
So if you were wondering, no, I did not enjoy this course.
Tim Hronick is a junior. He can be contacted at thronick@nd.edu
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not
necessarily those of The Observer.
