A Canadian law student has got off to a bad start to the academic year after a spectacularly grouchy email they sent to their coursemates was leaked into the blogosphere.
The missive — which is reproduced in full below — takes issue with the author’s peers’ propensity to eat during lectures, with tuna sandwiches and apples highlighted as particularly problematic snacks because they, respectively, “stink up the entire room” and lead to “the gnashing of your teeth and the crunch crunch crunch”.
During the email, the student, who studies at Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School, concludes of his or her 72 coursemates that “you all suffer from a peculiar set of eating disorders that bisect with a thorough lack of courtesy to your fellow students”…
To my fellow Adminstrative [sic] Law students,
I know that law school is hard. I know that having to attend more than one class is hard. I know that reading cases is hard, and paying tuition is harder still. I’m there with you.
I also have a great amount of sympathy for those of us in this class who are more fundamentally challenged. The ones who seem to suffer from a complete lack of etiquette and common courtesy as well as from peculiar eating disorders. I get it, that home life must have supremely difficult, and the public school system was so lacking that no one taught you how to behave in public, and, specifically, how to eat in public. And how not to.
I thought that perhaps the first class was a fluke, but as your collective behaviour seems to be getting worse with each class, I have come to the conclusion that it is not a fluke, and you all suffer from a peculiar set of eating disorders that bisect with a thorough lack of courtesy to your fellow students.
So let me help. Here are some basic guiding principles that should help you navigate your eating frenzies during our classes together for this semester:
1. There IS a ten minute break in between the two hours that we study. You do NOT need to start gorging on your food as soon as the lesson starts. For those of you with slightly less chronic eating disorders, I beseech you to please wait out the first hour before unfolding and then munching away like a horse on your chosen dish, which turns our classroom into a stable.
It’s really not that hard to wait until the break to start eating. Incredibly, you might also learn something about administrative law if you paid attention to what is being taught, instead of what is in your sandwich.
As an added bonus, your classmates might like you more if you could just put a reign on your impulse to gorge until the appropriate time.
2. Food selection: if you are so unable to time manage appropriately, and/or you are utterly incapable of waiting for the break to eat, may I be so bold as to recommend to you what not to bring as your dish of the day?
Tuna sandwiches: they stink up the entire room
Deli sandwiches: see above
Apples, pineapples and other crunchy fruit: your helpless classmates are here to study. We want to hear the professor, not the gnashing of your teeth and the crunch crunch crunch
Chips: Really? I mean, really? Refer to above point about the noise. But to add, you’re dying of hunger, and you choose to stuff your face with a bag of chips? Out of all available food options? It’s not very healthy, you know.
3. If you are simply unable to hold on to your eating urges, and are also unable to pick odour-free, noise-free dishes, could I please request that you sit at the back of the classroom? ALL of you? You guys can share food, and the rest of us can actually learn.
4. Get help. No, really. When you become an actual lawyer, you might have to go to court. Heaven forbid, maybe even sit through a trial. I assure you, no judge will allow you to gorge on your bag of chips because you couldn’t sit still for two hours without eating. And, we wouldn’t want you to pass out from hunger, or suffer some other horrific accident.
To put it politely, your constant eating/chewing/crunching/the SMELL is wholly distracting the rest of us from learning. If I weren’t being polite, I would say it’s fucking annoying and disrespectful and shows a complete lack of judgement and poor taste.
But I’m being polite, so I won’t say that.
See you this afternoon.