By Carla Wintersgill
Editor-in-Chief
In second year, I got a lung infection just around midterm season. I kept going to school. Eventually the dizziness got so bad that I resigned myself to squeezing in a doctor’s appointment between classes.
He gave me a doozy of a cough medicine. It knocked me out for three days straight. I was so weak that I had to crawl to the bathroom every time I needed to pee. Yet somehow I managed to write an assignment during periods of lucidity.
Sure I had a doctor’s note to explain my absence, but I was still going to have to do the assignments at some point. And it wouldn’t be any easier if I was playing catchup while the other round of homework came up. I just couldn’t afford to miss anything.
Our features editor, Adrian Morrow, has a hacking cough that we’re convinced is walking pneumonia. He also has a full course load, a job in the Toronto Star radio room and his Eyeopener editorship. As much as we’ve urged him otherwise, he just hasn’t made a trip to the doctor a priority. But he’s busy.
So are most students. While it’s a given that school will make you neglect friends, family and personal hygiene, associate news editor Andrea MacLean discovers on page 6 that health is also on the chopping block — sometimes in extreme ways.
Andrea’s feature ties in with Ryerson’s new Academic Plan. The school wants to be recognized academically on the world stage and has a new strategy to make it happen. News editor Shannon Higgins investigates on page 7.
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While real life school drama can get tiresome, something that never gets old is television school drama. And no one does it better than the kids of Degrassi: The Next Generation, filmed right here in Toronto.
Degrassi has always prided itself on using real people instead of slick Hollywood actors, and four of the current cast members are Ryerson students.
As filming of the current season wraps up, arts and life editor Jess Lewis spends the day on set and finds out what it’s like to go to Degrassi and Ryerson at the same time.
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