Klaus Solko, co-executive editor 

I am in a 200-level course. I’m taking it for my major, but unfortunately, the class also fills a general education credit. Why is this so unfortunate? Because it means my class is plagued with people who do not care about content and just need the credit. Now, that is not my business. I don’t care why someone is taking a class. Fuck, someone could be taking a class just because they think the room looks cool. As long as they aren’t slowing down the class for me. 

There’s no way answering the professors’ attendance question, which is word association, is hard. The people who are answering “I don’t know” aren’t struggling; they just don’t want to have to do literally any work, including saying what word they think of when they hear “environment.” 

What’s a professor supposed to do in this situation? That is the question and the struggle. I appreciate that the professors I have care about their students. In response to being met with nothing from over half their class, they slow down and go with the assumption that the concepts we’re going over are more difficult than they anticipated. Which is good; I’m glad that they are humble enough to admit that something they are teaching could be more complicated than they thought. However, that isn’t the case in the classes I am talking about. 

In the classes I’m talking about, it’s like a union of slackers has been formed. It only takes one person during attendance to go, “I don’t know what color I like wearing the most,” to have 10 more people answer the same. Now the professor’s concerned we’re moving too fast and is going to have us go over the same chapter for the rest of the week. Which is great for the people who wouldn’t do the reading even if they had the whole semester. 

And who is it hurting? Me and the four other people in the class who actually care about what we are learning. We talk with each other and lament about the fact that, if we keep this slow pace for the people who don’t even know what subject we’re on, we will not get through all the concepts that we could. This only limits what we get to learn and how much we get to interact with the material. It is even more of a detriment to us if the class is a prerequisite for upper-division courses, because now when I go to those, they will say, “Oh, didn’t you learn this is a 200-level class?” And I will say, “No, that concept got cut because when the teacher asked what ‘2+2’ equals, people kept responding with, ‘Umm, can I say nothing?’”

Really, I have to go back to the point about me not caring why someone is taking a class because I don’t. If someone wants to sleep in the back of the classroom every day, awesome. Don’t sit at my table. If someone wants to never do the readings, amazing. Don’t make me summarize it to you. The only thing I am asking is to at least pretend you did the reading once in a while so that the teacher doesn’t think we are all stupid. 

The students who do this also give first years a bad name. Even as a second-year myself, there are still upperclassmen who are hesitant to interact with me in class because they assume I am just in it for the credit. This is the reason I’m not calling this just an underclassman problem; anyone can still be finishing their gen eds, and I have seen this type of loser behavior in all years. 

Ultimately, if you want to waste thousands of dollars to be in classes you aren’t going to do the work for or care about, be my guest. But don’t let that impact the learning of people who don’t think it’s lame to care.