You can practically feel the stress wafting through the air

We all know that feeling: the reading for this class was really long and really difficult, and nobody could work up the motivation to actually get through it. But, unfortunately, your class is a seminar of fifteen people, and the professor is going to expect you to have a meaningful discussion about something literally nobody read. What do you do? Bwog writer Betsy Ladyzhets has answers. (And not because she didn’t do her First-Year Seminar reading for last class – she totally did. She promises.)

It’s five minutes before the seminar starts. The classroom is slowly filling up, students stifling yawns and balancing coffee cups as they squeeze around the overly large table and slump into seats. A few take out books or packets of paper and frantically flip through the pages, highlighting arbitrarily and scrawling messy notes, but most just turn to their phones, taking advantage of the last few minutes they have before they’ll have to pretend to be academically inclined students on top of their lives. And then, someone asks the question:

“Did anyone do the reading?”

Everyone in the class looks around – heads are shaking, polite smiles are drooping into frowns, and frowns are disintegrating into nervous laughter. The murmurs begin quietly, but are soon clearly audible:

“No.”

“Nah.”

“No way.”

“I tried, but I fell asleep.”

“I got through, like, the first ten pages? Maybe?”

“It was so dense, I could barely understand it.”

“It’s ridiculous,” agrees a new arrival, sweeping into the room with an industrial-sized water bottle and multiple cardigans. “This guy is so pretentious! And he’s so long-winded, it’s like you could summarize every five pages with one sentence.”

“Did you read it?” someone else asks, looking up from their phone.

The new arrival laughs, leaning back in their chair. “God, no. I got my copy used, and the person who used it last left highlighting and a whole lot of notes in the margins, so I just read those.”

Before the rest of the class can admit their jealousy, a book slams shut in the back of the room. “Finished,” a quiet voice says.

Attention immediately turns to the source of the noise. “Did you understand it?” several people demand at once. “What was the last thing you read?”

“I don’t know.” The finisher shakes their head, then drops it down onto the table. “I just speed-read eighty pages in one hour. I don’t know.”

Nobody can really blame them.

The conversation stumbles onward, with half of the class attempting to discern any possible meaning from the minimal amounts of reading some people did and the other half just calmly accepting their fates for terrible participation grades. Soon enough, the professor hurries in, half-full thermos in hand.

“So, everyone. What did you think of the reading?”

Silence falls. For a moment, the seminar is so quiet, the class can hear someone in the next room over chewing gum.

But then, one brave soul ventures a comment: “I understand that this is important to the course and everything, professor, but this was honestly the most tedious thing I’ve ever had to read.”

“Writing from another century is difficult to understand, I know,” the professor says, “but you can get through it. Just put time and effort in, invest in a dictionary, and -”

“I kind-of agree with her, though,” another person cuts in. “This guy was writing to make a point or whatever, but mostly he was just writing to hear himself talk.”

The professor starts to argue, but almost immediately, three other people start talking, complaining about the difficulties of the author’s word choice and style. A look of understanding passes around the room, a kind of solidarity that surpasses differences in opinion, appearance, and even stance on which Columbia dining hall is the best: everyone in the class knows they need to distract this professor in any way possible.

The complaints increase in volume for a few minutes, but everyone seems to run out of steam all at once.

But then, in the class’s time of need, one voice rises above the silence: “Actually, you know who this guy reminds me of?”

“Who?” several people ask at once.

“Donald Trump.”

The professor splutters indignantly, but the classroom is soon full of noises of agreement, saying, yes, of course, this eighteenth-century writing is exactly like that one campaign speech Donald Trump made that one time. Nobody is exactly sure why, but it is.

“What do you think of Donald Trump, professor?” a different voice pipes up.

“Are you the kind of person who might, I don’t know, get into arguments on Facebook with relatives who claim to support Trump?” another person adds. (In response to the concerned looks their oddly specific question merits from classmates, the student simply shrugs, unwilling to explain that they decided to stalk their professor on Facebook the previous night in the hopes of finding distraction material while procrastinating on the reading.)

But any bemusement about the question’s origin is soon forgotten when the professor launches into a fifteen-minute rant about precisely why Donald Trump is a menace to American society and why, if he becomes president, we as a country are basically doomed.

The rest of the class period is spent discussing the horrors of Donald Trump, the concerning statements of other Republican candidates, the main points of the Hillary v.s. Bernie fight, and, inexplicably, the hit Broadway musical Hamilton. The students have to restrain themselves from breaking out into applause when the professor looks up at the clock and realizes that only one minute remains in class.

“Alright, I suppose we’ll have to end it here,” the professor says. “Good discussion today. But remember – you have a paper on this book due next class.”

The classroom falls silent.

Well, shit.

Room full of vaguely distressed students via CU Admissions website