Hallway filled with students who enjoy lit class

In some lectures, you need to pay close attention to every moment. In others, you need to struggle to keep from running out the door screaming. Many literature classes at this school are closer to that second one; as intelligent as our peers may be and as hard as our professors might work to keep the class discussion on track, sitting fifty Colubmia students in a dim room and asking them to discuss nineteenth-century novels is a recipe for disaster. To help you get through your lit lectures this semester, several Bwog staffers have compiled a handy survival guide.

• Show up late. Like, really late.
• Slowly make your way to your seat, and make sure to get your headphones caught on every chair
• Bring a highly caffeinated beverage.
• Sit near a window, so that you have light and possibly entertainment to help keep you awake.
• Call people out if they don’t make any sense or are just talking in circles.
• Sit in the back and read some of the book.
• Start making a tally for every time someone says “essentially”, or every time ‘that girl’ (you know who we’re talking about) says something completely self-indulgent and nonsensical.
• Take a shot of vodka every time someone mentions a prior class/writer/author in order to extend their ‘point’ – which really has no point, and rambles on like a stream as it descends into a large, onerous ocean full of compost and actual bull shit.
• Fall asleep.
• Guess the average age in your class.
• Make personality quizzes for characters in the novel.
• Take a shot every time your prof mentions some niche intellectual no one else cares about.
• Actually call the NSA to tap the wires of that kid who is disconcertingly into Nietzche.
• Play Fuck, Marry, Kill with the characters in the novel.
• Write down some of the dumb ass things said by your highly pretentious, out of touch peers (and send them to Bwog?).
• Try your hand at class A bullshitting.
• If it’s a Barnard class: take a shot every time the one Columbia dude in the the class does some inane posturing.
• Color code your annotations.
• Take a shot every time you don’t know whether you’re in a literature or philosophy lecture.
• Take a shot every time the professor has literally no idea how to work the projector, and spends 20 minutes figuring it out.
• Take a shot every time the professor pretends to consider a classmates comment astute even when it’s trash.
• Take a shot every time someone forces a modern context onto a text (usually by mentioning Trump)
•  Take a lot of bathroom breaks, water breaks, crying breaks, etc.
• Just don’t show up for Gertrude Stein classes.
• Rate your peer’s reading of the text in class American Idol style.
• Play devils advocate (last resort!! only if you’re bored out of your mind)
• Leave early.