House Editorial: Welcoming our professors to the end of the semester
Posted on April 24, 2006

There is a question on many students’ minds as we go into this last week of classes before our quarter-year reprieve, a question that needs to be asked: Who do these professors think they are?

While the only guarantees in life are death and taxes, most college students can predict a nauseatingly overworked two weeks at the end of the semester with almost as much certainty. Some students will find over one-third or one-half of their final grades crammed into the last eighth of the semester.

As if that isn’t bad enough, professors then decide to get creative with the assignments. Of course there are still essays and tests, but in addition to the two or three of each you may have for the class in the next two weeks, there are also group projects and presentations. Apparently having 26 hours of work per day isn’t enough; no, we must also find the time to meet with other taxed and tired students. And regardless of how much professors swear that your group members do not necessarily have an impact on your grade, you know they are lying through their ivory (tower) teeth. Just in case your grade doesn’t drop enough from being overworked, they arrange it so that other overworked people become responsible for a  part of your grade.

Professors seem convinced that, if enrolled in their class, you do absolutely nothing with your time except re-read the textbook and sleep with the syllabus. The thought that their students might, just maybe, have other work to do at the same time is as foreign a thought in their minds as finding parking near the Quad or voting for a Republican.

It is said that nature abhors a vacuum; since many professors seem to live in one, the implicit conclusion is that professors are unnatural. As we all work ourselves to death in the hopes of not quite failing out of school, one can only hope the professors wake up and smell the coffee their students will be drinking around the clock for the next two weeks. Professors seem to have missed the object permanence phase of their childhood development, for their students apparently don’t exist outside of their classrooms, don’t take other classes than their own, and don’t have other work besides what they assign. It is high time for them to all grow up.