Discovering what you love is all too easy in college. Unfortunately the two years spent in general education burning money, time, and attention puts nearly every college student at a state where they much rather be holding a keystone than sitting in some lecture about the History of rocks. Here are just 10 of the most ridiculous things every college student will face in college general education classes.
10. The Thousand Dollar Class; The 25 cent Scantron
People pay very good money for college classes, especially these days and scantrons only cost 25 cents. With this said college students spend money on some very absurd things. BUT, no matter the price the phrase “Scantrons will not be provided,” can drive any student to go haywire. I guess the $4,000 your family just dropped on this class’ tuition just so happens to not cover the most crucial thing you need to cover the majority of the grade in most gen-ed classes. Great budgeting from an “economics” course.
9. The 8 AM Friday lab
As some famous butler in some superhero movie once proclaimed, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” This is the quote you really have to study in order to understand why a university would ever place a 50 minute lab or discussion so blatantly early on a Friday. With this said I could really see the theory behind it. I mean who wouldn’t want to see the faces of 30-40 hung-over still-drunk-from-the-night-before freshmen? Touché, professors Touché.
7. No cell phones and no laptops allowed
Could you imagine the absurd concept of actually paying attention and NOT reading BroBible in class?
6. The in-class-quiz/iclicker
In a last ditch effort to attempt to get your lazy hung-over self to fill a seat in their massive lecture hall professors offer the infamous in-class quiz. Or now with great technological developments the “Iclicker.” Thank you 21st century. As they persistently quiz you on something you legitimately just wrote down you begin to wonder why such technology wasn’t available for you…. in lets say the 6th grade.
5. The Trap Class
Also known as “that class that your friend Jeff took that he aced with minimal effort,” will without question cross paths in your college scheduling. While this friend Jeff was a delinquent and you strongly believe you are much smarter than him, the bad news is he had the class with a much easier professor. Here you are stuck paying good money for a class you not only have no idea what is going on in. You also probably strongly wonder how you aren’t getting paid by the university for being made to take such an awful gen-ed. By week three it’s nearing the time you can no longer drop the course and Jeff is persistent it gets easier. The time has come and midterm number one is right around the corner. This comes with the astounding news that Jeff barely got a B.
4. The Assignments
The dumber the class the dumber the assignments. So by using simple math this means you will be absolutely swamped with assignments in your time in gen-ed classes.
For this one I will leave a little anecdote of the absolute dumbest assignment I ever received in college. I once had to rewrite an entire 2,000-word paper without the usage of the letter “R”. Trust me, I could not make that one up. Remember that one job interview where you couldn’t say any word that had the letter “P” in it? I guess this was just in preparation for that.
3. The Peer Review
Have you really ever heard a success story with a peer review? A peer review is always a lose-lose. Odds are you get your paper back and completely ignore everything the person recommended. Odds are the paper you get is done by a genius that intensely makes you reconsider whether or not you will ever have a chance to write an actual respectable paper ever again. Or most likely you will get a paper that makes so little sense you wonder who the admissions officer was that allowed this person anywhere near your university.
2. Suggested Readings
Think way back to your college days and that night you struggled for hours as you powered through 200 pages of suggested readings for a class you could care less about but frankly had to take. Pretty sure you walked into the class the next day with your head held high— on that day you were a great student. Yet, all good things come to an end and the second the professor started summing up the chapter word for word in slides you realized you never had to open the book in the first place. With this goes the last time you will ever do the suggest reading for a prerequisite. As you walk through campus you can still attempt to find those elitist learners, the “One Percent” that still stick their head in the books for a class like History of Music.
1. Student Teachers
While intently looking for this elitist group of suggested readers, most likely you don’t have to look very far. In fact you might very well be slowly reaching into the depths of living hell due to them at this very moment. Everyone has had one. The student teacher gone rogue. The student that actually was a real student in his or her college era and is now in charge of making your life pure misery. These are the people hired by the university to make sure your freshman and sophomore years of college are filled with stories your parents would like to hear. Enjoy their treacherous assignments as they attempt to make even a simple writing tactic like a thesis into the most complicated five-paragraph essay of nonsense you will ever have to write.
There is amazing news though; all the horror of general education practically ends with five simple words “Lecture slides are posted online.”
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