You’re sitting in class when the professor’s droning, somewhat lulling monologue quickly changes tone — “All right, take out the reading you had for today. We’re going to discuss in small groups and then come together as a whole class.” Thinking you’d have yourself a perfectly passable class day, your misplaced complacency does a triple back handspring off the combination chair and desk you’re sitting at. The gray, coarse plastic that constitutes the chair-desk is now awash with sweat.
As a gulp travels down your throat, much too obviously, you prepare yourself to give the performance of a lifetime. The kind that will have flowers thrown at you. You must, because only now you suddenly remember that participation in discussion accounts for 20% of your final grade. Kissing that A goodbye, you prepare for the worst as the person next to you asks the ever-so-damning, “Do you have any ideas?”
“Uhmm…” You think of yourself as a reasonably intelligent person. That’s why you’re here anyway, right? It’s these moments where you’re convinced you fell through the cracks and the application committee accidentally put your application in the wrong pile. Another gulp settles as you sit there, making your eyes look up as though a thought bubble will materialize and provide you with sufficient nonsense to help you forge through this chest-tightening predicament.
With the utmost contempt spreading across their face, the person who just dared to expose your status of having — or not having — read begins again.
“Okay, well… I thought that on page 3,300 to the 2nd power in the 8th footnote, which is only in the special addition I specifically went out of my way to get, the author made a really good — no, salient — point.” Your stomach now feels as though you had downed an entire case of the 12-pack of hard shell beef tacos from Taco Bell all by your lonesome with the alacrity of Matt Stonie.
Then, just as you’ve caught your breath from narrowly dodging that situation, the professor blurts out, “All right, let’s turn it over to the whole class.” Your eyes threaten to pop out of your head. Pushing them back in, you assume a straight face, ready for what is to come. As overly enthusiastic hands shoot up, you can feel the fact that your hands are instead clenching the sides of the desk really start to stand out. Everyone who speaks lets the most eloquent and shockingly intellectual statement unfurl from their pie hole, now making you feel all that much more unprepared. You thought it was the norm to miss reading every once in a while (i.e., most times), but these people are proving you wrong each time they practically do a jumping jack off a desk to raise their hand.
The professor, initially satisfied at the sheer amount of preparedness your peers have displayed, now wishes to become dissatisfied for some reason. So, they begin to scan. They have their spectacles on, pushed all the way up to the bridge of their nose — to see your non-reading faces, my dear. They look around, scrutinizing every slight movement from everybody they have pointedly noted as having not yet contributed. They lift their head and sniff out the scent of fear. You look away for one second, and when you look back, their piercing gaze is fixed right on you.
“Joe,” they read off your name tag, being held onto the desk by your leaking water bottle, “Do you have any ideas?” They got you. Considering how much dropping this class would impact your DARS and the weight of your wallet, you sigh. Now, you must draw on extremely tangential information you learned from past classes and YouTube rabbit holes you went down when you were a pseudo-intellectual in middle school. Once you employ this gambit, you must then utilize the ever-so-necessary phrase of “To piggyback off of X’s point.” Once you’ve done this, you awkwardly nod, offering up a curled, toothless smile. Convinced that you’ve done your due diligence to ward off this ignominious show, you certainly have not convinced anybody in that room that you have done that reading.
Never again. You will, from now on, be the solitary soul poring over the readings in the cages at Memorial Library on Fridays when everybody else is out partying. You’ll be locked up in a much-needed act of ascetic academic reset. This will never actually happen, but you know what will? This whole shebang, again and again. You will never learn, nor do that reading.
