Dear classmates,

To quote one of my favorite series of online videos “What are you doing? What, what. What are you doing?” I have always wanted to voice some complaints about some of the brilliant students with whom I attend class. So I’m going to. There have been many people who I’ve shared a class with who have been distracting, disrespectful, and just plain dumb. These individuals make me worried that our standards for who we let into higher education are too low.

I will start with a gentleman who I’ve had the pleasure of having a few classes with already. We’ll call him “Restroom Jones.” Now Restroom Jones shows up for classes about 60% of the time. When he does grace the class with his presence however he takes a five minute bathroom break during the middle of a lecture. This is every time we have class!? Now I understand having a schedule to do your business, that’s all fine and good. That however, cannot be the case with Mr. Jones due to the following evidence. During one class period he left the room twice for five minutes apiece, and I’ve seen him do this in consecutive classes that are just an hour apart. Unless Restroom Jones has a severe case of irritable bowel syndrome, it is clear to me that he thinks so little of the person behind the podium who has a Ph. D that he feels he does not need their assistance in passing the class.

My next case is another gentleman who was a lab partner of mine for a science coarse, we’ll call this upstanding student “Ipod McLaptop.” Now, Mr. McLaptop went to a prestigious school out of state last year and made a point to tell everyone around him. He talked about the great parties that he went to and all the classes that he would skip there. All this, along with talking about how smart of a guy he was. I mean that’s how he got into POSU “Prestigious Out of state University” (I know that could stand for something else, I’ll let you decide) last year. Unfortunately for Mr. McLaptop due to the quantity of aforementioned skipping and partying he failed out of his old school and ended up back here. Now he shows up to most of his classes, however when he does he constantly plays games and texts friends on his iphone. During lecture and lab, Mr. McLaptop can be seen with one ear-bud in his ear at all times. If you sit close enough to him, you can hear the bass from his music, When he is not texting his friends, he can almost surely be found surfing facebook on his laptop without any attempt to pretend that he is paying attention. Tapping away at his keyboard when no one is even lecturing.

These are people who may have had the high school GPA’s to get into higher learning, but that does not make them acceptable student material. It’s people like this that should be removed and have their tuition used for the people who could not afford tuition but are willing to put forth an effort to respect the instructors and the learning process.