10 Signs You Should Drop A Class Before It's Too Late

Not all educators are created equal. High school teachers are much maligned by tea partiers and assholes across our fair country, but generally speaking, they want to teach students. The same cannot be said for professors. Strange as it sounds, the better a school you attend, the better the odds that your teachers might not be that into teaching. If you are enrolled at a Research 1 school, odds are that many professors prefer to sequester themselves in the stacks and work on their next book rather than teach yet another section of Practical Philosophy for Snot-Nosed Frat Boys. If you go to a top tier school, you may be taught by Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winners whose priorities include having their ego stroked, cultivating a stable of hot T.A.s., and identifying the next all-star in their field who will carry on their legacy. Nowhere in that short list did we mention "spending office hours hearing about how you just don't 'get' iambic pentameter." Just because William Faulkner has come back from the dead to teach your seminar on Southern Gothic literature doesn't mean that he is going to be a good professor. If your teacher is too busy sipping mint juleps and adding narrators to his work to teach you anything, take a course with a lesser known prof who actually gives a damn.

Some students enjoy the anonymity of settling into the back of a lecture hall and spending class delving deep into the agrarian world of FarmVille. Other students are in college to escape a life of laboring on an actual farm. Frankly, you have two choices in how you approach college. Some view coursework as a means to an end, four years of sitting that unlock the doors to a life of being paid to sit, ideally in as large an office as possible. Others view their studies as an opportunity to learn about what you love without having to worry about monetizing it. If you fall into the former camp, continue looking at Instagram photos of butts during lectures. If you are interested in learning, don't feel like you have to do so with three hundred other FarmVille-playing, ass-staring students. You will have to take a class or two in a huge lecture hall, but outside of Intro to Psych, you can usually avoid impersonal PowerPoint-based courses. Ask around and see if there are classes that cover the same requirements but offer more personal attention. If a hundred kids are failing a course, the professor won't likely have time to share your concern over your B- average.

In this culture of microwave dinners and drone strikes, we're all about making things easier. So, why should you turn down a blessing from the gods of blow-off classes? Again, you have to ask yourself what you're doing in school. If your goal in college is to learn, being the smartest guy in the room isn't always going to get you there. If you find yourself dominating class discussions and breezing through the required reading, ask yourself why you took the class in the first place. If the purpose was to give yourself a breather in an otherwise tough semester, then by all means, continue your reign as the all-star of the remedial English class. If you're supposed to be getting something out of this class, if the knowledge you gain is going to matter in future coursework or in your career, then it might not be a bad idea to court a more rigorous professor and more challenging peers. A little sweat equity now might set you up for success down the road, and by the same token, taking the easy way out now might force you to tread water in your advanced courses.

No one is giving out extra points to students who make their semester harder than it has to be. You should expect a level of rigor in college, so don't go dropping a class because you don't feel like reading, but there is such a thing as too much work. It may have sounded like an awesome idea to take a course to brush up on your Dickens or fill in the gaps in your knowledge of Elizabethan England, but don't be afraid to cut and run when encountered with a fifteen-page syllabus. When you find yourself plowing through several hundred pages of reading between classes, a course that was supposed to be enjoyable can quickly become a burden. If you want some time to chase tail, it's okay to skip A Tale of Two Cities. If that paper on yeoman will turn your semester into an endless indenture, pick another class. Neither Chuck Dickens nor Queen Liz will be offended.

"But, I got up at 5:45 every morning in high school." Son, that boy is dead, and he's never coming back. You will be amazed at how quickly your body adjusts to a new environment. Just ask the liver of any New Yorker: you adjust or you perish. It was easy to get up when the shrieks of your parents jarred you out of your sweet, sweet slumber. Now you've got a drunk roommate who stays up until 2am playing Grand Theft Auto instead, and he's not getting up until Thursday morning. Few students are able to stay early risers in the face of the late-night pizza and impromptu house parties that punctuate the college experience. You'll thank yourself later if you slide back those class start times a bit. Just make sure you set some sort of remotely reasonable standards for yourself. Odds are you'll have some friends who refuse to step foot in classrooms before noon. That guy probably also wears stained gray v-necks wherever he goes and drinks a Natty Light with his breakfast. Don't be that guy.

This isn't such a bad situation during the first semester. All that you're missing out on sitting in class until ten at night is the new episode of your favorite sitcom and some poorly planned dorm floor activity. Now, if you are spending second semester in class as the sun goes down, prepare to feel sorry for yourself. After the great thawing of March, you'll be forced to watch scantily clad women heading out to the bar and friends in tank tops going off to the park to play sports as you suffer through your Western Civ lecture. As your friends get out of class and gather together to do the awesome things that college kids do after class, you'll be staring at PowerPoint slides outlining the function of neurotransmitters. If you are forced to enroll in a night class, might we suggest that you sit as far as possible from a window and turn off your watch? This will help you trick yourself into believing you aren't missing the golden moments of your college experience.

Odds are that you won't be enrolling in Organic Chemistry on a lark, but be careful not to end up in another course meant only for majors. Talk to anybody who accidentally enrolled in advanced acting class because they thought it might be fun or an amateur writer who ended up in a high-level fiction seminar, and they'll recount their class time like a grizzled veteran who barely made it back from the front alive. Pretty much every college major has a class that is geared toward separating the future Indiana Joneses from the future "guys who volunteer at the historical society on weekends," and you don't want any part of that struggle. It isn't just the difficulty level of these courses that make them undesirable, it is how much the students care. Pupils scared to death that they've wasted years and thousands of dollars on something they may not be cut out for are clawing over each other for their professor's approval. They split their time between obsessing over their work, harshly criticizing their peers, and doing everything they can to secure a solid letter of recommendation. You'll have enough stress to deal with negotiating the politics of your own course of study; there is no need to dip your feet into shark-infested waters.

Be careful with this one. We aren't talking about the stern taskmaster who demands the most of his students. We aren't talking about the distant genius, so lost in his own thoughts that he doesn't notice he placed the red Sharpie in his shirt pocket with the cap off. Though you may not love them, these professors might be just the instructor you need. We're talking about a true douchebag. The majority of professors get into the game because they love the subject matter and long to share their knowledge with students. This professor is in it for the wrong reasons, or they lost something along the way. They are arrogant, bitter, pompous, or, simply put, dicks. Trust your gut. If you get through the first week of class and suspect that your instructor might be a destructor, get out. You aren't going to love everyone who hands you a syllabus, but there is no reason to stick with a professor who's out to make the world just as miserable as they are.