History professor Neal Smith has been criticized recently for his apparent lack of concern for the social-media time commitments of students. Smith has been accused of being intentionally ignorant of the needs of students and for assigning homework that is “pointless and boring.”
“Does he not realize that I need to check Facebook every two minutes, Twitter every five minutes and Instagram every four?” asked sophomore Emma Nichols. “He assigned a reading that was from an actual book. Are you kidding me? It’s just crazy that a man who has dedicated his life to academia and scholarly publications can be so much dumber than a group of 20-year-olds who assess their self-worth using Facebook likes.”
Junior Daniel Owens expressed a similar sentiment.
“I need to flip back to my Facebook tab four times every minute in case a person I vaguely knew in high school posts a picture of himself clearly inebriated. Or what if I post a picture from my weekend and need to check for notifications? That’s simply impossible to do with the work that Smith assigns. He just doesn’t accommodate the superficial desire for social-media recognition that will further my hopeless journey towards unattainable self-actualization,” Owens said.
Both Nichols and Owens explained that between the classes they skip on a weekly basis, social media and nothing else, they just do not have time to read the assigned chapters.
Smith, a professor of post-classical European history, has tried to defend his teaching methods.
“I simply assigned a 30-page reading about Johannes Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press,” Smith said. “I didn’t think it was unreasonable. It is a fascinating chapter that effectively shows how crucial the printing press was to the dissemination of information to the mass public and how it began a new era of education and information techniques. The Holy Roman Empire used it to great effect to spread – wait, are you actually still listening? By this point most of my students are looking at Instagram pictures that were posted 20 weeks ago by people they’ve never met in person.”
Conner Barrett is a freshman majoring in political science. The quotations used in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real entities is purely coincidental.