Over Christmas break, an uproar spread across the DU community. After the online grades showed up, student freshmen, English majors and writers decided things had gone too far. Students taking writing intensive classes realized they had been receiving much lower grades than many friends at other schools with the options of online classes.
Students at both the University of Colorado at Boulder as well as Metro State have been offered the option of taking their classes online. These online classes offer twice the grade point and half the work, including not having to get up in the morning. “I can take my final exam at 3 a.m. in my boxers while surfing for new friends on MySpace. It’s the best thing to ever happen to me!” claims one Metro student. Although Metro students’ lives tend to be uneventful, this statement still strikes a harsh blow to the DU student writers. Due to their inability to secede from the option of online classes, the DU writing-class-taking community has decided to go on strike against the administration until the online-class-taking option is offered. Students plan to hold off on doing any writing for any of their classes until these conditions are met.
Much concern has been raised on how students plan to continue to turn in materials to their writing professors, who will be expecting new material to be produced by them. Student writers plan to simply recycle their old essays over and over and over for every new assignment that is given. Students hope this movement will anger professors to help change the administration to help them receive better grades from online classes. Professors, in fear of losing money from their corporate professor sponsors (it is a little known fact that most DU professors are sponsored by large “ugly clothing” companies), may be forced to give in within the first quarter of the student writer’s strike. “I can handle reading a 25-page essay about the reproductive habits of slugs once, but after its fourth time turned in, well, I’m just not sure I even want to grade it again,” claimed biology professor Fake McNamee.
The strike has only lasted a few tiresome weeks and student writers are already expressing the struggles of sitting around and not writing. Already, other student “scabs,” who are already receiving good grades from online classes at other schools, will come into the classroom and write all their essays in order to keep classes going. These students are from other public Colorado schools such as CU-Boulder and have been rumored to be growing out beards, dreadlocks, and body hair in the spirit of the strike. However, in reality this body hair has nothing to do the strike and is just the nature of those students. These scabs, being from public Colorado schools, will just not be able to produce the same writing quality, and student grades will continue to suffer.
To help further the cause of the student writers, I have decided to rerun this same article in every issue of this newspaper continually until their demands have been met. However, due to the fact that no one will end up reading this article anyway, I will probably quit writing all together and open a free online TV/movie watching Web site.
