Raise your hand if...

The semester is drawing rapidly to a close, but evidently that's no reason to think I would possibly be off the hook in class. It's hard to differentiate among 5 classes that I hate and pick the one that annoys me the most, but today the winner is Business Organizations. I've never been called on in that class. There are about 80 students in there, which is assurance enough, but even better is the fact the professor seems to enjoy hearing his own voice rather than the insights of students, which I suppose is probably wisdom on his part. If we knew what he knows about corporations, he'd be out of a job, which means what we do know about corporations is limited, speculative, and often nonsensical, and honestly, who want to subject themselves to that? Since this particular professor favors the lecture method to the Socratic, I find myself, on a regular basis, struggling to pay attention in class, secure in the knowledge that I've done the reading, but he'll never call on me. My attention span has fallen sharply in the past few weeks, probably because of the inordinate amount of time I find myself spending on campus as finals approach. The topic for the day was shareholder derivative actions and evidently the professor was feeling adventurous enough to toss a question into the crowd in hopes of eliciting the awkward dialogue that is the substance of a law school class. The query bounced around the room like a beachball at a concert as people ducked the question either because they were unprepared or too smart to be sucked into the trap. Then I heard it. The sound that still makes my skin crawl. The sound of my own name...being butchered as usual. The case we were reading happened to be taken from a supplement to our casebook which can be found on the internet. Ahh, the internet, great facilitator of learning and repository of casebook supplements. Surely, since I was on the internet, I had the supplement open, right? I looked to my computer screen hoping to find something, anything useful to blurt out as I briefly entertained the idea of copping out as well. My screen was crowded with three open chat windows, the front page of the Times online, an email conversation with fellow classmate, and a solitaire game in progress, but of course the casebook supplement was nowhere to be found. I suppose you can say I've raised boredom to an art form, which did nothing for me on this particular occasion. I pulled up a sadly incomplete case brief I had written the day before when I actually did the reading, and start throwing answers at the wall, hoping to see some of them stick. When I ran out of semi-intelligent things to say, another question came, as they always do, and this time I reverted to my personal favorite: the pensive and silent stare. I really was trying to come up with a good answer, but I knew that if I thought quietly enough, some other attention-craving opportunist would start waving his or her hand frantically, just dying for the chance to dazzle the professor with an answer that would probably be long, verbose, and completely tangential, forcing the professor to spend several minutes getting the class back on task and causing him to forget entirely who he was initially talking to. This technique is tried and true, and worked for me today as it always does. Should I care that I'm not the one eagerly flailing my hand and jumping at the opportunity to contribute to class discussion? Probably. But why should I care when I'm content to coast? Coast on, my friends, coast on.