OK class, put your books away, it is time for a pop quiz.

Number one, when was the Magna Carta signed?

Number two, who was the president of the United States in 1865?

Don’t remember? Neither do I. But what difference does it make that I do not remember some obscure historical facts, I passed my required history core class, and I will still graduate from Eastern without remembering any such facts.

In the past three years here, I have sat through hours of classes on every subject, yet I can hardly recall any bits of wisdom I took out of them. I skimmed the readings, doodled in my notes and scraped by on class discussions.

As a matter of fact, I probably could skate through my final year here at Eastern without retaining much knowledge by just doing the minimum required amount of work.

Or, I could actually try to do the work.

Like the rest of you, I supposedly came here for an education. I did not go to college to sleep through my classes, or even to spend all my time at the newspaper. By the time I left college, I wanted to be a well-rounded person who could have articulate conversations on many topics.

I expected when I got to college the halls would be ringing with talk of Chaucer and foreign trade policies. What I found was that we are all so wrapped up in our own lives that learning about the outside world is almost always an afterthought.

With only one year remaining in college, I have some catching up to do on my learning experience.

After all, why not learn something just for the sake of learning it? Sit down and read a book for the value of enjoying good literature instead of skimming the chapters for quotes to fill a 10-page paper.

I don’t mean we should all know enough random trivia to appear on Jeopardy, but we should be more of a community of scholars than a community of slackers.

It seems like a lot of us are scrambling along just to get the grade, just to graduate, without consequence of what we have actually learned while we are in college.

After we graduate and move on to the working world, there will not be another time in our lives when the emphasis is only on filling our minds with as much knowledge as we possibly can.

This is our chance to gain knowledge we can take with us for the rest of our lives, and we are frittering that opportunity away with our own indifference and laziness.

Instead of reading Cliff Notes, read the book, or instead of calculating how many days you can skip class without failing, go to class and actually be an active member of the classroom environment.

I value my experiences I have gotten in the “real world” as much as anyone else, but there is something to be said for the exposure you get in the classroom to different people, ideas and interests.

Ok, time’s up, everyone put your pencils down. In a test of what you actually learned in college, what would your grade be