smoking my coffee and sippin a cigarette

dear economics professor,

right now you are making me feel as though i am reliving a really bad memory.

i, for one, do not understand some of your actions in class.  take for example our trusty, awkward, shy, and lovable TA.  just look at him in all of his nepalese glory.  the brown skin.  the glasses.  the heavy accent.  the seemingly unpronounceable name.

speaking of his name, dear professor, i am shocked that you still can't pronounce it.  i understand you are a 65-year-old hardass who grew up on a small-town north dakota farm.  but really, "praw-baw-car" is pretty easy to say, don't you think?  yet, every single time you ask him for his input, i can only chuckle when you say, "pruh-backer."  i apologize for the times in class that i have laughed at "pruh-backer" but, honestly, all i can picture in my head is you saying, "pruh-backer, go get me some tuh-backer!"

and then i start to imagine you and the TA toking up in the middle of the room.  i'm sorry if my chuckles have caused any inconvenience to your teaching style.

but, dear professor, i'd like to make a suggestion.  why oh why do you believe in midterms?  this is a graduate level class.  mr. professor, perhaps you haven't heard the news, but graduate courses don't have midterms.  thus, why am i forced to take one?  and why must you insist that we have 2 throughout the course of the semester?  i am a research student.  let me help you get something published so that i can take your vanity to the next level.  maybe you'll get awarded a grant and then you can buy even more flannel button-up shirts to further stereotype your farming lifestyle.

and one last thing dear all-knowing professor, all of us students realize that your midterm is meant to belittle us.  we, too, view it as an embarrassment that we have a "take home" midterm.  what is this, high school?  if you want us to learn something, then by all means, help us learn.  but the last thing we need is a take home test.  i guarantee i don't remember anything from this class.  why retain any of your information when i can look up the answers to your midterm questions in a matter of seconds via the internet?  clearly the best way to "learn" something worth 50% of your grade is to take it home and use outside sources to help you ace the test.  you definitely planned that one out.

and i forgot, ridiculously brilliant professor, but the wording of your questions is horrible.  everything is genuinely a trick question.  for example, we learned that the definition of an "open system" is one in which energy and material both enter and leave.  and then we learned that only living things are "open systems."  and then you stressed that the economy is not a living thing.

so when your question asks, "an open system is one in which energy and material both enters and leaves the system, as is the case of the movement of energy through the open system that is the economy" and you ask us to identify this statement as being either "true" or "false," i want you to know that based on your instruction, the answer to this question is simultaneously "true" and "false."

luckily for you, i created 2 other boxes below the "true" and "false" options.  one read, "tralse" and the other read "frue."  i checked both.  hopefully you get the hint.