Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back. I know by now you have had a few days to let this sink in.

Back to our grind of classes, labs and, for the younger crowd, the optional – and therefore neglected – supplementary instruction. I’m glad you could take time out of your hectic day to read the newspaper. Hopefully you picked a time when you weren’t distracted by anything, be it work, class or lunch with that lady/gentleman you met last weekend.

I mean, you aren’t actually reading this in class, right? You don’t really have the newspaper strategically folded up inside your notebook to see your half-finished sudoku and crossword puzzle, smudged because you don’t know how to spell the word “valley” like they would in Paris – do you? You mean all that effort, all that hard work and concentration that instructors see in your eyes are really focusing on which football player got arrested yesterday? Professors, beware! This travesty in your classrooms happens more often than you think. I know – I was just as surprised when I figured it out.

Now, there are a couple of things you can do about this predicament. My first suggestion would be to whip the newspaper right out of the unsuspecting hands of the perpetrator, roll it into a cylindrical baton, and proceed to beat your student into submission. Unfortunately, this road has become less traveled over the years as lawsuits spring from nowhere to take down any form of physical abuse from an authority figure … sigh.

So, if you must approach this in a nonviolent way, perhaps you professors can go to your vast – but perhaps seldom-used – intellect to tackle this problem. You can start by explaining that tuition for going to Iowa State this semester is $6,060 for in-state students and $16,554 for us out-of-staters.

Using my schedule as an example, if you are taking 15 credits, which amounts to 19 hours of class time a week, then you spend approximately $21 each time you sit in class. And, if you passed by a “Fields of Opportunity” sign on your way to Ames, you are paying about $60 per class – a travesty in itself.

Tell your students to ask themselves how much they paid for the newspapers sitting in their laps as they try to sneak a word into the puzzle when they think you aren’t looking. Ask them if it’s worth it to waste their – or more likely their parents’ – money each time they open a newspaper during class, or do anything else that doesn’t involve sitting and listening to you speak.

As for the students – it may cause a little part of me to die inside each time I admit this, but your professors actually have a pretty decent grasp of what they are talking about. That’s why they’re professors. That’s why they have the master’s degrees and Ph.Ds to back their knowledge.

Now they may not be the most entertaining people in the world – and sometimes they may be a little hard to understand (Iowa State needs to see cultural diversity somewhere, right?), but your instructors deserve your attention, because you can only learn so much from a textbook.

Education is probably the most valuable asset a human being can have. It is one of the things that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. So put down the newspaper – for now anyway – and focus on the delightful experience that is expanding your personal knowledge.

– Andrew Gionnette is a senior in mechanical engineering from Chanhassen, Minn.