Satire

Cincinnati, Ohio – Although Purdue University’s fall semester is months from starting, Mark Bernard, 20, has already decided to blame his anticipated poor grade in Linear Algebra on his teaching assistant’s accent. He claims that after seeing his instructor’s name online, his hopes of receiving "at least a B" have completely been shot down, solely due to his TA not being a native English speaker.

“I’m not going to bang my head against a wall trying to understand him,” exclaimed Bernard during an impromptu press conference from his family's living room sofa. “I’ll just skip class and try to learn from the textbook on my own.”

Bernard’s future lecturer, Megh Dhiraj, 28, is currently a graduate student at Purdue. He first came to America to attend Dartmouth, where he earned a degree with university honors in Applied Mathematics. He has been a student-teacher for nearly four years at Purdue, and is the course’s highest-rated instructor on RateMyProfessor.com.

One of Dhiraj’s former pupils, Jackie Hamilton, 21, eagerly shared her thoughts on her past teacher in a text message statement.

“Sure, [Dhiraj] is a little tough to understand, but he always made the really difficult concepts much easier to think through,” said Hamilton. “He also hosts more office hours than is required of him, which shows he cares about each student’s best interests.”

Asked to comment on Hamilton's statement, Bernard was unwavering.

“I don’t care how impressive his track record may be," said Bernard. "I will continue to have the mindset that if I don’t get a high grade in Linear Algebra, it cannot possibly be the fault of my own efforts or intellectual shortcomings. It must be someone else wronging me.”

This is not the first instance Bernard has decided to put minimal effort into difficult classes and blame an outside party for his grade. His freshman year, he claims that he received a ‘C-’ in Calculus II because his lecturer had “pretty bad handwriting."

“How can I be expected to learn things if I can’t read what’s on the board?” he said. “I stopped going to that class after a week.”