We come to college to grow up and become the adults that we always envisioned, this being the case I should not be 19 years old and still being told where to sit. This cannot be fair, and I am pretty sure I’m not the only one who is fed up with professors in college telling us where to sit just because it makes their life easier.

It is hard enough that you have to be in a class full of people you probably do not know, but to add assigned seating, making you to sit beside that guy that breathes too loudly or the girl that clicks her pen because it’s a nervous habit, is just cruel.

Professors say they assign seating to make sure students come to class every day and they can check that they are there. For example, in one of my communication classes I am forced to sit in the back of a large room just so the TA can walk up the steps look down the row and check off that I am there. Maybe I wanted to sit in the first row or the middle, but because my last name starts with a “T” I am automatically put all the way in the back.

In some aspects I do understand why college professors have to enforce assigned seating. The amount of students can be as high as 200 or more students and we have our ways of making it seem like we were in class when we really were not. Unfortunately, professors have gotten wiser and much more strict on how they deal with attendance. Professors want to make sure that students are in their classroom every other day and ready to learn something new.

Assigned seating is a drag on college students. If we want to attend class regularly I am pretty sure that we would, in most cases our parents or ourselves are paying for our education and if we do not perform well it will be on us and not our professors. It just really gets under my skin that I cannot freely move from seat to seat each day I come into class just because my professor feels the righteous need to take role.

I have a couple of alternatives to professors putting us in assigned seating as if we were in kindergarten. I think that they should pass around roll and let us sign in. We could also spend the first five minutes of every class and call out every name on the list and mark the ones who are not present.

Being able to seat ourselves would prevent our suffering when we are forced to sit beside the annoying guy who always has to answer the question or when we are forced to squeeze our way down a narrow aisle while you step on people’s book bags and their feet; when all you wanted to do was sit on the end of the row in the first place.

Let us find our way in the classroom, for its the goal of college anyway: to prepare us to find our way on our own.