Nobody likes writing asignments, not when there’s better things to do like text messaging your girlfriends, updating your MySpace profile or going to the mall to get your hair done. That didn’t stop Metro State College student Janna Barbara from weaseling her way out of a writing assignment by reporting her professor to university officials over claims of bias, harassment and bullying.

Andrew Hallam, an adjunct Metro State College Professor, asked his class to write an essay contradicting what he called the “fairy tale image of Palin” presented at the Republican National Convention. For most of us with a higher education, writing assignments are generally assigned regarding topics that may or may not be inline with our personal beliefs or thinking. After all, the whole idea behind college is to expand one’s social, economic, political and cultural belief structures and to develop an analytical method of thinking. Writing assignments that stink are nothing new. In my sophomore year, I was required to write a 5,000 word biography of former president Richard Nixon. Not exactly my idea of a fun time but it was completed as requested without incedent even though the topic did not appeal to me.

Things don’t seem to work that way for kids today. Janna Barbara, a student in professor Hallam’s class decided the assignment would hamper her busy MySpace and FaceBook schedule so she complained to a relative who works for Worldnet Daily who picked up the poor little girl’s story and it ended up on Fox News in between three other stories about how Gov Palin is being ridiculed.

Janna Barbara, who appears as though she spends more time grooming her hair than she does studying gave an account of professor Hallam’s intolerable assignment to Bill Hemmer’s bleach blonde, rough and tumble co-anchor Megan Kelly. Janna offered no real insights as to why the dubious assignment professor Hallam handed the class should have the professor under investigation but she sure found an innovative way to get out of a writing assignment. Perhaps real college is not Janna’s bag, however her Fox News appearance is certainly an innovative technique to accelerate her search for a rich boyfriend. Maybe she won’t have to spend so much time in those boring classes and on those tedious writing assignments.

A Metro State College spokesperson responded :

A former student of Hallam’s stated “I could understand how the professor’s style could be misunderstood. Hallam often picked a topic for students and asked them to write a specific viewpoint as an exercise in critical thinking.”

Evidently Metro State College is not a place where thinking or critique is part of the curriculum. What’s poor little Janna going to do when she has a math assignment she doesn’t like? Is she going to cry to university officials that it’s unfair she should have to learn the Pythagorean theorem because Pythagoras has been dead for over 2500 years ?