A Compare and Contrast of Extreme Living Conditions: Last Three Weeks of Semester vs. Dust Bowl
As many Florida State students may know, the spring semester will soon come to an end. Even though that one professor has only graded three assignments across a 12 week period, they still feel whatever grade students end up with are earned. When looking at these next few weeks and truly thinking about the grueling process of GPA upkeep and forced laughter on Zoom, students began to notice some striking similarities between this and a certain historic event. The Dust Bowl, surfacing around the 1930s, featured devastating dust storms that terrorized the Great Plains and left years of extensive damage causing drought, decreased lung health, and much more. Similarly, the next three weeks will be just as gruesome.
“I feel qualified to speak on this issue since I am a history major,” began Aiden Sourfield, a self-diagnosed paleophile at Florida State University. “Usually, when I tell people I’m interested in history they tell me I should simply move on, or insinuate that I am a hateful person. While that may be true, not just anyone would notice the stark similarities between the dust storms that wreaked havoc on our home country and the mere month left in this semester.” Sourfield pulled out his Otterbox to show reporters a Wikipedia page explaining the disaster. “In the Dust Bowl, people couldn’t eat. They couldn’t breathe--they couldn’t see! Similarly, students will be lasting on just toast and ketchup packets, permanently shriveling their lungs on smoke sticks, and, well, I guess they can see fine.”
“I fully believe that these next 3 weeks will be as bad, if not worse, than the Dust Bowl,” said Meghan Madison, a local teacher. “First of all, my inbox is flooded with emails from students asking if we can ‘talk’. We all know what that means! I’ve been utterly overwhelmed, and I can only assume that those nice folk living through the Dust Bowl felt similarly.” Madison took a moment to recline in her personal massage chair, likely purchased after news of her incoming tenure. “I mean, I was just informed that I’d have to grade all of the essay drafts I assigned before my students can write the final ones. They think it’s my fault that they have to write essays. At least people in the Great Plains didn’t have to grade papers about the colors used in ‘La La Land’ for the 47th time!”
All in all, everyone will have a tough time over the course of these next few weeks. While fighting to stay above a 79.5 grade may be difficult, take a moment to think about how difficult it was to sweep up all that dust, only for more to arrive the next day. Essentially, the blood, sweat, and tears exhibited during this event perfectly mirror students’ pain, although those Great Plain-ers didn’t have a summer’s worth of parent-paid groceries when the dust finally cleared.