OK, so there are normal things you should feel guilty about: cutting the line, stealing (unless you’re Robin Hood), cheating on an exam and punching someone in the face to get on a bus going Downtown.

Missing a class, however, should not wreak havoc upon your conscience.

How many times have you sat in a class when you begin to feel a twinge of guilt and think that you should be doing something more productive with your time? I’m not talking about Tetris-productive, nap-productive or even Facebook-productive, I’m talking about life-productive.

As students, we know that the energy to get work done in college is hard to come by. And once we harness it, we have to take it and run with it, preferably in the direction of the library. But sadly, as many of us have learned, when we are feeling this onset of energy, the worst place to be is in a class that seems to lack direction and a purpose.

Fortunately at Binghamton University, there aren’t too many of these classes, but they do exist. These classes are usually found in big lecture halls with a talkative professor.

The more a professor casually talks, the less he or she teaches. You’ve probably seen this inverse relationship plenty of times in high school when you didn’t care about killing time because you were there until the last bell. You probably even think back on those classes with a smile.

You remember back in your sophomore year of high school when you were helpless, when you had to listen to your chemistry teacher talk about how her grown son ‘who’s honestly too sensitive’ refuses to come over for Christmas if her son-in-law is there ‘because of the incident.’ In college, though, we don’t have to listen to this. We have places to go.

These chatty teachers end up telling tales of their families or something remotely tied to the topic you read, but barely ever connects. These are the teachers, to my never-ending chagrin, who say repeatedly that they shouldn’t have to go over the textbook because we should read it on our own time.

We all should read the assigned chapters outside class, yes, but it’s the teacher’s responsibility to lay out exactly what she wants us to cover in the book and at least outline major points in class.

I mean, these classes, as I said before, are a rarity. But when you find yourself in one, you feel torn.

You may assume by how I’ve been going on that I would just decide not to attend said class, but unfortunately logic is not the only factor involved in attending class.

Going to class provides a form of comfort even if you get nothing out of it. Attending classes regularly gives you a set schedule and a place to be, along with a reason to wake up in the morning (it’s just been so hard to find any reason after you hit your peak, playing Tee Ball in the spring of 1997).

Since I still go to class, this article must seem like a waste of paper (and parentheses), but I did come to my own conclusion on these matters. Since I feel obligated to attend all of my classes, I just bring other reading material to the bad ones; that way, I’m still learning something.

There’s that, or I count the ceiling tiles and squint until the lights turn into rainbows.