First of all, I value education. When I am sitting in a
classroom I understand that I am paying this professor to teach me something. I
am assuming this person knows what they are talking about because they have
been studying the subject for many, many years. It is for this reason that I
listen, try not to interrupt, and don’t second guess my professors. Not
everyone seems to understand this.
For example, Core Humanities 201, I took this last semester,
it consisted of a 50 minute lecture twice a week with a class discussion once a
week. Easy enough, right? As an added bonus the professor giving the lecture
was completely awesome. He kept it exciting and interesting, it was great.
Except kids in the auditorium talking to each other, loudly, I had to resort to
sitting up front so I could hear clearly. Then discussions were even worse. You
were required to read the assigned materials prior to class and discussion,
these readings were short, relevant and interesting. NO ONE DID THEM, EVER.
Discussion class usually consisted of the TA asking a question relating to the
day’s readings and, not to brag, but I knew the answer having done the
readings, but I would slowly scan the room to see if anyone else was going to
speak. There’s lanky jock dude, staring at the blackboard… there’s cheerleader
girl pretending to write notes… this continued throughout the entire classroom.
No one had anything to say because no one would read the shit! So in this
discussion class of about 30 kids we were supposed to do brief presentations
throughout the semester in small groups. The TA mentioned that last semester a
group had done Jeopardy which resulted in 4-5 presentations THIS semester that
were Jeopardy. I mercilessly trounced these kids in Jeopardy. My team won
Every. Single. Time. The one that felt best was the Jeopardy presentation on
the Bible, not only did I choose the categories, answer my own team’s question,
but when the opposing team failed to answer theirs after a minute, I answered
THEIRS too. Well, I couldn’t just let this whole event continue on without
saying something so I mocked my team and the entire class. “Yeah don’t sweat it
guys, let the ATHEIST answer all these BIBLE questions.”
Finally one day, a group of two made their presentation that
wasn’t Jeopardy. It consisted of them
sitting in the front of the class, reading from the book and ad-libbing an
“informative” lecture. It was agonizing to sit through.
My favorite though was in Fall of ’11 I was taking a really
awesome class called “Writing About Literature” from a fantastic professor. She
knew the subject, was excellent at teaching, enthusiastic and encouraging. The
problem is she was teaching it to a bunch of retards. First, there was Obvious
Girl, who would usually just reiterate the title of whatever we were reading.
So for example we’re going over a poem about seasons, namely, Autumn. The poem
has Autumn in the title. The professor asked what people thought the poem was
really about or what impressions it gave.
Obvious Girl: “Well the trees being barren of leaves makes
me think that this is taking place during like… Autumn?”
You see the trend starting here? Flash forward to a few
weeks later, discussing Kafka’s “Metamorphoses” short story…
Obvious Girl: “It seems like he is going through a big
change, as if everything about him is transforming…” …LIKE A METAMORPHOSIS?
She did this with all of them, professor asks and her hand
was the first one up.
Obvious Girl: “I feel like it is just really stormy and all
the characters are tied into this storm and it is really magical.”
Know what that one is? Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This is
all true, you can’t write shit this stupid and have the characters be
believable.
Another thing is that this awesome professor made it clear
at the start of the semester that she doesn’t care how something you read makes
you feel only what you think about it. Meaning use your brains
and figure it out, yet without fail every moron prefaced their thoughts with “I
feel like…”
Do you read Frankenstein with your heart? Do you open a
little chest compartment and just rub the book against your innards and you
read it by osmosis? Sorry but over here in my seat, I read books with my
eyeballs and process the information with my brain. I’m old fashioned that way.
Last semester I took an advanced non-fiction writing
class. This is a 400 level English course, serious business. Well, people were
called up to read their drafts which was extremely painful if, like me, you
have low tolerances for stupid. Well I barely went to this class because A.
hearing people read their shitty papers out loud doesn’t teach me anything and
B. Peer reviewing people’s shitty papers doesn’t teach me anything either. The
second paper assigned was a paper about a place you had been to and why the
reader should or should not go there, easy right? I wrote mine about the
Redwood National Forest, my peer review partner wrote hers about her dog. Now,
I know that NOUNS can be confusing, since they can be A. person B. place or C.
thing, but a dog is not a place. I didn’t bother explaining this to her because
I’m an asshole and it isn’t my job to make sure everyone writes their paper on
topic.
Two of the girls in the class in their papers decided to
mention how they were in advanced English classes in high school, one of them
was reading at a college level in middle school, wow no way! Have an A+ and a
scholarship! But their work didn’t reflect this. One girl’s paper was about how
a bad English teacher can ruin someone’s education but then she moved into
another teacher’s class in high school and it was so much better! She learned
so much more, she finally knew what a predicate is! Now, after a person
finishes reading the rest of the class can make comments or ask questions, so
as soon as she finished I raised my hand and was called upon. My question, you
ask?
Me: “What is a predicate?”
Her: “…..I don’t know….”
Also in this class was The “Grad” Student, I had to peer
review with him once where he ignored me while criticizing his fucking terrible
paper. This is the same kid who boasted about how when he applied to the
English graduate school they asked for a sample of his writing, “so I just
gave’em my first novel… yep… my novel…” His three novels are all self-published
online, anyone can do this. In addition, they just so happen to be the most
insipid, uninspired piles of shit I’ve ever heard. I won’t repeat them to you
here now because the ideas are too retarded to subject people to reading. So
after acting like he is so cool for submitting a novel to the English grad
school he finishes the story by telling everyone in earshot that they said he
needed to take some more classes. Despite being, what is called a “Grad
Special,” the professor and other students continued to call him “The Grad Kid”
and “The Graduate Student.”
Let me give you a little diagram of why it is stupid for A.
this kid to have an ego big enough to suffocate the air out of a classroom and
B. everyone to play along with his ego trip.
So it comes down to the end of the semester for Advanced
Non-Fiction Writing, the final assignment is: Write a persuasive paper that
makes an argument. Present opposition to your argument, then refute it in your
own words. Your topic must have opposition.
Pretty easy right? I chose circumcision! But other people
chose such hot debates as: Tourette’s Syndrome (wait, what?), How I Got Raped
Once by Oversharing Girl, I Cut Myself by Awkward Girl, Better Education Paper
by Uneducated Girl, and Grad Special’s masterpiece, Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
First off, the paper about Tourette’s Syndrome was well
written, but not the assignment. You
should get an F, I don’t care how good the paper is, it isn’t what you were
asked for. James T. Generic over there wrote his paper on dams, you know what
has a lot of opposition and fulfilled the assignment? His boring ass paper
about DAMS.
Getting raped is horrible, I don’t condone it, ever. I also
don’t think women who are raped
should have to hide the fact that it happened to them. However, a class room of
strangers is not an appropriate place
to discuss it. I get that you have tattoos, you paint, vegetarian and have ADHD
but refuse to take medication because it might suppress your “creativity”, I
get all that because you won’t shut the fuck up about yourself. I barely show
up for class but I know more about you than the subject being taught. You
should get an F.Weird and Socially Awkward girl reads her paper about how cutting is a real disease and she only cuts to release the pain she is in. People don’t think it is a real problem but it is! She goes on to talk about how most people overreact and believe that cutting leads to suicide. Later in the paper she provides a high statistic that cutting does in fact lead to suicide. However, she DID fulfill the assignment even if her topic is stupid.
“My Dog is a Place” girl reads her paper about how she did so well in high school and how education is important. Children need to learn things. Mind you, while she is reading this her paper is displayed on a projector behind her. It’s awful, misspellings that MS Word doesn’t even know what to do with, terrible grammar, misuse of there/their/they’re. Ugh, I felt more embarrassed for her than anything.
Then we have Grad Special kid talking about his irritable
bowel syndrome. I was not there for the day that he presented this jewel, but
from what other students told me he frantically reworked the paper to have
opposition involving western medicine versus eastern medicine. Either way, he
should have gotten an F. People aren’t writing to government officials because
of a horrific epidemic of shitpants going around.
College is fun, there are plenty of other incidents but that
is enough for this week. Next Friday: Pedophiles!
See you then.
