Give 'em what they ask for

Mood: Ice cold feet . . body fading with the passing minutes. Mind dully focussed on the writing, gaze narrowing on the luminous screen, back aching, foot habitually twitching. Fingers heavy on the keyboard, rear end heavy on the chair. I feel very little of my body, and my thinking has narrowed to only this post and the Van Halen song which occupies the ceaseless spot of backgrond music running in my head. Top Gun theme. The solo at the very end where he cuts it all loose. 3 measures of that solo. Repeating over and over and over.


Well, I just finished my first piece of writing that truly meets the criteria of that staple of mediocre college work, that denzien of a thousand procrastinations, the "bs paper." 7 pages about "polyglutamic proteins in neural degenerative diseases" in about 4 hours, the night before it's due. 1.5 spaced, lotsa big figures...

This is the first time I've ever really intentionally, foreknowingly done a shoddy job on an assignment, and it's sticking in my craw. But what saddens me is not that I wrote a blow-off paper, but that that's all that the class required.

Dr. Koepsel has been probably the worst professor I've had at Pitt so far. Not because he's mean or impossible to understand, but because he doesn't teach. He rattles off dry words about dry slides on the screen. He rattles off random, unrelated problems from the back of the chapter in the book for us to do as "homework." He grades our homework and papers with a check mark.

That's not teaching!

I doubt my paper will even be read. I would expect him to scan it over, check the page count, and look for one or more non-internet sources in the bibliography. Then the check mark, and my paper is done. To put the mental muscle of my Critical Writing skills into this paper would be laughable and foolish. Yes I am falling cataclysmically short of the principles I have spent a semester learning in that class, but their application would have been wasted.

And I take a step back, and I look at myself with the fresh homeschooled eyes of my 17-year-old self. I would scorn what I did tonight as that most-despised of intellectual iniquities: doing an assignment not to learn anything but just to get the grade. And so I did. There are things I could have learned in doing this paper that I didn't learn. But I never wanted to take biochemistry in the first place (Pitt requires it of me), and I'm not particularly interested in it, and the specific topic of this paper will almost certainly never be applicable in my life, and the teacher has bred in his class a stagnant academic atmosphere where nobody--not even he himself--cares about the material. Perhaps ideally I would still read, research, think hard, plan out, write, and craft a solid 5-10 page paper, but given that I am sick, and a presentation, transport homework, biochem final, systems and signals homework and critical writing paper are all due before Friday, that kind of time expenditure would be foolish. So my academic principles butt up against real life, and real life wins.

Writing a 'bs paper' was the wisest and most prudent decision I could make.

It's different than you might expect, but I am indeed getting a college education. For it is into real life that I will soon set sail.