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I really don’t like writing everyday. I really don’t.
But, here I am, with this little assignment. He thinks it’s a little assignment but I believe he has no idea how much time I don’t have to be writing 2,000 words a day. I remember when I was in college the first time, that professors seem to be oblivious to the fact that each of their students are taking many many classes at the same time, and each of these classes have professors that think that they are the only professor for each student...but I blew that all off based on the idea that they’ve done it all before and they’d have to reevaluate themselves and their teaching styles every year (I remember this fact from my parents being professors at the college in our county in Missouri.) and if this strategy hadn’t worked for them before, they wouldn’t be doing it now. So then, my first time around in school, I puttered through all the classes and tried to fit in sleep between all their requirements.
But, here I am, with this little assignment, 2,000 words a day for someone who probably can’t read the 50,000 words a day they expect from this class as a whole, and since we turn it in once a week, that’s Okay I’m terrible at arithmetic but the point should be clear. I’m guessing I could copy and paste some Lorem ipsum and fill up a portion of my word count requirements with that and he wouldn’t even notice, except that if I were a professor receiving a digital copy of someone’s journal with a word count requirement I would do a search of the document of the phrase Lorem ipsum and discover that people are too stupid to start about a paragraph from the top to avoid getting caught.
But, here I am, writing instead of cheating, which would be easy because I know the tricks to not getting caught at using filler for 2000 words of mumbling filler that designers use and copywriters replace. I’m being a copywriter. I’ve decided to remove the Lorem ipsum from my writing and to fill it with copy.
Yeah. So here I am, with this little writing assignment, five years after my first attempt at college, and the professors seem to still be acting like they’re the only people I am responsible to on the planet. I’ve got children, I’ve got a job, I’ve got a husband. I’ve got clients, and I’ve got other teachers. This is not the only thing I have to do in a day. 2,000 words a day, on top of all my other writing assignments for this professor--I’m guessing I’m going to be doing a lot of brainstorming for my writing assignments in these 2,000 word journals.
And I don’t care if he doesn’t read it and I’m going to treat it as if he’s not going to. I’m going to write whatever and be less concerned with the way it comes across because it’s never going to go across to anyone other than--well, I doubt if I’ll ever read this again so It’ll just sit in on some data field on a computer disk--lonely, ignored, and barren. And a copy of it will live on a data field on a computer on some server in Milwaukee, or somewhere. And a copy of it will live on a data field on the computer server at the college, until the professor quits, gets fired, or dies and they purge his accounts.
Speaking of fired professors, and since I’m only 3/10 of the way to my word count (and I got that math right), one of my mentors from school the first time around got fired this past year. Why? because of the evaluation process mentioned above. If you can’t self evaluate, no matter how amazing you are, you can’t make it through year after year of the same curriculum approach. As much as I feel sorry for him, I do not feel like he was unjustly fired. He just does not fit in a system that expects uniformity.
Whatever is next for him will probably require a similar amount of systemic self molding. Or some. Probably some. I don’t know...I really liked him for his lack of moldability. He did what he did on his own terms, and his ideas resulted in some really great thoughts coming out of his students--at least the ones capable of thought. At the time I was young enough I just wanted to listen to him talk and listen to the things other people said, and when I got to the point when I had to assert my own ideas, I felt prepared to format my thoughts in an original way, and feel confident that I was thinking with originality, and speaking with originality, and challenge the expectations of the professor I was writing for.
Writing about other people’s writing taught me a lot; I am quite proud of my work as an analyst of character, of motivation both of the individual created within the black and white on the page as well as the individual who used the pen to create the other. But I think this ability has been instilled in me from the beginning--not just through schooling. I look back and see that growing up at the same table as parents grading papers and listening to their exchanges about the people in their classes. Sometimes they’d have the same person in their classes and they’d discuss that person--like this one guy. He would do great in my dad’s class, but terrible in my mom’s. She started asking dad about what things he would write in his papers for him, how the sentences were constructed. I always suspected my mom was a harsher grader than my dad, but for some reason this guy’s inability to pass in her class baffled my parents. My dad would tell about the way they discuss things, the time he’d give the students to finish the assignment, and the percentage of my dad’s own rhetoric that came back in the student’s paper versus the student’s original work. They never actually traded this student’s papers between them, though, which I was always waiting for. I expected to hear one day, as I was studying in my room, that my mom would exclaim, YOU GAVE HIM A WHAT?! ON THIS PAPER?
She never did, though. They kept that particular distance, they respected that each of them was correct in their grading of their independent students. I never understood, though, because it would explain for so many of the students they shared did better in his class than hers. But anyway, this one guy. They started talking about what this guy might like and dislike. See, dad taught a series of classes on history, and my mom taught classes on anthropology. You’d think theyd’ be really similar, but even when they covered the same period of time and the same people, their approaches were so totally different. My mom was so buried in the individual people and their needs and wants causing their actions, and my dad was all about politics, and the needs of the society causing the actions. I figured this difference out early. My mom would always decide what it was that I was trying to do based on my history, my environment, my health. She always seemed sympathetic to me, and then assigned punishment anyway. It drove me nuts. Dad, though, just saw right through my lies. He saw manipulation, rationality where my mom saw emotion. And he calmly assigned punishment. Example? I could write a novel of examples. This one time, I had to walk home from school because I was told that the event I planned on going to instead of taking the bus home was not an approved event. I was actually told to walk home. So I started on my journey, but not until I had called a friend to give me a ride. It seemed innocus enough, except that my mom, having expected one mile out of fifteen walked woudl be enough punishment, decided to come pick me up. When I arrived home in my friend’s mom’s car some five minutes after my mom had left to get me, my dad promptly grounded me from seeing said friend. they had simply started out trying to punish me for disregarding their authority on whether I had permission on staying at school or not. My mom understood why I wanted to go, and how I managed to miss the bus by deciding to make the call to ensure they knew the change in plans, and her decision to come and get me along the way was based on the idea that she knew fifteen miles was too severe a punishment in my eyes, and probably would cause more detriment than results. My dad, however, saw the “ensure they knew the change in plans” part and knew I probably had plenty of time to call and make the bus when my plans were rejected, but that I postponed the call to be perfectly timed with the departure of my ferry home, in order to garner the positive response I had wanted. And then, I turned the punishment itself into a battle of wills, and willed myself out of the simple punishment by cheating my way through it, Tom Sawyer style. Let someone else do the work for me--that’s what he saw.
Of course, at the time none of this made sense to me. I was sixteen and wanted not to go home, but to go to this totally safe, school sponsored event, crawling with chaperones. This was the kind of thing teens’ parents let them do on short notice. So I notified them, and when I was turned down I was so very very baffled. Unable to figure a way to go anyway without getting grounded from school itself, I decided the best course of action was not to disobey the parents and to get myself home. So I got myself home. I walked about a quarter of a mile after my call to a rescue entity before my friend’s mom picked me up and drove me the rest of the way home, saving me from near certain hit-and-run accidents that replayed in my mind, not to mention the blisters I would have gotten had I survived the walk instead.
Turns out teenagers and their parents don’t really have a lot in common. This is coming back around to me as I wait at home for my own teenagers to show up after school. I remember the walk I never took as if I had actually walked it. The misery of the punishment for my series of apparently bad decisions never left me, though the full details and the ability to understand my parents has obviously evolved as I grew older. Instead though, I take from this that there might actually be some logic in what the kid is saying. It is indeed possible to put seventeen unrelated factors together and come up with a valid reason she skipped class. It’s not a good reason, but it’s valid, provable, supportable. So I have to show the flaw in the reasoning. My job is not to punish right and wrong, but to teach reasoning.
Which brings me back around to the Lorem ipsum part of this writing assignment. I don’t understand the reasoning for all of this chatter and whether it’s appropriate for me to give up two whole hours of my day to yammer into a computer without interruption. But I’m smart enough now not to just skip it; the fact that I have no idea why I have to do this does not mean there is a lack of reason. It just means I’m ignorant of his reasoning. I’m willing to give a self-centered professor the benefit of the doubt--obviously not without my own juvenile, pre-formed opinions glued to it with rubber cement like in grade school--and go along with the work. I’ve always done that, at least, whether it proved fruitful or beneficial. I’m bound and determined to get something out of this, if it kills me. Or the plants I should have watered and the fish and dogs I should have fed and the kids that I was supposed to pick up after school but I sent them a text and told them to find something interesting to do for two hours before coming home because I needed to work in quiet.
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