Let's Take a Break from Fictional Villains and Focus on a Real Villain: Red Tape!

Good news readers! It's study day and I don't have an exam till next Monday.
Bad news readers! I have three exams on Monday.

That's right, this is the first semester since my time here at (information classified, I don't want to make it easier for the orthocons to find me in the night and implant microchips in my teeth) I finally don't have every exam at 8AM. I'm better at waking up early than most, but come on people! Didn't they learn their lesson from the SATs? If you want someone to do well, you should probably hold a test during hours where my brain is at least a little more than reconstituted lilliputian tapioca (which thankfully still gives me an edge over most college students). In fact, there are more than a few problems with college courses/testing in this country, which I'll of course be more than happy to share with you.

First off, I'm here for Criminal Justice (though I'd really love to be making movies/TV shows someday, I'd be more than happy to toss some drug dealers in prison if that opportunity never arises) and that means that I am not here for (insert inane elective here, my favorites include: Female Caribbean First Person Writers of 1825 and their Continued Influence on the Hallmark Channel, and Mapmaking with Macaroni and Maniacal Mucilage). If I'd been taking only Crim. classes since it became my major, I'd have been in the business years ago and such international villains as Kim Jong Il, Fidel Castro, and Lindsay Lohan would be behind bars already (Fidel has a nice full beard and good old Kim Jong had a nice soliloquy in Team America but what has Lindsay done for the world since The Parent Trap?). But instead we trudge along and write paper after paper about a bunch of sociological junk, which may well be interesting, but that really has nothing to do with anything. A little bit of that should be part of the game plan, but my 120 credits will consist of 40 credits for Criminal Justice, 40 credits for CORE classes, and 40 for electives. Useless. Utterly useless.

Interlude: I know what you're thinking: "But Domenic! What if there's a serial killer whose M.O. is offing people according to their relation to Dante's Divine Comedy?" Ah! I am way ahead of you, I enjoy literature classes because books are actually useful for improving your writing skills (way more than English 101 and Junior English ever could) and helping to catch said serial killers with a flair for the classics.

I don't think all extra classes are useless, but I think we have to draw the line somewhere (somewhere around 40 credits instead of 80). And I understand that not everyone knows what they want their major to be from the beginning, well they can feel free to stay as long as they want and sample as much as they want. I say that each degree should have a set amount of credits, and once you hit that, you're done. If you want to take some other classes and delay your graduation for unknown reasons, go for it. But if you'd rather be deterring hostile takeovers and locking up would-be terrorists than trying to remember which sociologist first postulated that kids who play on playgrounds eat less red meat than those that don't, you should be able to do so. Plus, didn't we learn about a variety of subjects in, oh I don't know, 12 years of schooling? And yet by the time I get to college people are still trying to tell me what a freaking preposition does or what the Bill of Rights entails (if you don't know by now you never will!).

On another note, let's get back to the aforementioned English classes. Now, I don't like to go around making myself look good all the time (that's a filthy lie) but I'd like to think that I write papers that are quite excellent. Nay, my papers are incredible. Mostly because I use a lot of trickery and deceit to cover up the fact that I'm saying pretty much the same stuff everyone else is (I got a higher grade on a Waiting for Godot paper than the rest of my high school english class simply because I compared it to It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown! I still feel a bit bad about that, but one must do what one has to in order to receive high marks). I also like to use slightly unusual vocab words (superfluous and juxtaposition are my favorites). However, the only two classes I've ever had that directly reflect writing prowess have been English 101 and Junior English. Both of which contained a major group project. I hate group projects. I was lucky with my group this semester, both guys were really good and helped out a lot and I'll probably end up with a B in the class. BUT, my 101 class was a disaster. I ended up with a C+ in the class with a 79.4 or something crazy (a mere decimal away from a B!) and I probably could've gotten an A if our group project (which was worth way too much) had gone according to my plan instead.

Papers can be the silliest assignments of the whole shebang. Consider this, on a research paper the assignment is as follows: 1)you're not smart enough to come up with your own idea, so use someone else's 2)find evidence from multiple sources to support your chosen theory 3)don't put down exactly what they said, pretend you came up with most of it because otherwise that's plagiarism. Then for other papers we're told: 1)don't be colloquial 2)don't be boring. So find a way to interest you without speaking as though I'm interested in it? It all reads like one of those mind game Tree-Falling-in-the-Woods/One-Hand-Clapping nonsense! We're so busy jumping through all of the hoops that at the end of the day we're not even sure what our paper was talking about in the first place.

It's like they're setting us up to fail! When reviewing for tests, instead of telling us what all of the relevant information is, they want us to study everything and hopefully the things we'll remember are the facts that show up on the test. On that note, I can accept this: "It's all relevant information and you should be able to deduce what I'll ask based on the core ideas of the semester." This helps us learn deductive reasoning, so that's okay. What I find unacceptable is when professors give us a whole slew of information, some of which is just fun to learn and some of which is actually important (without making a distinction). I fail to see the logic in this, which I think might be the point. They want me to fail, so I can keep coming back for more schooling (hence more funding! I'm so glad we put a lot more money into adding onto our football stadium, now more people can come watch us lose).

Well, after years of being frustrated by these very things, I finally learned what it's all about: red tape. College prepares you for red tape that you'll experience in real life. Why make it such a pain to write a report according to set guidelines when you can write a better one while being more creative? Because that's what you'll be forced to do in real life. So why not quell the hopes and aspirations now? Well I think the whole red tape thing is an imagined phenomenon (like peer pressure, not once has one of my friends given me crap when I told them I don't drink, some other people have but I don't like them anyway) that is facilitated by circular reasoning:

"Why do I have to write it this way Mrs. So-and-So?"
"Because that's how you'll have to write it in college!"

"Why do I have to write it this way Professor What's-his-Face?"
"Because that's how you'll have to write it in real life!"

"Why do I have to write it this way Boss It's-on-the-Tip-of-My-Tongue-but-I-Can't-Remember-Your-Name?"
"Because that's how we all learned how to do it in high school and college and I can't understand or deal with anything else!"

So maybe if someone just sat down and thought about it all for a second, we'd see that the whole system is junk. Because the opposite is true too, everyone assumes in high school that you'll read Dickens in college, and everyone in college assumes you read Dickens in high school. Hence, I've never read one of his books! Instead I read a bunch of random stuff, which is relatively new and won't be passed down through the generations for good reason. Maybe if professors only told us to study the things that will be on the exam, we might accidentally remember them after the test is done with, and coincidentally exceed expectations on the exam. Perhaps if everybody learned to write an essay that succinctly (what's with these page minimums junk? Are you telling me that if I can get my point across just as well in 2 pages instead of 5, that wouldn't be mutually beneficial for both the student and the TA?) and thought-provokingly (not sure if that's a word, but you get my meaning. While simultaneously showcasing my point. Boom!) proves a solid thesis. That should be the assignment. Who gives a crap if you use the first person in a paper? As long as the reader understands what you're talking about, that's all that should matter.

So do I think everything about the system is dumb? Not exactly. But a lot of it is needless nonsense that brings heartache and not much else. The only thing that I find useful about the college experience is learning how to cater to your audience. Get to know your professors, and then write a paper you know they'd enjoy (or the TA, or the high school teacher, or whatever). If I was teaching a class I'd give extra points to students who referenced Batman and Star Trek, because they're clearly the only ones smart enough to cater to their audience (a nicer term for sucking up). But as for tests, I say keep it simple unless you're trying to put them all through a gauntlet that will tell you who is the most worthy of wielding the Sorcerer's Stone.