Like every good college blogger, I've decided to put off my last few finals for a little while in order to bring you another wonderful post. As appropriate to the season, today's topic is sickness. But this isn't just any old sickness where you wrap up, take a few days off and watch Netflix for 12 hours straight while you give your body time to recuperate. No my fellow students, this is finals sickness. That dreaded, un-diagnosable funk that sets in right around the week before the big tests and doesn't seems to fade all the way until you've made it back home.
I'm sure it's the stress, the change in temperature, the weather, the procrastinating, heck even the barometric pressure, but something about finals season seems to drain the body. First it may start as just a common cold, maybe not that severe. Then you realize that semester-long, 14-page paper you were supposed to be tackling all these months is just some pathetic list of sources you though about one day reading. Now that little pre-finals cold is a full blown flu that tries to take over all your remaining energy.
The worst part is you can't just choose to sit this round out to drink hot tea and nap for six hours, you've got things to do, presentations to give, teachers to beg. So you've got to tough it out, suffer through it, and drug up on DayQuil til your nose goes numb.
So good luck on your finals everyone, hope you all get well soon...
Showing posts with label annoyances. Show all posts
Showing posts with label annoyances. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Thursday, April 12, 2012
The Pandemic of Professors' Handwriting
All right, I'm usually not a fan of reading online rants; but I've got to get this one out because I don't think I'm the only one with this frustration. I spend hours of my time writing a perfectly crafted essay (or other piece of written work), not only do I type it up to all these crazy specifications on what font and what size and what information and how I should site my sources and what format and so on. I make it look nice, I proofread it (or more often force my friends to) in the hopes that I might impress my professors enough to get a good grade or at least one that doesn't make me feel pathetic. And what do I get in return? Seizing chicken scratch that bleeds illegible comments that even if I stare at and ask everyone around me can't be deciphered.
If I put all the effort into writing and perfecting this paper I really would rather not write, just because I'm told to and the professor can't even take a few extra minutes of their busy schedule (which is infinitely more important than ours) to make their handwriting legible. Students would never be allowed to turn in a hand written paper in fear that the professor won't be able to read the thing and yet, when we get comments back that might improve our writing for the next paper, we can't even read what we did wrong (or right if you're lucky). It's not even limited to male professors, female ones have just as hard a time writing clearly, as if they just skipped over second grade when they went over handwriting etiquette. It's an epidemic. And the cherry on top is if we want to discover our essay-writing faults in order to resolve them for the next round, we have to take even more time to go visit them during their office hours so that they may hopefully be able to read their own hand writing and tell us how to improve. And often times even the professors can't read what they wrote.
All I'm saying is make this a two-way street. I have lots of essays to write, just like they have lots of them to read so please put a few extra minutes into writing legibly so that everyone's life is a little easier. And don't go around complaining that you have so many papers to grade, professors of the world, and you don't have time to write perfectly for each one. If you're going to bitch about them then don't assign them and then everyone will be slightly happier.
If I put all the effort into writing and perfecting this paper I really would rather not write, just because I'm told to and the professor can't even take a few extra minutes of their busy schedule (which is infinitely more important than ours) to make their handwriting legible. Students would never be allowed to turn in a hand written paper in fear that the professor won't be able to read the thing and yet, when we get comments back that might improve our writing for the next paper, we can't even read what we did wrong (or right if you're lucky). It's not even limited to male professors, female ones have just as hard a time writing clearly, as if they just skipped over second grade when they went over handwriting etiquette. It's an epidemic. And the cherry on top is if we want to discover our essay-writing faults in order to resolve them for the next round, we have to take even more time to go visit them during their office hours so that they may hopefully be able to read their own hand writing and tell us how to improve. And often times even the professors can't read what they wrote.
All I'm saying is make this a two-way street. I have lots of essays to write, just like they have lots of them to read so please put a few extra minutes into writing legibly so that everyone's life is a little easier. And don't go around complaining that you have so many papers to grade, professors of the world, and you don't have time to write perfectly for each one. If you're going to bitch about them then don't assign them and then everyone will be slightly happier.
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