Oh, those professors.

Continuing with my blog addiction I came across a blog today that reminded me of why I love working with college students and college bound students. Plus it's Friday and I thought a little humor might be nice.

I'm going to go slightly out of order on this blog and tell you the moral first, which is this:
ATTN COLLEGE STUDENTS AND COLLEGE BOUND STUDENTS: Stop taking yourself quite so seriously. At some point you will make a fool of yourself by being so gosh darn serious about yourself and yes, the administrators and professors at the college will have a good laugh about it. (And if you could read what you wrote, you would too!)

I truly wish I still had some of the papers from when I was a TA (teaching assistant) in an intro level class. The class was comprised of mostly freshmen, and Fall semester was the best because they were trying soooo hard to sound highly academic or thoughtful or scientific or I don't even know what... now that they were in college that it turned into complete and utter gibberish. Weird analogies, made up jargon, bizarre imagery- you name it, it ended up in papers.

The professor that I was the TA for would take a few of the most choice samples throughout the semester and post them in the student lounge where the students in that particular major hung out between classes... it was always a day that everyone looked forward to because the samples were usually hilarious. The professor eventually got in a little trouble for posting these (I guess openly mocking the students was frowned upon), but really, I would think if someone was careless enough to A) write these things in the first place or B) actually think that they made some kind of profound academic statement should take a step back and have a good laugh about what he/she just wrote as well.

Those of us reading the papers do appreciate the thought put into it, but you do need to remember that we are normal people who usually come equipped with a sense of humor. Even I've looked back at a few things I've written in my early college years and I couldn't believe I subjected a professor to reading that. It may sound funny to say about academia, but "keep it real". Then again, it is one of the more appealing parts of teaching an intro level class... "I wonder what my students will write about THIS!"

Maybe it means we're horrible people, but I think you would laugh too if you heard some of the things students write into their papers or admissions essays. (We'll save excuses on grades for a different day, that's a completely different story... it should *not* be confusing why you're failing a class if you have never turned in a single piece of homework...)

So, when you're tempted to write "He spun round with a sort of guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat’s milk" or "She is a swan of beauty and grace which sails through the portals of the mind into greater sunsets" please think twice. And finally, if you're going to use a statistic please make sure it's correct: "Like more than 90% of married women in that time, she married."

College students aren't the only ones prone to this, unfortunately. See what the best of academia has produced here: http://www.denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm

Of course, the opposite side to this whole blog is not to take yourself seriously at all, which the administrators and professors at the college find simply annoying in my experience. So find the happy middle ground, don't be afraid to laugh at yourself once in a while, and just enjoy the process of writing! Take a step back and look at the big picture... sometimes it looks a little different from back there.