When, exactly, did I become a whore?
What I should be dooing right now is reading for phil. I'm not because I'm a whore.
My first "offical" college level interaction was a discussion on what college is for(some of you were there.
This argument is divided into two camps:
Those who believe that college is about individual intellectual development
and
Those who believe that college is a certification program designed to prove an individual has a certian minimal background.
As a naive freshmen I was determined to actually learn things. I even still give people the "what college is really about Somewhere along the line I lost my way. I don't bother to learn. I don't engage. I write total shit and get praised for it because it's better than the average swill.
I think that's what bothers me most. That because I'm willing to rise to the "standards," I somehow excel. I'm not reading phil because we'll cover everything which is on the test in class. If I need it for my paper topic, I might look at a small relevant section. What's said about it is I know there's a lot which can be gained from reading their actual text, but my brain is so fried from the stuff that "matters" (read that which is graded).
The sad thing is I don't WANT to be like this.
The system is broken at both ends.
The students know longer want to learn, so the instructors no longer teach. It's about methods of "evaluation" now. In a perfect word, the system of evaluation would be a measurement of learning. To be a proper whore one would have to be engaged.
I don't know how to fix it. What I don't know is I'm almost halfway through my undergrad and I feel like a tenured grad student.
-CI
1 Comments:
Yeah, I feel as though I'm doing the same thing. Carefully reading the story for Russian Short Stories isn't exactly a priority anymore, since every class begins with 10-15 minutes of plot summary, anyway, and we rarely talk about anything in depth. On the last 1520 assignment, my code was ugly, but rather than change it around (and in the process actually learn how to work better in PHP), I left it alone so that it would be done. The A I got for my Philosophy of 20th Century Physics paper isn't one of those I'm most proud of because I spent only a few hours on the paper, and while it wasn't awful, I know that I could have written one that would have required actual research (not to mention that it was in many respects *late*).
So... um... yes. This is all a glorified "me, too!" post to fulfill your desire for comments. Hopefully it works.
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