Shit My Students Write

Yup.

.

The "In Conclusion, TMI" entry is O.M.G.

if this is legit, the students will figure this out who this is in like 12 hours

And then take credit for it.

xpost Yeah I immediately thought the same thing.

It’s not as racist as it sounds, I swear.

Please keep in mind while reading the following; I am in no way trying to be racist. It may come off like that, but it is just to support what I think. Instead of accepting that Hispanics and white will be one, I want Hispanics to stop coming to America, and go back to where they came from. This sounds bad, but I just wants best for me and everyone I know.

Posted on April 21, 2011 with 100 notes

not really fair or funny to post something like the tmi one on the internet for people to laugh at, really

fair? no

The rebel and onion armies showed grose negligence by having many of their battles right inside national parks, like Gettysburg.

The potato literally encouraged the Irish to overbreed.

holy shit

gross (re: the TMI entry)

tumblr would have been less inelegantly titled 'my students write shit'

I'm fond of this one:

Sodom and Gomorrah really blew the lid off the sexual revolution for people to be more experimental with sex, and the gays getting to have some. But Jesus put a stop to that!

this is all college writing, yes

or rather, allegedly this is all college writing?

And some of these would be pure wit in other contexts:

I felt so guilty because I realized I was aiding in the bedding of a criminal.

Edwin Morgan released a book of stuff like this from his time as a university lecturer (iirc).

Last semester a student wrote in one of the assigned essays, "As FDR said, man does not live on bread alone."

okay there are officially too many people in college

I was a fucking CS major and I never would have written some shit like that

Gawd I hope this is an elaborate hoax:

Indians, the other dark meat, were saved from extinction by the humanitarian, Andrew Jackson.

Thanks for the link, Ned. :)

I felt so guilty because I realized I was aiding in the bedding of a criminal.

fantastic

I'm still pissed at my parents for pushing me to work hard in high school "to get into college" since mostly everyone in college is functionally illiterate and spends most of their studying time drinking away what little brain cells they had left.

Works for me:

Frederick Douglass coped with his anguish by hopping.

I'm still pissed at my parents for pushing me to work hard in high school "to get into college" since mostly everyone in college is functionally illiterate and spends most of their studying time drinking away what little brain cells they had left.

on the plus side, once I seize power I will not have you killed for being a moron

I was aggrieved that, after a year of comp courses, my students could still write like this on Rate My Professor:

agree, this class is not hard to pass. The proffesor is very nice and funny. The only problem is that he makes it nearly impossible for anybody to get an A. Gives A- not A. But overall very helpful and not hard at all to get a B in his class.

xp: (oh that's gonna hobble my '12 campaign, isn't it)

And then there's the Glen or Glenda? effect in which incompetence/lack of means imperceptibly morphs into surreal genius:

Whether it’s taking a walk outside, breathing the air, or eating some corn, the environment is almost everywhere you look.

Cool prof., very funny and fair. Only 4 papers, and the topics are fairly interesting. Very handsome as well. Highly recommend.

haha win

Orientalism, to David Said, is known as Eastern culture and is typically thought of as a combination of Asian, Japanese, Siamese, Chinese and other non-European cultures. The concept of Orientalism relates to music because it creates a stereotype for the different types of music in different Eastern cultures. For example, in the movie Lady and the Tramp, there is a scene with two siamese cats. These cats not only have accents and very think eyes, but they are introduced into the scene with “Oriental” music made of up chimes, bells, and even gongs, because they are siamese cats, trying to hypnotize the dogs in the scene.

What course was this written for:

S and M stands for smoke and mirrors and was a common practice in the middle ages, before modern pop singers like Rihanna made it popular.

http://www.themakeupgallery.info/images/racial/asian/letter3.jpg

lol wow

http://content8.flixster.com/photo/11/87/68/11876858_gal.jpg

I'm still pissed at my parents for pushing me to work hard in high school "to get into college" since mostly everyone in college is functionally illiterate and spends most of their studying time drinking away what little brain cells they had left.

An illustrative story:

So in high school, when it came to the academic side of things, I was mostly bored. There were a couple of challenging classes -- AP Physics was a grind and learning other languages has always been hard for me so Spanish required some careful work -- but in the last couple of years I was pretty much getting through the roof grades, reading novels in class and coasting. I must have expressed a little frustration to my mom because -- based presumably on her experience on going from a California Central Valley cowtown to the University of the Pacific -- she told me more than once that I would enjoy college a lot more because it was a more challenging atmosphere and that people wanted to be there and it would just be, indeed, more collegial.

So off I went to UCLA. A few weeks after my first quarter started I was on the phone with mom and told her, "Well, you were wrong..."

eventually college becomes what they said it would be but by then you want out anyway.

(^^^ dropout)

Or you're like me and then you go straight into grad school. THEN it finally got challenging.

Graduate school was a bore too – nobody liked to read. I returned briefly last spring to finish my thesis and – well.

my grad-school friends really impress me--pretty sure i'm not cut out for that at all--but i think they're becoming alcoholics.

See this is why I'm glad I went to grad school AND why I'm glad I left. Aim for the MA, treat the PhD as a maybe/maybe not bonus and you're good.

Man, I had this AP English teacher senior year of high school who worked us to the BONE. We had like hella books to read over the summer(!) and constant essays and everyone in the class was like "ayo, what gives?!"

She would always respond with, "I'm preparing you for college, when EVERY class will be like this." Needless to say, in four years, I didn't have a single college class that had a remotely similar workload or expectations, and it was basically babysitting a bunch of functional alcoholics and future entitled crybabies.

Maybe the real secret was that if you go through all that hard AP work you can coast through college.

my AP English class was also much harder than any college lit course. Here's where my nerd core emerges: I didn't mind taking the AP test. I actually liked knowing questions and fighting with the poetry excerpts. The essay portion demanded a close reading of a long, rather beautiful excerpt from Wordsworth's "Prelude" which got me excited enough to check it out on my own.

I was a fucking CS major and I never would have written some shit like that

I was a fucking CS dropout and etc etc

please can someone go back in time to before I dropped out and tell me "eh, stop procrastinating and get any old shit handed in, or be assumed for the rest of your life to be stupider than the people who wrote this"

my school's AP classes weren't too tricky, although i was proud of my hard-won grade on the calc test. we had summer reading for english junior year but all i remember about it is reading the hot zone the night before school started and then writing five pages on it. (it wasn't specifically assigned; i think i found it lying around.)

Works for me:

Frederick Douglass coped with his anguish by hopping.

― Kevin John Bozelka, Friday, May 6, 2011 11:12 AM Bookmark

This is amazing.

(i also remember walking into the AP U.S. Gov test and this girl with whom i had this weird combative relationship where we yelled at each other over ideological differences in all sorts of classes and then went to my place after school to make out looked up and said "what are YOU doing here" and i was like "um i'm taking the ap gov test" and she was like "why are you wasting the money, you've never studied" and i was like "lol watch this")

(she did beat me though)

I have to agree, AP is tougher than Freshman English in college. That is because in college you have to compete with people who skip half the classes. High school teachers have more license to individually humiliate students.

Then there was IB, which was AP for hypernerds. (Even I didn't go that far, then again I wasn't planning on going to Oxford or wherever.)

my best friend did IB! but apparently it was all they had at his school? he always went to dorky schools.

I only found out that AP tests existed when I told my guidance counselor I intended to apply to an Ivy League school; there were no actual AP classes until after I graduated.

Everyone in my AP American history class scored very poorly on the exam; this was because our teacher was smart, funny, and actually engaged us in discussions about events (therefore leaving no time for anything after 1920)

The approximately zero others came from all walks of life.

There was approximately one hundred and twenty four people injured, of which one hundred and twenty four were police officers.

And then there's the Glen or Glenda? effect in which incompetence/lack of means imperceptibly morphs into surreal genius:

Whether it’s taking a walk outside, breathing the air, or eating some corn, the environment is almost everywhere you look.

― Kevin John Bozelka, Friday, May 6, 2011 8:16 AM (1 hour ago)

Sometimes I think –– I cherish this effect so much –– that I might make a bad teacher.

Like one time I had a creative writing class in college & this fat middle-aged guy was reading his short story, which was an otherworldly (unintentional?) farce about tattooing donuts onto a tied-up cop. It was a lot weirder than it sounds. He didn't follow a single short story writing rule. I thought it was the best story in the class, whereas my peers (who, like half of them wrote about relationships ending *falls into a coma & dies*) could not stand it. Even the prof was like 'why are you repping for this?'

Needless to say, in four years, I didn't have a single college class that had a remotely similar workload or expectations, and it was basically babysitting a bunch of functional alcoholics and future entitled crybabies.

Where did you go to college?

Like a woman seduces a horny man, Hitler captivated the people of Germany.

^^not just bizarre, but surely innappropriate for any class, ever

No one else thinks this is disrespectful to the students?

i have read some shit in my day that was shocking and heartbreaking it was so bad.

and my dad (a prof) routinely breaks some kind of professional ethics rules to read me shit his students write that's just lolzy horrible.

but i kinda call bullshit on some of these?? the "rebel and onion" one?

Maybe the guy just can't read penmanship very well and they wrote "union."
If you are an iunstructor doing this, what it says is: I am an instructor who thinks my students are like those insufferable macrocephalics in "The Family Circus," whose major purpose is to amuse me with their foolish malapropisms.

I am a college level writing teacher and see stuff like this/much more o_0 than this every single day.
Students don't exist for our amusement -- they are in college because they are learning. Don't mean to get all earnest on you, but dang.

university is hard imo

No one else thinks this is disrespectful to the students?

I think everyone thinks this is disrespectful to the students.

Doesn't seem that way, but ok.

In the balance, the funniness outweighs the disrespect to the students.

I remember in ninth grade, I had terrible, almost illegible penmanship. My English teacher would occasionally read my answers aloud for the amusement of the class, which would be full of all kinds of wacky "onion soldiers" equivalents because she didn't really try to read my penmanship or ask for clarification. SO she was always making an ass of me in front of my peers. I am pretty sure she thought I was a grade A idiot. It was great. Why I went to her funeral, I still don't know.

so you could leave a poorly-scribbled "fuck you" note?

(that the family could misread as "full love" or something)

Post-homicide regret?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgmvbbWM_Z0#t=02m19s

well that didn't work. go to 2:20!

I had a passive-aggressive thing I did. She would let us illustrate a short story or poem for extra credit. I drew a lot of intensely gory or generally offensive pictures, and then I got to complain when she didn't hang them up on the board.

that is AWESOME

I should point out that English professors are poor teachers of writing because the professors themselves write poorly. You should see some of the articles my thesis committee members proudly showed me.

yes, we should!

My friend still tells this circa-1997 tale of a kid in his class who reviewed a Star Wars book, just watched the movie, and still called it "Stars War" and called chewie a "Workie"

I didn't have a single college class that had a remotely similar workload or expectations, and it was basically babysitting a bunch of functional alcoholics and future entitled crybabies.

the difference at my college was that the functional alcoholics and future entitled crybabies managed to deal with an intense workload and high expectations ... though you could write garbage and still get a B.

xxpost -- This will always give you a taster:

https://twitter.com/AcademicTitles

Why I went to her funeral, I still don't know.
― offee is for losers only, do you not c? (Abbbottt), Friday, May 6, 2011 10:01 AM (18 seconds ago) Bookmark

You should have gone to spit on her grave and cursed her soul to wander the Earth as a ghostly specter! Or plant a mandrake root with a snip of her hair tied around it on a full moon so you could have brought her back as an undead zombie forced to do your bidding.

im pretty sure i would murder a prof who did something like this to me

vis university is boring & ppl there are dumb: i felt like that all through high school & cegep, but feel like even if one is smart enough to understand learn & apply everything, the ways they turn up the pressure in university (making really packed exams with insane time constraints & grading hard in assignments/essays) are sometimes kind of insurmountable and frustrating. some profs are arbitrary dicks abt stuff too

xp: Who needs an undead zombie minion who will make fun of your penmanship?

xposts Yes, of course, it's disrespectful.

Nevertheless, this isn't 100% correct: "they are in college because they are learning"

Who needs an undead zombie minion who will make fun of your penmanship?

Masochists.

It would keep them happy, after all.

Fine, they are TRYING TO LEARN. I was being optimistic.

In some cases, even that's not true.

And right about now, to counter all the hate, I should mention that I've had some amazing professors at every point of my academic career. And there was always a bank of hard-working, intelligent students to make attending class compelling.

like half of them wrote about relationships ending *falls into a coma & dies*

a friend teaching freshmen creative writing made a "no death" rule by week 2.

honestly i've probably never had an academic problem that wasn't entirely on me.

I should point out that English professors are poor teachers of writing because the professors themselves write poorly. You should see some of the articles my thesis committee members proudly showed me.

― ginny thomas and tonic (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, May 6, 2011 10:06 AM (6 minutes ago)

This is true true true. There's a whole category of smartypants poseur jargon – Engfish - that is, like, the great plaything of the academic world. Nobody seems guiltier of it than freshman English professors ; smarmy hypercorrect an historica rectifying pedants who don't write (or read) outside of academia. They be gettin' high on they on supply.

Xpost I went to UCF and I graduated with a 2.4. I was smart enough to excel but had no motivation, which I blamed at the time on the school.

Later, I more or less admitted to myself that while it did play some role, my own laziness, financial issues, and a bout of minor depression had more to do with it.

I have no doubt if I was going now, it'd be a different story. The diploma still helped me get my current job (because they preferred degrees) but I would have liked to learn more. Just didn't have any work ethic then.

went to high school, barely graduated
went to a good college, did terrible for two years (bored) and great for two
went to wonderful grad school, got all As and learned a ton
went to grad school again, got all As and learned nothing, except how easy it is to pull off b.s. as long as you confirm the professor's opinions
went to grad school a third time – still enrolled – and realized that field experience is far more valuable than classroom experience and i don't give a shit about my grades

so this is the "web 2.0" version of that email fwd that went around in the 90s?

most of these are fake, right?

the internet is making point-and-laugh humor increasingly uncomfortable 2 me

so this is the "web 2.0" version of that email fwd that went around in the 90s?

the one i remember from this is "sir francis drake circumcised the world with a hundred-foot clipper."

i figure about 20% of these and what you find on those facebook lols sites is real

haha yes that very fwd

that was also the era of the "cats/buttered toast" antigravity machine fwd, and the onion croatia vowels fwd

true story: once, i was in an undergraduate class and totally zoning out during a lecture on t.s. eliot's 'four quarters.' to smoke me out for dozing off, the teacher asked me to remind the class 'mr. eliot' spelled his name with two initials, rather than just one or a first name. i had no friggin' idea, hadn't been paying attention, and belted out 'because without the S, he'd be 'toilet' spelled backwards. i got kicked out of the class for smartassery, and sent to the english dept. dean, who told me that he felt exactly the same way, and that it was a ridiculous question anyway.

the english dept. dean, who told me that he felt exactly the same way

I hope so, cuz you're right about the spelling.

A friend of mine, who teaches herself, in response to the site:

I keep a collection of the worst papers and quotations, then once in each composition I ruthlessly mock them as a lesson to the current students. I call it "rough pedagogy."

i feel like i learned a lot in college, but i didn't really learn that much about writing, per se. most of what i learned related to creating connections between seemingly disparate 'things' by being pointed in certain directions by my professors. by the time i graduated, i was writing papers on the phenomenology of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's poetics, the indigenous ellisions in the work of Alvar Aalto, and whatever. i wouldn't have known who either of those people were if it weren't for my *quite excellent* profs, but the connections i made were my own. same story during my time in grad school.

just to point out, though, that there were some tough-ass profs at my undergraduate institution, but the toughest tended to be those who were visiting or adjuncts. the most difficult workload i ever managed was for a class on Art and Architecture in 20th Century Russia. seriously: 1500 pages/week of theory, fiction, and history, all assigned by a woman who was incapable of making eye contact with the class.

this whole phenomenon also reminds me of my high school chemistry teacher, who kept a list of all the stupid things his students said. after the final, he'd hand out a photocopy of the list. my year, i was at the top, for singing (in my best James Brown voice) "I'm a mole man." i thought i was being all Bill Nye and clever, and he just looked at me and said, "that is some wack shit, mr. r33s."

original of Soul Man == Sam and Dave, and not The Hardest Working man ni Show Business

well i know that, duh, but my father raised me on James Brown, and that was the version i knew best.

I keep a collection too, but I keep it to myself. I don't know how ILX manages to do it, but I feel superprotective of my students as well as personally and professionally insulted by this thread -- all at the same time. Congrats.

Making fun of students on the internet/in a photocopy/as a pedagogical example is just straight messed up no matter which way I look at it. There is always a better way of making that point, one that does not involve laughing at someone else's expense. I don't care if it's effective. So is intimidation.

^^^ otm

I've never done it either. On the other hand, I have no qualms about writing deserved, vicious comments on the margins of essays.

Honestly, on the handful of occasions I have brought up some funny examples in conversation socially, I've regretted it and wound up defending the student to the person I was trying to amuse. It did not make me feel good about myself or my work.

yeah, i'd never mock my student either, –- but i teach 11-13 year olds, and basically everything they say is lol-worthy. i'm not above sharing cute/silly/goofy/endearing stories about my kids, but it's always done with tons and tons of affection. but i guess that my job involves a lot more of an emotional connection than an undergraduate/graduate lecturer has with his/her students.

I don't take these things so much as insults to the students who wrote them as to the educational system which so clearly failed them.

for instance, every morning my kids can sign up to share news/personal events/whatever from their home lives. a few weeks ago, our super-awesome 12 year old national Go champion, judo master, etc., came into class and shared the following. i transcribed it because i thought it was so wonderful and sincere and sweet and so, so, so "kid":

"Yesterday I went with my sister, who's my friend, and my sister's friend, and my sister's friend's sister, and some of her friends and their sisters, and we went to the Anime convention and some creep followed us around and we watched this movie about Evas – not like you, Iva, but about Evas who are like robots and actually kind of look like Iva now that I think about it, and me and my sister and my sister's friends and their sisters and friends didn't really get it because Angels are bad I guess and then we were in the background of this video about Cosplay that was a parody of Rebecca Black's Friday."

<3

I agree that it's mean to make fun of these kids, but on the other hand I constantly make fun of the writing in cover letters and resumes I receive so who am I to criticize.

when i said "aiding in the bedding of a criminal" was fantastic i meant it

it is

Remy that story is really cute.

Stuff like this draws attention to the woeful state of secondary education in a concrete and visceral way that studies and statistics can't. I'm sure lolz isn't the only intent here.

Remy - "Kids say the darndest things" is not the same as "lol these people are stupid" or "lol those teachers are terrible". Yours is borderline family humor in comparison.

right, that's exactly it – and there's a critical shortcoming (not to mention an ethical one) in the compassion filter of a professor who would post bad student work for the malicious enjoyment of others. it's bullying, in essence.

all of my friends are teachers, teaching is horrible

i want to hear that "Cosplay" take off of Friday.

right, that's exactly it – and there's a critical shortcoming (not to mention an ethical one) in the compassion filter of a professor who would post bad student work for the malicious enjoyment of others. it's bullying, in essence.

― ignore the man behind the parentheses (remy bean), Friday, May 6, 2011 2:36 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

are you saying someone in a POSITION OF AUTHORITY might secretly be a jerk?

"aiding in the bedding of a criminal" is hilarity, I don't care what it was sourced from

It sounds like one of those things you've only heard spoken, but never seen in print. Like saying "for all intensive purposes."

should have / should of

I think I was the only person who used the word "stupid" (which I knew wasn't even true but I'm too inarticulate to explain) and yes, I feel bad abt it, sorry

everyone else had sufficient class and empathy not to - so don't be too bummed out at the rest of ILX, just this one bitter ol' fuck-up

I used the word "moron", ironically in response to something that didn't even come from the site (I think I read 3 entries before clicking away).

Wait are we saying these kids aren't stupid now?

i think we're saying that calling these kids stupid is mean, you retard!

we went to the Anime convention and some creep followed us around

gr8080?

haha

maybe it was me, I kept walking by the convention center to boggle at the costumes

Disengenuously phrased, that.

Not in the slightest! Trust me, if there was any lasciviousness in my boggling I would have mentioned it but this was seriously about as close as you can get to the opposite of sexy.

A pack of Tron guys, then.

more like a pack of Inuyashas/Ed Elrics/Vash the Stampedes

I meant more in terms of shape and odor but that makes sense.

also, you had to get kind of close to tell half of the girls apart from the boys unless they were in halter tops

(and most of those guys really shouldn't have been in halter tops)

this kind of shit disgusts me. I am extremely bitter about my experiences with teachers mocking students.

the only way to begin the healing is for more people to post hilarious shit their students wrote

The only way to begin the healing is to stop reading student essays, alas.

essays blow anyway

man ilx, way to ruin internet lulz

Sorry I stuck a ranch in your plans.

essays blow anyway

I won't tell Montaigne and Orwell.

The only time I remember a teacher mocking students was when the teacher was kind of a dick and the students were these ditzy rich girls. It was an accelerated math class, and they would ask some ridiculous questions occasionally.

The best had to be when they kept pronouncing M.C. Escher as "MacEscher"

the clowning was give and take in high school for us. like the day in my high school Analytic Geometry class when our teacher, deciding to use an abbreviation, wrote "Anal. Geometry" on the board on the first day of class, and got subsequently clowned the rest of the day

"Like a woman seduces a horny man, Hitler captivated the people of Germany."

Yall are laughing but is there really any literature out there that explains it better or more succinctly than
"Germany was horny for Hitler"? I mean, there's Stanford prison experiments and such, but that explains
the after, not the before.

i thought that one was pretty good too.

yea I've seen far worse, and at least it was coherent.

I had a friend bribe me once with a Mercyful Fate cd to help write a critical analysis of a classmate's English paper, as they had to present the feedback to each other during the next class. The dude was a jock and his paper was so bad, the friend said he couldn't bear to do the analysis himself.

The paper was about the roles of players on a football (American) team, and contained such eye-opening passages like "The defensive lineman's job is to be the meanest, toughest player on the field" and "The team finishing with more points at the end of the game is generally considered the winner".

I don't take these things so much as insults to the students who wrote them as to the educational system which so clearly failed them.

― quincie, Saturday, May 7, 2011 2:25 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

sorry this is a bullshit halfassed justification for laughing at people

which, this being ilx, is totally unneeded

mb if the ppl posting shit on lol tumblr spent that time teaching their students theyd have... less stupid shit to post on tumblr.

justify my lolz

the fake relativism directed towards these drooling dopes is the cancer of the cuddlestein era. we need dom back more than ever

weingarten: exposing weakness to the cull

if only someone could save us from....fake relativism

http://doginmypocket.com/FunnyDogPictures/dimp47b3b74116e24.jpg
the fake relativism directed towards these drooling dopes is the cancer of the cuddlestein era

it's reassuring to know what era you're in, after all. plus it sounds like a nice one. lucky!

the fake relativism directed towards these drooling dopes is the cancer of the cuddlestein era. we need dom back more than ever

kinda lol that a dude thats started abt three hundred different group therapy threads is bemoaning the 'cuddlestein era'

The purpose of teaching isn't to prove you are 100x smarter than your students; it's to teach them something. Showing them up as shallow, error-prone, or falling short of your standards for excellence doesn't accomplish anything useful. Not everyone is going to excell at writing. It's a given.

All you, as a teacher, should concern yourself with is making them better than they'd be without their having had you assist them to improve. Demonstrating that you know they make egregious errors is neither surprising, nor worthwhile.

I only found out that AP tests existed when I told my guidance counselor I intended to apply to an Ivy League school; there were no actual AP classes until after I graduated.

― Dreaded Burrito Gang (DJP), Friday, May 6, 2011 12:14 PM

i was advised not to take ap tests lest i be placed too far above my ability in college. which is insane and actually cost me money

aimless otm - also when you turn work in to a teacher, that's a pretty private transaction! this tumblr is a pretty egregious violation of the student-teacher relationship imo

http://lh3.ggpht.com/fisherwy/RyzCaBHS8kI/AAAAAAAAKoU/EHqNs5kJfnY/Mary+Kay+Letourneau+and+Vili+Fualaau%5B2%5D.jpg

ok, this is dope

Since their marriage, Letourneau and Fualaau have hosted three "Hot for Teacher Night" promotions at a Seattle night club with Fualaau serving as the disc jockey and Letourneau as host.

Aimless, I want to hug you for this...so OTM

All you, as a teacher, should concern yourself with is making them better than they'd be without their having had you assist them to improve. Demonstrating that you know they make egregious errors is neither surprising, nor worthwhile.

Thread reminds me of the truly awful Heidegger essay I turned in to my Critical Theory professor in 2nd year. Writing that fucker was agony because I didn't understand a word of anything he wrote, I was so out of my depth and was so desperate to finish it that I didn't check my spelling at all. Misspelled his name throughout the whole thing, in every way possible, even. I can remember the long pained note written on the cover sheet that began: "I struggled to even give you a passing grade for this..."

And that was in a class I genuinely liked, and a tutor that I loved..

Erm, read and write a little smarter?

These academia-sucks-cos-I-never-succeeded threads get old.

Ned, We're all ok with you not doing a PhD. Honest.

Thanks, I think.

I dunno. Doctor Raggett has a nice ring to it.

And paul I don't think that is the theme of this thread but w/e

paulhw is a long-time ILX troll

ah, thanks.

Paul Herbert Walker (B)

there's a difference between loling @ shitty posts on ILX and loling @ students who are just doing the assignments they've been instructed to do

i was advised not to take ap tests lest i be placed too far above my ability in college.

this is awful!

guys, meet paulhw, ILX's dickhead emeritus and chair of the well-placed fuck you department

AP tests account for ~40% of the college credits that I actually have, I think.

I got a 5 on my AP English exam junior year, enough to allow me to opt out of taking English in college, but the teacher refused to allow me to take AP English my senior year, as he didn't think I was cut out for it. he made this decision before the test, though.

This semester I decided that the policy of letting AP students skip a lower division comp or lit class is a ruinous one. Most of these kids have no idea of the differences between high school and college writing.

my AP Lit class in high school was pretty legit I thought! but that might have just been because my other high school literature classes were so dreadfully banal.

two 5s on AP English tests meant i never had to take an english class in college; god bless america

but I definitely learned to appreciate literature in a different, more profound way when I went off to college, after being exposed to Actual Adult Ideas and having gone through a more rigorous personal journey of self-discovery than I ever had a chance to experience in suburbia living with my parents. (My college lit class was a bit of a joke though as I go to an engineering school.)

but I definitely learned to appreciate literature in a different, more profound way when I went off to college, after being exposed to Actual Adult Ideas and having gone through a more rigorous personal journey of self-discovery than I ever had a chance to experience in suburbia living with my parents.

oh all of this full-on happened to me too of course but not in class.

^^ yeah def

My AP test successes did not allow me to skip any college classes. I remember being sort of outraged that I did all that work for nothing but it didn't work out too bad for me in the end.

My AP in math allowed me to skip the first quarter calculus class in college. Then in my last year I was looking for some easy units and decided to take that class (I'll just have to show up for the midterm and final!). Turns out it was harder than I thought, maybe because the particular things covered I hadnt really used in the intervening years, so I did pass, but probably with a C (maybe a low B).

tbh I learned to write by aping better writers, at first. and now I don't really have to, considering that my average colleague seems to write at a 5th grade level judging by their emails.

tbh I learned to write by aping better writers

What I've always done, but you know what's depressing? Teachers are so fucking literalist about plagiarism that it never occurs to the dimmer students to steal. Of course, only dim students would let this stymie them. Vicious circle, etc.

Hmmm. Any stealing from better writers that amounted to plagiarism isn't going to teach a student anything they couldn't learn from reading the same thing, but not copying it. Aping their style is not the same as copying their sentences.

For me, learning to write well consisted primarily of reading a shitload of good writers and writing a shitload of words, almost all of them not intended to be read by anyone else. I've got nearly a million words of crappy writing in about 40 notebooks left over from college. I did learn a lot that way. You develop a feel for words and for your own natural voice by writing enormous amounts of unpublishable, barely readable dreck.

Learning to write is reading, in sum. Not reading, not writing well. The end.

my college had no general ed requirements, so all the AP shit my parents signed me up for was really just to make them feel good, which i didn't mind, because i was a pretty lousy kid.

If it weren't for the English novel, I wouldn't know how the hell to use a semicolon properly. Teachers are so skittish about'em.

I think "subjunctive mood" may have been a forbidden phrase in my grade school curriculum.

Why? I remember a lot of brouhaha about the passive voice, but I only learned about the subjunctive from Spanish class.

The subjunctive mood is in English as well and it isn't widely taught for some reason!

for me (and this is probs pretty common) style-building happened in spasms: when i was 12 and 13 everything i wrote was fake p.g. wodehouse; when i was 16 i wrote a novel(la) about high school that was just catch-22; after i read ulysses i spent a few months making up awful compound adjectives; tolstoy made me obsess over Gentle Compassion; it took years to wriggle from under nabokov's thumb. (also about a year ago i wrote a bunch of essays [about russian history] with dozens of footnotes and sub-footnotes: that one's not exactly a literary mystery.) it's kinda digestive--for a while after reading one of these guys you're just writing bad imitations, but eventually it gets churned in with the rest.

(and then you're just writing bad originals)

i've been having this sort of problem recently, too. my prose writing is stuck in this weird new narrative corner that i can't seem to break free of because...well, i like it so much. but i want to not be writing prose in only this fashion.

uh, anyway...

My biggest influences in high school/early college: Fitzgerald, James, Orwell, Eliot, and Yeats.

orwell is an excellent influence; james (like nabokov) a dangerous but prob irresistible one.

As a critic my worst tendencies come from Eliot: the prescriptive self-assurance which sounds like smugness.

i wonder who the least imitated famous author is? I had no illusions that I was a special snowflake for writing a bunch of sub-Salingerian short stories as a teenager.

I wish more young writers would imitate Dawn Powell and Edith Wharton.

i've never tried to be kafka, melville, or austen despite <3ing them, but there's lots of apeable stuff in moby-dick and obv kafka is a genre now.

i am fairly confident austen is widely aped. ahem.

yeah, i'm sure. even though i dunno how i'd go about it! and it's another really risky style i think.

i dunno, it lends itself to parody well.

I liked to imitate L. Frank Baum when I was a kid & I think it never went away – love terrible puns, can't do even the simplest narrative.

your face will freeze like that

wonder if there's as influx of Stephanie Meyers impersonators: "Hitler was chagrined by the defeat at Stalingrad" etc

stalin's perfect, icy eyes turned on me. why was he even looking at me? how could he be interested? i wanted to die.

"stay in the bunker," he said.

lol

His skin was like alabaster and his mustache caught the moonlight in a way that made me swoon

i started by aping the writing of much lowlier sources then you folks, with dragonlance and anne mccaffrey and philip k. dick as guiding lights to my earliest, grade school crap. i came to admire garcia marquez and borges and eco during high school, and wrote elliptical and magically realistic scenes of sexual longing and tropical ennui until college, when i got laid and where i fell under the sway of joyce (yes, yes, the damned compound adjectives!) and j.g. ballard and faulkner and beckett. in graduate school i began writing drama more than prose, and was heavily influenced by mike leigh, robert altman, edward yang, and milos forman, and only returned to prose a few years ago. when i came back, i became really aligned with the style and substance of christopher isherwood's non-fiction work, and have branched out from there a little bit, into maugham, huxley, and bowles.

damned if i know how to proofread, though.

I'm going to risk ire here and say I am quite suprised at the vehement dislike on this thread of the blog. I dont see this kind of stuff as "lol look at these IDIOTS!" but rather, amusing/bemusing mangled thinking, bizarre malapropisms or whatever.

This stuff isnt new. Rinkworks have several pages of lol student writing/speaking stuff thats been around since the mid 90s.

http://www.rinkworks.com/said/answers.shtml
http://www.rinkworks.com/said/kidscience.shtml

Am I the only one who finds this stuff entertaining because, at least sometimes, it is endearing? Not "haha these failures of education omg how could they be so dumb!"

And Crut, if you think this stuff is insulting, dont ever read any of the IT forums I am on, We're WITHERING about people who cant use computers and the internet. I mean, vicious. Or is it ok to mock computer illiteracy?

I mean come on whats not to love about "# "Nitrogen is not found in Ireland because it is not found in a free state." "