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 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." "