Goodbye February - I loathe academia

Alright – down to eight weeks and two days for any of you who may be keeping tabs on how much longer I am trapped within the walls of this miserable hovel of post secondary learning. And by my estimations, this place just gets worse with every passing day.

Now I honestly felt that I couldn’t really be more apathetic about being here then I did at the beginning of the semester – but alas, I have proven myself wrong. Why? Well, it’s simple my dear bloggers, I had reading week. This is a strange little occurrence akin to spring break (but not directly referred to as such). It is the expectation that as diligent little students we will work long and hard to catch up with our reading, finish our projects and otherwise love life via the magic of our textbooks.

Yeah – and I’m Tinkerbelle.
(this spelling actually came up in the dictionary feature of this computer – is that normal? - And when stuck into Google image search - this came up first...Ah, Mr. Disney would be proud)

Instead of doing anything remotely academic– many of us spend it drinking, partying, sleeping or doing squat all for about ten days. We then return to the school full of fuzzy narcotic feelings and mildly panicked about the boatload of crap that is coming due in a matter of days, of which we have done none of it. Even now, I have a midterm assignment due this afternoon and I am typing in my blog. Ah, the sweet caress of apathy; its warmth is eternal and its pain is subdued by just not giving a damn. It's emotional poetry for the soul; it really is.

But how could you not love school you ask? Simple – I’ve done two programs back-to-back, and have been here for eight years. I…don’t…care…anymore. This place has drained my bank account dry, and I have shattered remnants of a social life to show for it. Wheeee. The system works. Add to that special glow the realization that many of the people who are now being admitted into this facility likely couldn’t find their ass with a road map. How am I to have a realistic conversation with youngsters whose biggest enchantment in their present lives is that residence has a vending machine on their floor?

But to top it off for me – my first day back from a week of shoe shopping and wine drinking, I discover two things: 1. The school wants to change our program into a full Bachelors program – thereby adding ten more course, or two years, to our stay here, and 2. My group member in one of my classes is a lying dolt who can’t even plagiarize her way out of a paper bag. Number one just irks me more than anything else – number two has me giggling to myself for the past day and a half.

Now this silly twit took an original document that I had provided her with, and in turn, cut and paste her entire submission with full sentences from this original work. She didn’t even attempt to change the phrasing or the sentence structure to reflect her own writing style – no, no – this was full on word for word. The funny part about it is that I only provided her with a hard copy; she typed out each sentence exactly as it was shown in the original. One entertaining element of this was that the only creativity that was displayed by her was that she attempted to cover it up by taking individual sentences from different pages to construct a paragraph.

For example: Paragraph 1:
Line one – came from page 3
Line two – came from page 5
Line three – came from page 4
Line four – came from page 2

Now some of you may be wondering how I was able to know that these lines were taken from different pages and were not her own words…simple – I helped write the original.

Thousands of dollars in tuition hard at work – don’t you wish you were me?