Tempestuous Fury

Well, after a good deal of consideration and chat with Carmen Woods and Pug, I have decided to overlook my fears about any of this coming back to bite me as “overwrought.” With that said, I am now free to sit here and pontificate to you, my captive audience, on just how and why I’m SO GREAT. Ha ha! My ego will now expand to hitherto unknown bounds, and I shall become insufferable. (Well, more than I already am.)

And so, onto my latest exploit, which as you might remember, I artfully described a “snow job.” Last week in my Thursday lab for BOT 2710 Practical Plant Taxonomy, I got back yet another very bad score on my lab quiz, in addition to failing the one they give at the beginning of the class. This is unfortunately a rather normal and depressing occurrence for me this semester; I really can’t stand this class as a direct result. It all came to a head though when they described to us exactly how things would evolve immediately after that quiz. To wit, we would be expected to memorize some large number of families of plants, all with funny greek sounding names, and a stack of general details about each one in preparation for a final lab practical exam in which we’d have to look at plants and identify their family.

Now, this is not something that I’m really willing to deal with, and to be honest, I have serious doubts as to whether or not I even COULD handle such because my motivation for work in higher education is barely sufficient to get done the stuff I have to handle for my degree now. Memorizing all this bullshit would not get done, and that’s in addition to the fact that trying to do so would SERIOUSLY cramp my style. Plus, I got the first major exam back a few days prior to this with a grade of forty something out of 100, one of the worst grades in a class where about half the people walked away with A’s. The professor joked about how they’d have to make the next test harder, because this one just wasn’t.

So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that when they told me about the lab practical, my first thought was, “OH SHIT.” My second response was to get very pissed about it all, because this class really doesn’t teach me anything important about my major; it’s just some candyass elective that someone stuffed in because it looked cute or something. Why do I have to jump through all these stupidass goddamn fucking hoops anyway? I’m not learning jackshit. It was in this moment of cold, insane fury that I resolved my course of action: I would get out of this class and still get the requirement for graduating anyway.

Crazy, eh? Who do you know that does that anyway? But what was even crazier was the plan that I came up with in this fury: I would get out by substituting a course for one of the four Botany elective classes that I could take. This would entail taking the course descriptions and finding one for a much easier class, then rationalizing the equality of the courses for the substitution to be accepted. Of course, the catch is that a much easier class is generally not the same as a more difficult one, but I knew that my /\/\4d 313373 writing and “communication” skills could make it work. Who knew, but apparently I think rather well when in a killing mood, because this plan worked perfectly! Isn’t that hilarious?

So I picked out the Botany course that would be easiest to flummox, then went shopping in the Course Schedule for Spring. To make a long story shorter, I successfully convinced my major that a course in Resource Sampling, which covered data collection techniques and technical concepts, was the equivalent of an introductory level course for people who might be interested in getting into the SFRC, the organization which my major now falls under. The actual paper was an art piece: although no one individual line of the reasoning could really be denied, the whole thing taken together could not be called anything other than wrong.

I currently have my own copy of the paperwork with all the signatures, so it’s in and done with. Now I’d like to open up my own critical thoughts on this whole thing, which revolved around the new emphasis in higher education on writing and so-called “communication” skills. Here’s an excerpt from my own personal diary which captured my thoughts perfectly:

To this end, I’ve pulled what can only properly be described as a snow job: I’ve made a petition to substitute a course which is significantly easier. Since I had four different classes I could choose from to substitute to make the Botany elective requirement, I had significant creative leeway. In the end, I decided on making a substitution for the Natural Resource Sampling class. The substituted class was an introductory level class for non-SFRC students interested in getting involved in our new college. Optimistically speaking, there was probably only superficial similarities to the class, and almost none when it came to in-depth technical issues. However, I smoothed all that over rather artfully, and it is rather ironic: this wouldn’t have been possible without a high level of education and sophistication in the writing and so-called “communication” skills. I turned in the form today; we shall see the extent of my capabilities in the next few days.

Does anybody else find my use of “communication” skills funny? Is this an intended outcome of this aspect of higher education? Seriously, that’s quite a good question. With the advent of an entire new section on the SATs just for writing, as well as all the people telling us that “in surveys business people cited communication skills as most lacking,” should there perhaps be a little thought into the unintended consequences of good presentations of really stupid ideas to people with poor perception?