Final Paper Anxiety/Frustration

I am going to take a quick moment to talk about the conundrum of homework and tests and finals that every college student in the history of the world is exceedingly well acquainted with. Mostly due to the fact that this semester is the first time in a long time that I’ve been so stressed about projects, papers, and term finals that I’ve become ill to the point of wanting to commit to unconsciousness at 7 in the evening.

For those of you that know me, that’s a problem. For those of you that don’t, I’m naturally nocturnal, and my body doesn’t normally feel the wear of a day until around 2 or 3 in the morning. If I’m saying I want to go to bed at 7 at night, then I’m either sick, or about to become sick. And it appears as though my workload has done just that.

This is the frustration, my biggest beef, with school. Out of all the other little bumps and hiccups that present themselves along the years, this one still remains. All students have been there. You’re sitting in class, and it’s the last two weeks or so of school. Your professor is standing at the front of the classroom, and you already know that you’ve got a paper or project due for the class in a week, and you’re hoping it will be adequate enough to help you pass the class. It’s nearing the end of class, or maybe it’s at the beginning, but the professor sits down or leans on a desk or something and says, “I know that it’s a busy time of year for you guys and you’ve got a lot on your plates,” and then you groan because you know there’s going to be at least a but, and at most an addition to your plate, normally in the form of another quick presentation you’ve gotta do or a quick exam you need to take before you even enter finals week.

So, this is my question; if you see the pattern, if you actually see it and acknowledge that your students are getting burnt out and not sleeping and are forgetting to eat, what compels them to add things to your list of things to do? Is that not the definition of insanity; to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result?

Then you enter finals week, or hell week, depending on who you ask. And we kill ourselves so we can have a number to follow us and hold us where we will in the class line up and in the waiting line for scholarships. No offence, but no number is worth my sanity or my health.

If it weren’t completely impossible to do anything beyond flipping burgers, (it’s a cliché), I would not be going through this torment that people call college. I would be perfectly content with a high school diploma.

Call me lazy. Call me a procrastinator. I’ll be honest and tell you that’s true. But on the other side of the coin is the fact that we’ve allowed ourselves to call insanity smart thinking. We’ve allowed ourselves to take the strongest points of our bodies lives and spend them sitting classrooms, becoming stressed about grades and classes, and not being properly caring of our bodies because we just plain don’t have time.

When did this happen? Why do we accept this? This absurdity needs to change; because eventually, we won’t know how to enjoy life, because we’ll be too busy trying to figure out how to get a better score than so and so on something, or make more money than what’s her face. Humans were not meant for what we spend our time doing. We were meant for interaction, for love, for devotion, for friendship. Yet we sit in rooms, by ourselves, typing away on computers trying to write a ten page paper on something that could be explained in two!

But for some reason we need to explain something to the umpteenth degree to ensure that not only do we know how to find other people who share our views, but we can reiterate it twenty times to meet a set number of sources that agree with us.

This is absurd.