Today in class, my English 101 professor at the established state university decided to return our first papers of the semester back to us. Now, not to toot my own horn here, but I attended the best public school system in my state since kindergarten. (Excluding my sophomore and junior years of high school, in which I attended a prep boarding school out of state, which ranked pretty damn high academically as well.) Anyway, avoiding the perpetual tangent that is my mind, we will get back to my freshman English teacher. The woman, seemingly of an age close to 60 or above, returned my paper to me. Atop the paper, she had written some remarks in red about how I needed to “tone my writing down.” Not being that guy who constantly stays after class to molest the teacher with extra credit opportunities (and no, Mary Kay Letourneau, I don’t mean that in a literal sexual translation) and questions about point loss on assignments, I decide in my head that today will be the day that I must sell out and do just that. As I approach the teacher after class, she says “I bet you are asking me what my comments on your paper meant.” Yes, bitch, believe it or not, I am baffled by your slinging of silly non-sensible sentences (fuck her, that is an alliteration right there…let’s see who should be the professor now) However, wanting to continue my education at that university, I kept those thoughts in my head and responded with a “Yes mam.” The next two and a half minutes have perplexed my life more so than any previous ones.
Not having a secretary to take notes from this meeting has left me without a complete transcript of the aforementioned dialogue. However, the summarization of it being that my writing had too much descriptive word structure and that although it was “certainly well composed and talented,” I had just painted too much of a picture for the reader. She then went on to say that I should tone the writing down and make it more appealing to a less intelligent audience. To this, I laugh. A) She is the only person reading my papers, so what audience am I writing to again?? B) I came to receive “higher education” and am having to revert to the writing talent Larry “the Cable Guy” would be able to exhibit in an article for Popular Mechanics about string theory? I haven’t been this confused since the Barbaro Fund raised $1.2 million to save the life of a dying horse (??). I wouldn’t raise my face from a burning hot stove to donate money to a horse. And now, I find myself wanting to drop out of college to become campaign manager for Barbaro’s 2008 (because of the natural grazing and grass eating of horses) Green Party Presidential campaign before I listen to this English professor of mine. Yet, as always, the Man, or in this case, the University of _______, has me by the gonads. Oh well, just another case of oppression on the collegiate level. Reminiscent of the Columbia University protests in ‘68. When they ban beer funnels from campus, I might have to stage a protest myself. Until then, I’ll just take a deep breath and sigh. After all, isn’t apathy the way to the top??
P.S. – If you clicked on the hyperlink to “alliteration” to find out what it was, thank you for helping me get into a higher SAT score percentile than you.
