I Wish I'd Filled Out My Course Evaluation

I've got a final tomorrow at eight in the morning, so rather than try to think up something to write about for three hours, and then fail, and then feel like shit tomorrow morning when I wake up without enough sleep, in order to fail another test, I thought I would give you all a sample of what happens when I don't give a shit about a class.  For a Sociology 222: "The Family," I was required to write weekly response papers, so here are some excerpts from these one page wastes of my time.  Keep in mind that I go to a real state university, which grants Ph.D.'s in sociology.  I handed these papers in to a real professor, for a real class.  Hey, Naomi Gerstel!  Fuck you!

The first couple weeks, I hadn't yet made up my mind about the professor being a retard, and had not yet decided never to go to the class or do the readings.  By week three, I knew I had no desire to ever spend any more time than was absolutely necessary on this bullshit. I started things off simple, to test the waters.  If you were wondering what the assignments for these papers were, by the way, it was simple to "reflect" upon the assigned readings.

Reading “Humane Matters: A History of Sexuality in America” made me realize that I actually wasn’t actually sure what sodomy and buggery were. According to Wikipedia, sodomy is everything but vaginal intercourse, and buggery can mean anal sex with a human or vaginal sex with an animal.

I got pretty much no response on this, other than a check mark, and a "sounds good." I pressed on.  Here's an excerpt from my response paper entitled, "Guys & Dolls: My Sister Likes Musicals."

What I found interesting, and actually kind of comical about the second reading, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” was that, apparently, homosexual people actually lived their lives like they seem to in television sitcoms, Hollywood movies, and Village People songs; dressing in drag to keep a job, or meeting people at the YMCA. I always thought those were just stereotypes, or urban myths, but apparently I was wrong.

As you can see, I'm still keeping a bit to the academic nature of what I thought a college course was supposed to be, while just letting a bit of absurdity and subtle sarcasm seep in.  I took a break next week from being a bit of an asshole, aside from titling the paper for that week, "Catchy Title: Interesting Subtitle."

The week after, all the readings were about college kids boning.  It made me really depressed.  I ended it with the line, "I must not be doing this college thing right."

The following week's readings were all on poor people getting married or something; I don't know.  I was too pissed off about the grades on the last test to pay much attention.  That's why I titled that paper, "I Can't Believe Joe Got an 88."  It did also include the line "I have no money, and now, to top it all off, a bunch of women suddenly think I’m a scumbag, because I don’t make a lot of money. Thanks!"

The next paper was all about domestic abuse.  It was a sobering paper, and I really couldn't bring myself to joke about it, because it was just too depressing.  I called the paper, "For Halloween, I was El Recto, the President of Mexico."

Now, here's when things really started to piss me off.  I had not been going to the class for about a month, maybe two, at this point, and the only thing I was able to bring myself to do to get by in this class was skim the readings each week.  It was kind of required for these response papers.  But the readings were completely inaccessible.  So, my next paper, "A Shot in the Dark," was written in a kind of unhappy tone.

When I tried to access the articles assigned as reading for this week, I was unable to get the pages to load. So, rather than hand in nothing because I couldn’t read the articles, I decided to write something about what I imagine the articles to be about. The first reading, entitled, "Invisible Inequality: Social Class and Childrearing in Black Families and White Familes," probably talked about how children are raised differently by families in different social classes, and how race probably didn’t actually have as much to do with it as one might think. But that’s just a guess.

The second article, "For Siblings: Inequality Starts at Home," probably talked about how siblings of different genders are treated differently by their parents, and how it affects their images of self, and of the society in which they live. Or perhaps it talked about how siblings of different age are treated differently by their parents. Who knows? Probably you.

And that's when I told the class to fuck off.