Is That Your Final's Answer? (Another Adrenalin-Jammed Adventure in the Strange and Perilous Demesnes of Undergraduate Composition)

-by Martini

You can tell it's late spring around here. Days that are longer and nights that are stronger than moonshine notwithstanding, the one real tried-and-true method for discerning the equinoctial arrival remains the customary end-of-semester paper push, test cram and palaver-fest that we TA's suffer through prior to graduation. It's never particularly easy being a TA at this time of year -- "this time of year" being defined as anywhere from the Monday after St. Patrick's Day to twenty minutes before the final, depending upon whenever the bottom 10% of your charges sober up and decide to make an effort at salvaging something close to a passing grade. To understate things, the whole process is mildly annoying. Anyone with an ounce of common sense will understand that there comes a point in the semester where nothing you do as a student, especially if you've done jack-all up to this point, is going to help. Pulling an oh-fer from Martin Luther King Day all the way through to Easter in my class gets you what you deserve. Euclid in his most hallucinogenic state couldn't dream up a curve that'll help your grade, and the ones he could dream up I am loath to use for fear of warping our universe's dimensional boundaries and releasing some Lovecraftian monstrosity.1 But does that matter to the students? Of course not. If it did, they'd realize the predicament they got themselves into and take the D- or F like a man (or woman, as the case may be). Instead, they start their academic engines around mid-April, and feel the need to give me daily updates of their bona-fide progress in making up work that missed the final due date like an Imperial Stormtrooper's blaster shot. They e-mail me every day. They clog up the office's voice-mail box hourly. And then they go too far. They make appointments to see me during office hours. In mid- to late April. On Friday mornings. When the temperature's in the high 60s. And I could unashamedly cancel them. And be on the third tee by now.2 But no, I've gotta be there, in my windowless office, sitting at my desk grumpier than Nero Wolfe, undercaffeinated, peering over my spectacles at some barely-past-hungover 19-year-old feeding me some lame damn excuse about why he couldn't be bothered to show up for the first two midterms or any of my classes past the drop/add period.3 To which I tell them all the same thing: "The final's the only thing that'll save you now." 'Cause the final's always a bitch. (I should know, I write the thing.) And if a student can navigate his or her way through what I ask, it's going to be good for something. And yet, the good-for-nothing answers continue to frustrate my golf game. Without further ado, the most recent round of gems:

 

I. Evidently Getting Rid of English Rule Meant We Got Rid of the English Language, Too

"The guidelines of liberty, justice, law, and equality provide skeletons for a country's government." [Welcome to America. Boo.] "The Deceleration of Independence." [Jefferson! Slow this thing down! You're driving like a bat out of Hades, you powder-wigged Enlightenment lunatic!!!] "Britain decided to rum its colonies like a monarchy." [And maybe if they'd given the Original 13 less rum, we wouldn't have had people like Jefferson driving around like such an inebriated goof.] "First of all, I would like to honor the USA's Declaration of Independence for being the first one to state such democratic ideas." [Thank you. I'll pass your fawning accolades on to Jefferson. I'm sure he'll be flattered. Whenever he sobers up, that is.] "The English established their own rules for Englishment....They tried to Englishize the colonies." [Which, although it sounds painful, is at least better than being Frenchified, Germanated, Italicized, Slavved-up, or Scottled.] "The court was unfair to Anne Hutchinson and had shotten her defense down." [Shoot-shot-had shotten? I will have been being shotten?] "He would be was banished from the colony." [See previous answer.]

 

II. The Law Is a Ass, and Other Bits of Legal Eloquence and Perspicacity

"Three of the four men were dead by murder." [As opposed to being nastily bruised by murder but expecting to make a full recovery. He's not dead yet; he's getting better; he thinks he'll go for a walk...] And then, in the very next sentence... "The fourth man was lynched." [Somebody out there --- somebody with a lot more patience than myself, mind you --- needs to tell these suburbian spawn exactly why "lynched" is not preferable to good old "dead," whether by murder or not.] "I think that all the charges brought against Anne were totally bogus." [Ah. Been having your papers proofread by the Canadian Olympic snowboarding team again, haven't we?]

 

III. Random Ruminations on Drink, Those Who Partake of It, and Its Place in History

"If a war started the colonists had home-field advantage." [Yeah, but those British are notorious for sending over hordes of soccer thugs to even the odds.] "The setllers came to Pennsylvania because of William Penn's high tolerance." [Now, this is how you choose a leader. The one guy to drink everyone else under the table gets to be in charge. Works for me.] Works for me indeed. I'll be at the pub. Grading.

1. And how's that gonna look on my c.v.? "Accomplishments: University Fellowship, 1996-present; Teaching Assistant, 1996-present; Unleashed Great Chthulhu who promptly devoured every single thing in the path of its vile and ruthless fury, Spring 2000." How the hell am I gonna get tenure after that? 2. Which is why I schedule office hours on Friday mornings in the first place. Not to be there, but to give me the option of arbitrarily canceling them if the weather's nice and the putting greens are freshly mown. (Hey, I'm a graduate student. I may be poor and overworked, but I'm not stupid. 3. The standard excuse -- let's all say it with me now -- is that their grand[parent] passed away the week of the midterm. Which should make every college professor and TA out there wary of ever scheduling any assignments at all. I mean, I've killed about 50 or 60 old people since I started giving tests a couple of years ago, and the accumulated guilt alone barely makes it possible to look at myself in the mirror each morning. (Although, come to think of it, this does present one solution, albeit an extreme one, to the ensuant Social Security problem facing our country. Give as many tests as possible at the university level. There won't be any retirees to collect them after a while, if we plan this right.)