Spring Break
Finals week - More important than eating or breathing
Johnathan Kastner
Issue date: 5/6/09 Section: Opinion
What are you doing reading this? Go study for a test.
As everyone knows, finals week is the most important and stressful week of a person's college experience. Nay -- it is the apex challenge of a thousand generations of ancestors who lived and died just to produce you, just so you could write a five-page essay on the meaning of Huck's river journey.
Here's a hint -- Huck Finn is dead the whole book, and Tom Sawyer sees dead people.
Finals are a fact of life, one that has been around since high school, and, in the case of the more sadistic school districts, even earlier. And each and every one was so mind bogglingly important that, as a defensive mechanism, it's likely that your mind has erased all memories of the final.
In fact, the final was so important, that it's likely that the whole of the class is a fuzzy memory. This is a sign of how very important it was.
Why, finals, and education as a whole is so important that ... it's importance ... is, um, quite important.
You know what? I can't lie to you people any more. I get $5 from the King of Education every time I say that finals are important. And not modern, shifty-eyed monopoly colored stuff. I'm talking '90s money.
So, here's the truth. Finals aren't really important. Passing is.
"But Johnathan," I can hear my favorite hypothetical dissenter exclaiming, "What about for jobs? I need to do more than pass to score some of that '90s money you enjoy as a member of the thriving newspaper industry."
I can't speak for the whole of the professional world. But, as a trained Englishtician (it's what we call ourselves when we graduate with a degree in English. That and unemployed.), I can create a convincing parable that gives the appearance of proving my point without providing any real information.
Let's say that there are three people applying for a single job. They've already gotten past the initial filters -- not misspelling anything in the introductory letter, not drooling on the secretary, having the required experience, not sniffing the secretary's hair, being hygienic, not cannibalizing the secretary. The basics.
As everyone knows, finals week is the most important and stressful week of a person's college experience. Nay -- it is the apex challenge of a thousand generations of ancestors who lived and died just to produce you, just so you could write a five-page essay on the meaning of Huck's river journey.
Here's a hint -- Huck Finn is dead the whole book, and Tom Sawyer sees dead people.
Finals are a fact of life, one that has been around since high school, and, in the case of the more sadistic school districts, even earlier. And each and every one was so mind bogglingly important that, as a defensive mechanism, it's likely that your mind has erased all memories of the final.
In fact, the final was so important, that it's likely that the whole of the class is a fuzzy memory. This is a sign of how very important it was.
Why, finals, and education as a whole is so important that ... it's importance ... is, um, quite important.
You know what? I can't lie to you people any more. I get $5 from the King of Education every time I say that finals are important. And not modern, shifty-eyed monopoly colored stuff. I'm talking '90s money.
So, here's the truth. Finals aren't really important. Passing is.
"But Johnathan," I can hear my favorite hypothetical dissenter exclaiming, "What about for jobs? I need to do more than pass to score some of that '90s money you enjoy as a member of the thriving newspaper industry."
I can't speak for the whole of the professional world. But, as a trained Englishtician (it's what we call ourselves when we graduate with a degree in English. That and unemployed.), I can create a convincing parable that gives the appearance of proving my point without providing any real information.
Let's say that there are three people applying for a single job. They've already gotten past the initial filters -- not misspelling anything in the introductory letter, not drooling on the secretary, having the required experience, not sniffing the secretary's hair, being hygienic, not cannibalizing the secretary. The basics.
Viewing Comments 1 - 1 of 1
Aha
posted 5/06/09 @ 3:49 AM MST
Ah, this would explain one of Huck's lines that always vexed me, "I want y'all ta hit me as hard as ya can."
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