AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!
I just realized something. I'm sitting here writing this paper for a class I'm taking at CNU, and I am thoroughly hating it. I've caught myself complaining again, which is not uncommon because I do it just about every time that I sit down to write a paper. Not every single time, but just about. I got to thinking about why I hate it so much and why I complain so much- and then it hit me- its because every single one of these papers that I hate wrting so much has been complete crap. You see, I've discovered its not that I hate writing- I actually enjoy it quite a bit. And I certainly don't mind finding out new things- I enjoy that too, anyone who knows me knows that is true. But the problem with papers is- I don't learn anything. I don't learn one darn stinkin' thing. So what do I do? I sit there are try to figure out how to make a paper out of just about nothing. I'll look online or something and try to find some meaningless facts to throw in there, and when its all said and done I have 5 pages of fluff. Not that I do poorly on them- the grade is usually either very good or at least okay. But I hate the process of trying to make fluff into a reasonable paper. I geniunely want to care about the work that I do! But I simply don't have the time or the know-how to find really important information. There are three problems with trying to find sources for these papers: 1) There's a whole lot of either out-dated or oversimplified material out there that is just about useless. 2) If the work I've found isn't outdated or way-oversimplified, then its just way too in depth- its far too technical and way over my head, and there's no way I'll glean any useful information from it because I don't understand it, and the material in it is almost entirely beyond the scope of the paper I am writing. And 3) it doesn't make sense to write these papers!!! All of these papers are just practice in case you ever write something of some merit. A REAL paper would take months to finish and require a lot of initial know-how and desire, as well as a good knowledge of where to look for more information, but students are given some finite amount of time and a choice of topics they probably know little about and are told- "write this paper!" The students know their papers are crap- nothing is really useful in them. The professor knows they are crap. Everybody knows they are crap and will never be helpful to anyone!!! But still, you have to suffer through writing it, trying to make it look to the professor like you really learned something while spenidng as little time as possible. Because, afterall, there's no point in spending a lot of time on it- the best thing you can do is throw some stuff together in a manner that is good enough to get an A, because even if you did research it as well as possible and write the best paper you could (making sure to revise it over and over so that it sounds just write) - in the end, nobody would care. Your professor would read your paper, say "excellent job", give you the same A that he/she gave to the student who just did theirs at the last minute, and then you'd put your paper back into some folder from whence it will never return...