January 19, 2005

"Planes, Trains and Plaintains" From "this is my thesis statement" all the way to "this is my conclusion", Mr. Freeman may have not had a chance with his Comparative Lit teacher but I think he just won over jaded lit majors everywhere. via BlackTable
posted by Johnny Hazard 19 years ago
  • I wonder if this is real? It's too well-written (and funny) to be written by an idiot. If genuine, it seems like it was written by a student who knew he was going to fail because of some personal dispute with the prof. sorry... I spent too long teaching English comp...
  • it still gets 61%? I'm with you, meredithea... it might have taken more time to put the whole thing together than to write a proper essay. the grading system seems very high school, however.
  • I call shennanigans. Page three (helpfully identified by the writer) has the comment "Page is to long". No English teacher/professor would make that mistake.
  • Doesn't even seem remotely real. It does remind me of a kid in my English class my senior year in high school. His name was Mike. I never read one of his papers, but I recall him showing me a comment on one of the papers one time that said something like, "Good job, Mike. Next time, try to use less pornography."
  • I can't even believe your comments are real.
  • I bet he got that paper off one of those term paper sharing websites and just forgot to proof it.
  • I can't do not even believe your comments are real. Not long enough and a little vague. What are you basing your thoughts on? Please see me after this thread is done.
  • Yes, sir! *adjusts britney outfit*
  • *gets out wooden ruler*
  • I was personally entertained by this since I did something in high school many years ago that was similar just to spite my commercial design teacher. Going into my senior year with a 3.7GPA I sacrificed it by intentionally adding a square tire on a sports car for a photorealism assignment soley because she had previously accused me of using a lightboard to trace the outline of the car and telling me to start over. I got an F for the semester but won Student Choice Award as Artist of the Year. I can see it somewhat believable since I can easily imagine such a student.
  • I could believe it. There are an awful lot of high schoolers, some of which who are a lot smarter than their teachers. Regardless, it's pretty damn funny.
  • I did stuff like this in high school, too, but it was less obvious. For instance, I had an English teacher who thought it was her job to tell us why abortion was evil all semester. So, for my biography project, I chose Margaret Sanger. (I thought doing Roe of Roe v. Wade would be too easy.)
  • I can't believe the teacher/prof/TA even bothered to take off marks. Who marks essays by taking off marks? You just read the whole thing, and give it the mark it is (or in the Ivy League, two marks above what mark it should get). About the mark being high - apparently many American high schools have this strange inflated/truncated marking scheme where A is over 90, 85 is a B, 80 is a C and so forth. It is so strange - why not widen the margins? It's not like it raises standards - you just get higher marks for the same work than you would in Canada, etc. all marking systems are arbitrary, but it doesn't make sense to choose one with so little space in it.
  • Oh, and the mark for that essay should have been simply 0. No detention, no "see me", just a big fat 0 and you tank your year. Perhaps I would have written "If you would like to discuss your paper, you may make an appointment", if I were feeling kind. It wasn't very clever, just ignorant, rude, and showed no understanding of how an essay should be structured. Now a parody essay that managed to be funny and still show an argumentative structure - THAT I would have given good marks to.
  • Yeah, I would have given it a 0 just based on the fact that it's inappropriate for the assignment. I would have acknowledged the funny, though.
  • Hmmm, I thought that the totally obscure references and the title alone were funny, but the simple scatology of the majority of the paper doesn't strike me as all that humorous. I guess I'm just getting old...