Creeva’s World 2.0

Image from here

Remem­ber in high school when we had to do the five hun­dred word essay.  It may have been on Roman Pol­i­tics and how they were the basis of mod­ern gov­ern­ment.  It may have been a book report on Huck­le­berry Finn, which we were forced to read in high school; for the record I like Tom Sawyer bet­ter.   Either way we would dread doing this report.   It could have been given to us two weeks ahead of time, but I’m sure most peo­ple didn’t uti­lize those two weeks.    Instead they put it off know­ing some­time in the future they would get around to writ­ing such a paper.

So we would leave until the night before we actu­ally had to turn it in.   We would fret and strive over which words to use and we also lib­er­ally used the word “the” and “and” as much as pos­si­ble count­ing those along the way.   If any­thing I am sure our gram­mar was actu­ally bet­ter since bet­ter gram­mar usu­ally has more words.   We would fin­ish page one, one hun­dred and sixty four words fin­ished.   Doing that math in our head we real­ized that we needed about three more pages worth of words, curs­ing the teacher as we strug­gled on.

We would take syn­op­sis from the text book, para­phras­ing along the way.   We would won­der if we actu­ally both­ered to use cita­tions in our work if those counted, or if they were just a waste of time.   We won­dered if the teacher actu­ally counted each and every word to make sure that we reached the min­i­mum of five hun­dred.  We wor­ried as we stuffed in more “the“‘s into a sen­tence on how Custer actu­ally had influ­ence on the fol­low­ing pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.   We pre­tended that we had spent the full time work­ing on the project, in real­ity the teacher knew that we didn’t, but yet graded us on the great mask­ing of illu­sion that weaved the BS spilling neatly across the page.

It was all a power strug­gle, the teacher push­ing out hte work and the require­ments, the stu­dents doing their bare min­i­mum to get by in the hopes that the paper about Zeus was actu­ally going to mat­ter to the Seniors after they grad­u­ated.   The teach­ers taught, and the stu­dents pre­tended to learn.

These days how­ever we know the stu­pid things that we were taught, truly did noth­ing to the make us bet­ter.  Most of the learn­ing I’ve done in my life I have done best out of the school set­ting.   Writ­ing also doesn’t intim­i­date me, five hun­dred words really is a blink in the moment of time that I can breeze through in a mat­ter of min­utes.   I hope my child has the drive to do the same.  Writ­ing is sim­ple.  Writ­ing is easy.  I can ut out five hun­dred words in no time at all.   This piece is exactly five hun­dred words and took me 12 min­utes to com­plete — I won­der if I was faster in high school when I didn’t count the words.