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End Of Semester Stupidity

Lauren

For some reason, this semester seems like it has been the least motivated, frustrating semester in a long while, not only for myself but all of my friends and classmates. Just yesterday, I received an email from my friend titled, “DO YOU HAVE A GLUESTICK?!” That is a sign of something, people, but I don’t know what.


Two conversations I have overheard over this week:

D, to J, on the phone: “Yeah, we’ll be over there as soon as L finishes her poster.”
J: “She’s making a poster in college?”
L, overhearing phone conversation: “That’s what I said! I’m fucking twenty-four years old and I’m decorating a posterboard for college! Can’t I write a paper?”

For more universality, replace the words poster and posterboard with any slew of related projects more suited to junior high than higher education.

And the one most likely to be heard around here, yet repeated with great frequency across campus:

“Did you get a lot done on your paper tonight?”
“Yup.”
“You’re lying, aren’t you?”
“Yup.”

For an education class project I’m supposed to finish for Thursday, I photoshopped dogs pooping all over beautiful landscapes. Yes, I do have a reason and it’s a good one.

16 thoughts on End Of Semester Stupidity

  1. Actually, a well-designed, clear visual argument is surprisingly hard to do. Yeah, it still comes down to gluesticks and x-acto knives, but when you’re trying to convey some very specific ideas and the relationships between them, without words, in a tidy way that doesn’t look like monkeys made it, it gets tricky.

    And, yes, I was evil enough to make my students do this. *impish grin*

  2. I had to do a poster project this semester too, and I was like WTF? I’m 22, and in a 354 history class, why am I over at some girls house glueing pictures of lesbians and a timeline onto tag board? This could have been me in high school…. well, without the poster project being about lesbians…. and with out wine coolers and Sex in the City on the TV while we were coloring with our magic markers…

    If a prof wants to see a visual thing, why don’t we make power point presentations? You actually do that in the real world… I don’t know of any professional historian who busts out their glue sticks for a presentation…

    Anyway, it was an easy A so I’m not complaining too much.

  3. Sarah, I do some web and database design for a small company and still bust out the poster board & glue. I find it easier to visualize a problem with pictures and geekvenn diagrams and charts. I also make index cards, sometime color-coded, and move them around until I get things the way I want them. Not everyone works that way, but an education will expose you to alot of stuff that doesn’t work for you, but does for someone else.

    By the way Lauren, love the new comment features.

  5. The really surreal thing is when you find out that poster boards follow you out into the research community. I was co-author of a paper on muon spin states and ceramic superconductors, and the specified format for it when were to present it at Los Alamos Labs was… to mangle it into a poster. We presented it among a field of other posters, walking distance from a particle accelerator that we were all trying to find time on (and we all had to take a safety class and pass a test to get a badge just to be able to walk around). I kid you not. The really funny thing was that from all of these people, some of which were going for multi-million dollar grants on their respective topics, only a few posters (including ours) actually adhered to the poster specifications.

    Go figure.

    I ended up not going into physics after all (I’ve left the really brainy stuff to my girlfriend so I can focus on toys), but that memory will always stay with me.

  7. I, too, have been obscenely frustrated by the amount of silly crap I have to do, even in college. This semester isn’t quite so bad, but my dignity still hurts after only four semesters. And that’s as a computer science major.

  8. Lauren, sorry. They will.

    Or they will morph into PowerPoint presentations in which the text is bright blue on a bright yellow background, in a 10-point font, and the presenter will read every. damn. word. aloud.

    Visual illiteracy! It’s not just for posters anymore!

  9. My department is trying to be media-savvy. Most of my projects this semester require video editing, and I’m majoring in… well, nothing video-related, I know that much. Enjoy the posterboard, if you can manage to.

    And in response to the earlier question, I also know an enormous number of people (myself included) whose semester has sucked the big suckiness. Zeitgeist? Some sort of airborne anti-academic pollen?

  10. Oh, the reading your slides bit. I hate that. It’s a sure fire way to get your audience to stop listening. Then they print out the slides as a handout. Great, thanks, now why were you up there for 45 minutes talking when I could have just read the damm thing myself.

  11. Some what OT.

    Re: PowerPoint
    A year or two ago the Chicago Tribune (maybe the NYTimes) put out a weekend insert discussing the downsides of this PP, etc. business and school technology. They reduced the MLK Jr. “I Have a Dream” speech to bullet-pointed PP slides. If anyone can find this article for me, it would be greatly appreciated.

  14. I am pretty sure I’ve seen that a coupla years ago via the now-defunct Calpundit (by, well, y’know: Dr. Um, aka CaliCat). As soon as I saw the name PowerPoint (which I never used myself), I remembered that interview with comix artist and theoritician Scott McCloud, where he expresses a rather nuanced view on the software:

    PowerPoint is merciless. It exposes our levels of apathy. If your message entirely grows out of something about which you have no interest, it’s going to show. PowerPoint will not forgive – it will expose you. It will show the true you. If your day is a tedious drone of facts and figures, I’m afraid that is what is going to hit the screen.

    (via Scott himself; 08/18 entry.)

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