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If Today Was Tomorrow
Years ago, I participated in a graduate level course on sociology. There were only seven of us in the class. We met in a dusty, old room of the health sciences building on Wednesday evenings from 6:00 to 9:00 pm. Class sessions were roundtable discussions of the material we’d studied the previous week and an opportunity for the professor to ask us philosophical questions.
We read several books during the semester, all of them dealing with both chronic and acute social disorders. The professor indicated in the syllabus that we could write a two-page paper every week or any other combination of paper lengths as long as we wrote a total of 30 pages’ worth of well-researched papers by semester’s end.
All seven of us wrote a 30-page paper at the end of the semester.
As you can imagine, writing a 30-page paper during the last two weeks of a semester with other finals looming added a lot of unnecessary stress especially considering the avenue that had been afforded all of us.
I ended up getting a C in the class. I suppose the professor didn’t approve of my 25-page paper extended to 30 with the use of some minor spacing and margin adjustments and the addition of considerable fluff.
In reality, I think we, the students, were a case study in procrastination for the professor who was visiting from another…
