So today was the day I was
To recap : last Tuesday night, I worked myself up into quite the tizzy because I thought I had a major paper for my Ideology and Politics class due the next day, and so I slapped one together based almost entirely on my own thoughts, cause that’s just now us boldly original thinkers/lazy researchers roll, dug up a few afterthought citations, and prayed I could get a printer to work.
Um, no. The one I recently acquired uses the old fashioned LPT1 printer cable, and miracle diablu, despite us have boxes full of assorted cables, none of them were the right one. And my old printer turned out to not be as broken as I thought it was, but it was totally out of ink.
So I freaked out big time. I knew the thing was supposed to be handed in via hardcopy, and I couldn’t do that, and I was having a serious freaking anxiety attack. Tearfully, I emailed a PDF version of the assignment to the prof as proof that I had, indeed, done the work, and begged her to give me an extension.
Then, the next day, I found out the assignment wasn’t due to the next Wednesday class, which I totally would have known if I had just read a certain email more carefully.
I am really starting to worry about this habit of mine of leaping to conclusions. I am starting to suspect that it is an emotional rather than cognitive issue. Pent up emotion just arcs through my brain like static electricity being discharged, and bypasses all the common sense checks, and I end up at an actionable conclusion that is just plain stupid.
Anyhow, after that bit of embarrassing relief, Joe was able to find a color cartridge for the printer, so I am now able to print black text on white paper by putting the printer into “color only” mode.
That brings us to today. This morning, I printed out the assignment and took it to class. There, I was reminded that this journey was not yet at an end : I had to peer review a classmate’s work.
Now, this is something I really don’t want to do. I don’t like being put in the position of judging another student’s work, even if they are the only ones who will ever see it. I don’t want to hurt anyone, in general, and on a purely selfish level, I honestly don’t want to read someone’s poorly written, poorly thought out, just plain awful paper.
If that happens, I will be torn between my desire not to hurt people and my heavily analytic mind which is perfectly capable of performing a detailed and brutally honest and precise takedown of a subpar paper.
That’s the worst case scenario, of course. And so, of course, that’s what happened. The student I swapped with ended up being someone with extremely poor English skills, and reading the paper was therefore quite tricky.
Basically, it was written in Engrish. Not as bad as the Engrish stuff that can only be interpreted as some kind of mystical free verse, but close.
So now I have to fill out this peer review form about the paper. That means that, in order to placate my highly demanding conscience, I have to somehow evaluate this thing without judging the very poro English in it.
I gave it my best shot. But some of the questions were specifically about use of language in the paper, and I had no choice but to be pretty brutal there. I wish I had a copy so I could show you nice people what I am talking about. But imagine talking to someone who only barely gets across in English. It was like reading that.
This approximates what I had to deal with.
And just to put a cherry on this turdblossom, I realized halfway through that this poor fellow was stuck trying to evaluate my paper, and well, I don’t exactly write for the beginning reader.
Couple that with the fact that the thesis of my paper on the question of group versus individual rights was that it was a false dichotomy and group rights are only collective expressions of individual rights, and that is not the sort of concept that goes down easy even for very confident English speakers.
There are downsides to being such an original thinker. I only hope that the prof gets it, and gives me a good mark despite the fact that my thesis could be construed as an attack on the question itself.
Not my intention, but… it’s in there.
Needless to say, but said anyway, this experience did not improve my opinion of having to do peer review. Having to evaluate my peers is bad enough, but I never dreamed of this sort of problem landing in my lap. I can’t imagine that this fellow is going to get a passing mark from the prof. Honestly, I wonder if he is qualified to take the course at all. Perhaps he understands English better than he speaks/writes it. I hope so, because otherwise, his experience of the class must be terrifying and incomprehensible. I have no idea how he bypassed the English requirement for entry into Kwantlen. Perhaps the test was multiple-choice. Or perhaps I misunderstood the rules and that test is somehow optional.
Regardless, it’s clear to me that the guy will not be able to do the actual work of the class. Not until he seriously upgrades his English skills. I don’t know how he got into the position he’s in now – perhaps he told people what he thought they wanted to hear (that his English was perfectly good and they didn’t have to pay for more courses) when he should have told the truth.
But he can’t possibly pass the course. He should drop it and come back when he speaks the language.
I hope he gets the help he needs.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.