My First Attempt to Run For Office

I'm surrounded by the foot soldiers of higher education, evidently it's that time of year. The snow reluctantly melts away, becomes fodder for the coming spring. Tiny green-brown buds appear on the ends of branches and thousands upon thousands of university students begin the real learning process.

Final exams are mere days away, time to decipher those courses you don't want to have to take again. Begin the guessing game, the goal being far from that of learning. The point of the course, the material you're intended to learn, the building blocks intended to move you forward in your scholastic career all disappear.

Anything you've picked up at this point is an accident, an unlikely byproduct of the few lectures you made it up in time for, or that one assignment you actually did yourself. Today, all that matters is hedging bets. What will this professor put on the exam? That's all that matters, all that ever mattered.

"I heard he didn't even mention chapter six in the lectures and it wasn't on any of the quizzes so I'm not bothering with it."

"He spent three classes on this, I'm focussing on it, forget that other crap."

"I'm only studying the second half of the course, I'm ignoring the whole first half. I'll learn it inside out, that'll be what he focusses on anyway."

"I've already passed that course so I'm not even studying for it."

It's a game, a system. It's the students versus the profs. The student's job is to figure out how to get the marks. Study? Sure but the real gains are in loopholes, old exams, figuring out what parts of the material the prof seems to like, borrowing assignments, getting into group projects with the keen students.

The profs spend their time patching the holes. You have to pass the final exam in order to pass the course regardless of your overall mark. You have to at least hand in every assignment. You must get a passing mark in class participation to pass the course. Group members must assess their fellow group members on their participation.

They'll all gadgets to fill holes. Each rule a clear route marker of a path taken at one point by a student playing the game. Profs are there to improve the game.

When I went on to post secondary education I naively assumed it was about learning, about growing through the courses taken. When I finished I naively assumed that the system was flawed, that it was just a useless game of working the system for marks. Work your ass off on the first assignment or two in order to bias the prof. Slack the rest of the course and your prof will create the excuses for you. Ploy on top of ploy, play the game.

What I've since realized is that the system actually works quite well. I simply misinterpreted the goal of the system. The marks game is perfect training for the salary game. Get good at it and you'll do well in the workplace. Will you contribute to society? Enjoy your career? Lead a fulfilled life? I have no idea, that's completely unrelated. One has nothing to do with the other. You're simply being prepared to function and accept a system where you spend your days pandering to the few people that control the rewards. People that generally know little about you, your life, your work, or your happiness.

It's the chicken and the egg. Which came first, the marks or the salaries? Did the marks system create people craving the salary system or did the marks come about to support and feed the salary system?

A happy society of people controlled by their craving of a manmade fiction, money. I would guess that currency, money, was created as a common language for bartering and nothing more. It's a brilliant way for the blacksmith to interface with the seamstress through the farmer but did anyone intend it to be this?

Wow, it's a serious morning up in here....someone say something funny...please.....