Ugh!

I'm sorry, but I just have to bitch for a second. Everything has been all sunny and happy and chipper around lately, and that's mostly reflecting my real life at the moment. But sometimes I'm just going to need to whine for a minute, and this is one of those times.*

I have just spent the past three hours working on an assignment for my intro to doctoral studies course. I'm only about halfway done with it, which means I can plan on devoting at least three more hours to this assignment. And do you know what the assignment is? It's effin' busy work, that's what it is! It's a list of resources (online databases, archives, a couple of books [that I'm going to have to trek to the damn library for], etc.) and for each one we have to write a long paragraph about its contents, organization, and usefulness. I am glad that I have this list of resources, and I think it has been good for me to go through and look up each one so that I can get a general idea of how it can help me in my future research. I get the point of the assignment. But I also could have gotten the point without having to write a detailed paragraph on every single one of the resources. 90% of the list is online databases. How many different ways can you say "this database lists search results by relevance and can be searched by keywords as well as title and..." Meh. This just feels like something I would have had to do in high school. The more annoying thing, though, is that the professor who assigned this obviously put no thought into the assignment at all whatsoever. It was clearly a cut-and-paste job, as evidenced by references to questions 7 and 8 (which don't exist). And I don't think he cut-and-pasted from an old assignment he wrote, either. I'm pretty certain this assignment was created by the person who taught the course last year, which leads me to believe he really has no idea what he even assigned us in the first place. I highly doubt he's even going to read all of this information, which leads me to wonder why I'm busting my ass to do it. But it will be just my luck that if I treat this like the BS assignment it is, he'll call me out on it and I'll end up with a bad grade on the assignment. Which leads me to the other problem, which is that he hasn't given us a real syllabus yet so I have no idea how much this assignment is even worth. Grrrrr. Oh, and the biggest problem of all, which is that he wants all of us to e-mail our assignments to him and each other by Sunday afternoon, a full 24 hours before class time. And apparently that's how it's going to be every week. Which sucks. And on an assignment like this it makes no sense, because this assignment has nothing to do with opinions. For the first time in years I'm doing an assignment that has actual, black-and-white right or wrong answers. Which, frankly, means that I'll be putting off e-mailing my assignment until the very last minute just because I want to see what the other girls are doing to make sure I'm on the right track before I turn mine in. Of course, they probably all have the same idea. The whole thing is just really, really stupid.

Alright, I'm done ranting. I was warned about the disorganization of this prof before I started the class, so I'm not surprised. I just think there has to be a better way to do this assignment. Like this, for example: if we all have to e-mail our assignments to each other anyway, why doesn't each of us just research a few resources in depth and share our research with each other? Then we'd all get an even more comprehensive overview of each resource, the assignment would take a much more reasonable amount of time to complete (because six hours on busy work is really, really ridiculous) and it wouldn't be completely and utterly pointless to be e-mailing this assignment to each other 24 hours early.

*I know karma is gonna come back and bite me in the butt. Someday, I'm going to have students writing scathing e-mails about the stupid, pointless work I assign. But that doesn't mean I can't whine right now anyway. The other day when I was wading through my 400 page reading assignment I complained about it to Phil, and he said, "No. You're not allowed to complain about school, ever." And I get where he's coming from, sort of. I do want to be here. I chose this lifestyle, and I'm lucky to be doing exactly what I (think) I want to do. But I also think I can realize that, acknowledge it, and still have a right to bitch about my life once in a while. This is going to be really, really hard and I'm going to need to vent sometimes. Besides, I don't think there's a person in the world who doesn't occasionally whine about what they are doing in life. You can love your child with every ounce of your being but still wish s/he'd disappear until the screaming fit is over. You can passionately love your significant other but still look forward to having the house to yourself for once. You can have the most satisfying, meaningful, enjoyable career in the world and still prefer weekends. I don't think that finally getting what you want in life means that you're only allowed to be 100% happy and satisfied every second of every day. We're all human, after all.