It starts

I have just turned in my first piece of coursework, and it's probably absolute rubbish.

(Note: I'm having to start saying rubbish now instead of crap. My American Brothers and Sisters will wonder why that is, since cr*p is not a bad word. Tell me about it, My American Brothers and Sisters. It's slightly crude, as it does reference fecal matter, so you wouldn't really use it at church or anything, but it is nowhere near an obscenity. And even though I checked with like 6 people about the use of cr*p and they all said it wasn't a bad word, I'm slowly noticing that no one else says it. So I will have to stop as well. From now on everything is rubbish. Sigh . . . .)

Anyway, yes. First coursework. They call them all essays over here. What's fun (or, you know, panic-inducing) is the part where I think I'm in a familiar system because people are speaking the English and writing the papers, and using things like the Harvard citation style which I've never heard of but hey, Harvard, but then it turns out I'm wrong. There are all these little rules that I don't even know about. And even though I tell myself, "Look. You have a degree in English. Writing is what you do," it doesn't help.

Things had been pretty relaxed up until this point, because I think the department was trying to ease us in the the fact that we're actually going like lambs to the slaughter, but now it all begins in earnest. I will have to start being a scholar now, and part of this is that I have to stop procrastinating. Although hey, this last essay was finished like 90 minutes before the deadline, so I really think I'm headed in the right direction!

I must say also that this department is great. The lecturers are friendly and approachable and they hold meetings to see how things are going, and they didn't even stab these two students to death yesterday who took the How's It Going? meeting and turned it into their own personal Whine Fest. ("Back when that one lecturer told us all that we would be punished for any kind of plagiarism, I thought he was being mean." "At my old school I never had to cite stuff." "Can you have some windows built in the classrooms?" "I wasn't breastfed as a baby.") This went on and on! Please, foodie, could you make me a t-shirt that says "Shut up" on the front and "No, seriously. Shut. Up." on the back? Thank you ever so.

Posted in: England