Homework Journals and Other Useless Forms of Academic Drudegery

Sometimes we must ask ourselves, "Who decided that (fill in the blank) was a good idea?"

The time has come to ask this very important question about the English department staple, the reading journal. For those of you who have been blessed with an academic career devoid of these atrocities, I shall explain. The reading journal is typically a one to two page affair. After reading a given assignment, the student must write a reading journal to prove to her professor that she did in fact read, and understand, the assignment. At least that is what the professors think they are proving.

In fact, the reading journal does nothing but teach a student to lie, cheat, and skim their way out of the extra time it takes to read the assignment and write the journal. Though one will have read the entire assignment before attempting the journal, one will soon find that does not qualify them to write a page and a half on it. In fact, after two semesters of writing journals, it becomes more of a weird, twisted game, than anything resembling real homework. What once was a legitimate reading experience, becomes a treasure hunt for random quotations that can fill the empty space between you and your page quota and make your professor believe that you are a serious student with real views and opinions on phsychoanalytic theory or Percey Shelley, or Virginia Wolf, and so on.

What I cannot understand is that today's English students become tomorrow's English professors. The English professors must know what it was like to be shackeled to a useless form of intellectual pretense, and yet no one stops it. We must ask ourselves what holds us to the reading journal, and those of you who will become university professors, you must vow to end this form of oppression now. Grow up and make me proud.