word count: 500

Sitting in the desk-crowded, ugly green-tiled, sun-blinding WR123 room that's located on the third floor of Allen Hall today at 3:00 which is when I have my writing class because it's nice to have classes in the afternoon, someone (a girl sitting three desks away with brown hair and too much makeup) asked the teacher who was standing in the front of the classroom wearing a scarf and a sweater if it was acceptable for our reading responses that she had assigned the previous class (not Monday because we had that off for MLK Jr. day--MLK Jr. was a very talented speaker by the way--but Friday) to be less than the required 400-500 words. Although reading responses are only one of the various types of busywork (busywork is all the superfluous stuff that teachers make students do to make sure they're actually reading the materials) assigned for this writing class, they are the most time consuming and annoying and frustrating because we are forced to draw meaningful thoughts and ideas from crap essays (by crap essays I mean poorly written garbage that some pretentious geriatric—Bruce Ballinger—thinks is meaningful in one way or the other but is generally incorrect) with no point and then type them up and turn them in to her. (And she's very picky about the ink, even though I'm running out of black ink in my printer and have to print in red or brown or some retarded color, she doesn't care, she just plain doesn't like weird colors when we turn in papers that she has assigned.) Anyway, her response was no, that we would be graded down a certain amount off the total grade for not having the required amount of words, which was 400-500. Why? Because writing classes at UO require us to write a certain amount for the term. Apparently it doesn't matter if it's poorly written and grammatically incorrect, or even borderline illiterate, just as long as we meet that golden word count. These writing assignments don’t ask that much of us; 400-500 words is a stretch even if you actually care about the assignment. She informed us this policy of meeting word counts or getting graded down would be in effect for our two research papers as well.

"So it's better to keep writing after we've run out of meaningful things to say than to have a paper of substance?" I asked on my way out of the classroom at 4:00 when class was over. I've never been one to pad a paper; when I'm done saying what needs to be said, there's no fucking reason to go back and cram in as much shit as possible to meet some idiotic standard. She nodded her head. "Yep!"

That’s right, instead of writing thoughtful papers and responses, we have to continue spouting nonsense after we've already made our points in order to pass this class. This is quality in education.

I can feel my writing skills improving already!