Finals Week...It's Like Dying

There really is nothing worse than Finals. It is the time of year when every teacher feels the need to throw a 10-15 page research project on a student while also assigning a cumulative exam less then a full week later. Somehow, this does not fit the description of cruel and unusual punishment. I understand that every class needs finality, a way for a professor to end the course with one large, inclusive project. This is all good, in my opinion: it is how classes are designed. But what I hate--and makes me really despise doing the work at the end of the year, no matter how "intellectually enriching"--is that teachers feel the need to heap an inordinate amount of work on students that it literally makes their lives a living hell. Just take a look at the work I have for the upcoming two and a half weeks:

• Two-three page seminar paper due this Friday.
• Physics lab write-up due this Friday.
• 5-6 page paper due next Wednesday and two page journal in the same class.
• 12-15 page research paper due next Thursday.
• Two final exams, the following week.
• One take-home exam the following week.
• 20-page seminar research paper due Dec. 13.

Now, I'm not trying to get any sympathy; I'm sure my amount of work is just as heinous as any other students. Hell, I'm not even writing my fucking thesis this semester. God help those poor souls. I only wonder what professors really think. They can't expect that the normal college student will start working on his research paper in October, can they? I mean, I do want a college life, and that's normal, right? I seriously think that every professor is so disillusioned that they believe college kids have no lives, and the only class they are enrolled in is their own. Otherwise, how can you justify the amount of shity assignments that they give towards the end of the year. It is like a death sentence.

Speaking of death sentences, that is what my assignment list looks like right now. It reminds me of the shitload of work I had during the second semester of sophomore year, when I pulled at least four or five all-nighters in a span of no more than 10 days. When I would walk to Commons at 7:30 every morning to eat breakfast on those late, late nights (the only times I would ever eat breakfast that year) I would feel like a zombie. That feeling was the closest to death, or just the shittest I could possibly feel. And this year, the daunting amount of shit I have to do will require at least that amount of effort. The thing is, this time around, I don't care half as much. All my years of busting my ass at Bates have finally broken me down to the point that I would accept a B on every single grade happily, and a B- probably as well. It has finally reached the point where I hardly see the point in so much work; I'm beyond it, if that is even possible.

And my only question is: is this the idea that professors have when they create their courses?Do they have any idea that the work they assign is only relished by kids who lived in the Bill before the chem-free label was removed? That it completely breaks the will of a student to learn, and many just want to get by, turn the fucking assignment in, and go home and get drunk to forget that it even happened?

Well, the final two weeks of the semester start in roughly four days, and I just wanted to vent before my life began its descent down the shitter.