Fun in university

[13_CBS]

Today at my university's writing class, we did an exercise where we tried to answer the question, "What is Polybius's view of history?" with a horrendous essay. We had to use the "2 reasons" format, where we give an introductory paragraph stating a proposition/thesis and expand that proposition with two reasons, each reason getting its own paragraph.

Here was my group's essay:


"People often find themselves in fated situations. For example, my friend found a quarter head-side up on the sidewalk the other day. Later, he went to sped that quarter at 7-11, where he found a $1000 bill on the floor, which he used to buy a book at Barnes & Nobles. This book led him to become a political big wig, where he is today. Thus, life works as a chaotic mess of fortune and luck. Polybus saw the same; history was, and still is, nothing but a river of utter randomness with a lady bathing in it inside (that lady is obviously Luck). Fortune runs the world, after all.

The 2nd Punic War was a big war where people fought and killed each other. Specifically, the Carthaginians under Hannibal and the Romans. They fought for some reason, though Rome almost lost because Hannibal brought elephants over the Alps and near the city of Rome. Because Romans were a bunch of sissies around elephants and the sea, they almost lost. However due to incredible luck which had nothing to do with Quintus Fabius Maximus delaying the Carthaginian army the Romans beat the Carthaginians back to Africa, where Scipio Africanus kicked their ass. Polbius was with him at this time, and since he was such an awesome historian and a lucky guy, Scipio beat Carthage and killed Hannibal. All of this was completely due to luck, like that time my friend found that quarter on the ground.

Other historians completely sucked because they were not Polybius and didn’t immerse themselves into the great river of fortune that is life. Since life is a great river of fortune, historians must immerse themselves into that river and bathe with that Lady. Polybiu was immersed in the great river of fortune that is life because he was with Scipio when Hannibal lost to Scipio. Therefore, he was more awesome than the other armchair historians. And therefore, Polyius saw history as a great big river of fortune that is life."

See how many mistakes you can point out :smallbiggrin: We had lots of fun with this.

Again, we made these essays bad on purpose. All part of the fun.

[SurlySeraph]

...history was, and still is, nothing but a river of utter randomness with a lady bathing in it...

*rolls off couch laughing*

[snoopy13a]

Only thing close to that which I remember was when my history class read Lysistrata. During section my professor (I ended up in the professor's section and not a TA's) had each of us pick out lines from the play that we thought were the most sexually charged. It actually was a good idea on his part because it took about five minutes to do and everyone got their immature laughes out of their system.

[Ishmael]

Ugh. I hope the essay was written as a complete joke, because it's academic tone makes me cringe.

Hey, once my English teacher had to explain to us--in explicit terms--the sexual imagery in Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress'. It was absolutely hilarious...

[13_CBS]

Ugh. I hope the essay was written as a complete joke, because it's academic tone makes me cringe.





Again, we made these essays bad on purpose. All part of the fun.

Did you even read the post?

[Crispy Dave]

this reminds me of about a year ago when I started ranting randomly with faqke history in guild wars and still today when I log on I get messeges of people asking me if im telling stories today

[Hzurr]

My primary objection to this is that you made no mention of Emperor Fabulous.

[WalkingTarget]

Hmm, the only remotely similar thing I got to do while at school was that for one programming project we had to write a simple file server/client pair (client can ask server which files it has available and can download those same files).

The next project was to write a "malicious" program that would scan the network for our particular server and then download everything it had (I guess to teach us about network security or somesuch). That was fun but not nearly as awesome.

[Hephaestus]

On the state testing done in Massaschusetts, the history portion is new so it's still in testing so none of it matters yet. So the entire test I took basically looked like this (http://nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=070801)