University of Virginia Library

Humbug!

"Tis the season to be jolly."

May be at Barracks Road Shopping Center
it is. But just take a stroll through Alderman
Library and you can forget all about being
jolly as you watch pale, frenzied students
hassle over their Christmas term papers. Bah,
Humbug!

It is not as if we were opposed to term
papers. They are often a valuable educational
tool, and occasionally even inspire the writer
to further study of a given subject. No one
can claim that he has not learned something
about the art of writing by working on college
term papers, although they are not much help
in teaching style. And certainly everyone
remembers at least one useful fact from his
first-year semester project on "The Relevance
and Imagery of Purple in Anabaptist
Liturgical Thought." So term papers have
their positive effects, of course.

Writing a paper once on Rimbaud's poem
The Lice-Seekers, it suddenly became
apparent though, that papers can be like
lice. They get under your skin and irritate the
hell out of you. You try to do them early so
as to avoid an epidemic in December and
January, but it seems like you can just about
keep up with the daily reading and write the
weekly "short papers," much less plunge into
a 20 page research project. Even at that it
would be no real hardship if you had just one
of them to do at semester's end–or even two.
But, no, you have three or four or even five,
so you just scratch your head and try to
figure out where to start.

One louse or two lice can be disposed of
easily. But when there are too many, they
keep slipping away out of your grasp because
you cannot keep track of all of them at once.
Same with term papers. If every teacher (at
least outside the sciences) did not feel
compelled to assign one large term paper each
semester, the papers you actually did write
would once again be educational. As it is, the
standard practice of a paper in every class
makes it impossible for a student to enjoy
writing one of them without neglecting the
others.

It is especially maddening around
Christmastime. Who can think of bells and
sleighs and egg nog when there are only 10
days before and 10 days during Christmas
vacation to get all the papers written? For a
poignant example, one need only have
visited the Guide Service's annual tree
decorating party in the Rotunda Wednesday
night to see the concrete results of the term
paper plague. From an organization with over
100 members, perhaps a dozen showed up to
decorate the 25 foot tree; making it a
wearisome job, not an enjoyable get-together.
Those who were there grudge against
the absentees, citing the deluge of term papers
as the reason for their colleagues'
non-attendance.

Even though it is the Christmas season, we
admit it is still school time, and, of course,
schoolwork takes precedence; no one can
argue that. But is there no other way to teach
a course than with a midterm, a paper, and a
final exam? Is their no improvisation or
originality in education any more? Is
experimentation dead and the cult of
conformity thriving once again?

Who will be the first to try a new approach
without a Christmas term paper? May Santa
be generous to the daredevil who takes the
first bold step toward academic
nonconformity.