Some Funny Assignments From Third Year

I was immediately disappointed with the educational philosophy of university.

In third year I stopped caring about the failures of university and just accepted that it was too large a problem for me to deal with as a student. I accepted the inevitable letdowns of uninterested students, administration that lowers standards and overworked professors who don't even have time to read student's papers. I decided that I would just have fun (in retrospect, I wish I had my current mentality about education when I was at school - I was a bit too philosophically immature for my own good).

This decision to have more fun with school typically manifested with me mocking the educational value of the paper I was assigned (but only when I considered the educational value to be lacking).

I went through my old computer and pulled a sample of the papers to remember what I was up to in those days.

My housemates came up with the idea that I should insert random movie quotations into my essays. I agreed. At first, this started out fairly simple. This was the first quotation I used:

To quote Uncle Ben from ‘Spiderman’ as he gave advice to a teenaged Peter Parker “with great power comes great responsibility”. In the early 20th century technological innovations commanded great power indeed.

The quotation loosely related to the subject matter and I'm sure when my professor read it he thought "...ok...". But, from here, I became more adventurous. The next paper I wrote in this class began as follows:

To quote Norman Osborne in Spiderman, “Sorry I’m late. Work was Murder.” Similarly Robert Oppenheimer went to work every day with the ultimate goal of killing thousands if not millions of human lives. If he were ever late for a meeting he would almost certainly have used the quote above but only in a humorous manner, not the menacing ironic method of Norman Osborne.

I was pushing the edge of plausibility here. But I got bored of this and then started mocking my previous submissions by inserting movie quotes that had absolutely nothing to do with anything!

The third paper in this class began as follows:

To quote Peter Parker from Spiderman “Go web. Fly. Up, up, and away web! Shazam! Go! Go! Go web go!” At first appearance this quote may seem to be completely unrelated to both to the following paper and the impact of technology on society in the 30’s and 40’s...

I was getting cocky. In this same class, the term paper was a 3000 word essay about a futurist which I began as follows:

If the future were a dog, then the following quote from Billy Madison would accurately describe the sentiments which Arthur C Clarke had toward investigation into the future of technology.

The part of the story I don't like is that the little boy gave up looking for [his dog] after an hour. He didn't put posters up or anything, he just sat on the porch like a goon and waited. That little boy's gotta think 'You got a [dog]. You got a responsibility.' If your dog gets lost you don't look for an hour then call it quits. You get your ass out there and you find that fucking dog.

I didn't even explain why this quote had anything to do with anything. It just hangs at the beginning of my essay...

In other classes I was mocking the assignments in similar ways. But my mocking had become self-aware. I was now mocking my mocking by calling attention to the meaninglessness of my mocking. I wrote a paper on warfare and concluded it as follows:

When John Connor begins to cry in Terminator 2: Judgment Day the terminator asks “what’s wrong with your eyes?” What does this quote have to do with my conclusion? Nothing really… I just wanted to quote Terminator 2 because it was a badass movie.

In the same class I wrote a paper about religion that ended as follows:

In conclusion religion is lot like when Forest Gump says "Leutinent Dan ICE CREEEEEEEEAM". What do I mean by this? Who knows! But I had a bet with my housemates that I couldn't put this into a paper. I am now one dolla richa!

In the same class I wrote a paper on the potential future genetic-engineering of three-breasted women and I used the movie Total Recall as a source. I argued that these women would make great wet-nurses since they could nurse 3 babies at a time and that the number of breasts per woman would likely rise beyond 3 as wet-nurses push to nurse more and more babies simultaneously. Now, due to the geometry of the situation, a single large breast encompassing the total available breast-area would produce the most milk. This, however, would only facilitate a single nursing baby. With each additional breast the milk production decreases but the number of potential simultaneous suckling-babies increases. As such, I estimated that 6 breasts would likely be the most economical for wet-nursing as any more would result in breasts running-dry and any fewer would result in a milk surplus with no baby able to utilize that surplus through simultaneous suckling. Also I floated the idea of having multiple nipples on a single breast but I discarded this notion as absurd.

I got an A on the paper.

The final paper in this class was a 5,000 word essay on how a certain technology has been influenced by the media (or something like that). I decided to write the essay on the movie "Honey I Shrunk the Kids" and how this movie influenced the fictional technology of shrink-rays.

I did not get a good mark on this paper because the entire thing was entirely dislocated from reality... Also, in order to reach the 5,000 word mark I spent a couple pages explaining the plot and just talking about how awesome the movie was.

Now, my personal favorite paper in all of this mocking was a term paper for a religion course. We had to watch a movie about the life of Jesus and then address how the movie differed from the gospels and the historical Jesus. I watched Jesus Christ Superstar and the whole time I was thinking "this is the stupidest fucking assignment I have ever had in my life".

I spent the paper arguing that historical Judea was a live rock-opera and that Jesus Christ Superstar was a %100 accurate representation of the historical Jesus. That the writers of the gospels also lived in a rock-opera and, thus, did not mention that Jesus was, as I wrote, "rocking the shit out of his sermons".

Some quotations from this paper:

Jesus Christ Superstar - could there be a more aptly named movie in cinema history? I think not. What does it mean to be a superstar? Who is to say? Was Jesus truly a superstar? This movie addresses none of these questions, and neither will this paper. Instead far less interesting, and far less valuable topic will be covered, dealing primarily with the differences between the story of Jesus as presented in the movie “Jesus Christ Superstar” and the story of Jesus as presented in the Gospels.

It is obvious that the bible makes note of the importance of music and song. Ephesians 5:19 states “as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hears”. Even the Gospel of Matthew states that “when [Jesus and he disciples] had sung the hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives”. It seems, then, that there is some reference to Jesus and his followers partaking in group song. Seeing as how I cannot speak Greek and am not an expert on the time period and location in question, I cannot come to a definitive conclusion on the matter. However, it seems like Andrew Lloyd Weber’s representation of Jesus as a musical maniac may fit precisely with the character of the historical Jesus.

Finally, I concluded the paper as follows:

Andrew Lloyd Weber chose to represent Jesus as a messiah who could rock the shit, Judas as a tormented misunderstood disciple who could also rock the shit, and Mary Magdalene as the love of Jesus' life… who, oddly enough, could rock the shit. Personally, I like to picture Jesus in a tuxedo T-shirt because it says "I want to be formal, but I’m here to party".

I got an A on that paper too. Most of the lost marks were a result of gratuitous profanity.