This semester I'm taking a junior writing class, one of the required core classes for psychology. Basically we just write papers about meaningless cognitive psychology crap and our teacher plays mind games with us. I'm pretty sure that most of you are familiar with the concept of peer review. If, by chance you've missed the memo, peer review or editing is when you get in small groups and edit other peoples papers. Yeah, it's a good time.
Today was not like any other day I've experienced in my entire history of peer editing. Today a pact was broken and it's going to be something that takes me many hours and dollars in therapy to get over.
There is this, how shall I put it correctly, Man-Student in my particular section of junior writing. He can only be described as having some type of slow personality mental disorder in combination with a fatal dose of monotonality (yes, I believe I just made that word up). When the teacher asks a simple question, like "How do you site this source?" the Man-Student will proceed to give you so much detail as actually
counting out how many spaces between each word and how many spaces the second line should be indented, and so on. He'll tell you what letters need to be capitalized and turn what should be a simple answer into the longest, most drawn-out explanation in the history of citations. In short, it's bad to have to listen to it. And he does it for
everything. Sadly, it's not unlikely that the class will secretly snicker as the Man-Student tries to sound intelligent to his younger counterparts.
Now, I feel bad for the Man-Student as much as the next guy because he obviously has issues. This is all fine and dandy as long as there's a good distance of space between us, you know, an appropriate distance that is allowed by the restraining order I filed against him because I'm scared for my life.
Anyway, back to peer editing. Normally when this time comes around we students like to stick to groups that we've previously been in; it's just sort of an unwritten rule. The last peer review group I had was with three other cool people. In our group we made a pact: it will
always be the same people. Really simple, not hard to understand or anything. Everyone agreed. And today, let me just say it was different.
One of the guys that was in the original group deserted the 3 of us. Left us high and dry. Left us to suffer. And so, you guessed it, we got stuck with Man-Student who somehow found a way to sneak into our tightly pressed-together desks and join our group. You're thinking "Who cares?" or "So what?" right? Well, no! It was a big deal. This guys paper was nothing of what it should have been; it was practically twice the length of the requirement and really had nothing to do with cognitive psychology and when it was finished being read left me seriously saying "What?" out loud.
All the things you think would be impossible to be included in a paper about cognitive psychology Man-Student somehow found a way to include. Like what? Like Adam and Eve, like going in-depth talking about some painting. The assignment was to explain a phenomenon that occurs in cognitive psychology. Sounds simple, right? It should be simple. But, somehow Man-Student's paper made me even more confused about top-down or bottom-up whateveryoucallit processing than when I started (and I knew nothing about it to start).
What Man-Student couldn't comprehend about PEER EDITING is that in the group, the other people are supposed to comment and show constructive criticism to make the paper better. Yeah, he didn't get that. One of my friends in the group, I'll call him Fred, tried to make a suggestion that maybe this paper was a tad too long and a bit confusing. Man-Student didn't accept that. It was probably the worst demonstration of insecurity I have ever seen. There was an argument; a big one. At one point, everyone in the class had stopped what they were doing to witness this heated debate about whether Man-Student's paper was written in size 10 or 12 font Times New Roman. Knives were whipped out, daggers were thrown. I think Man-Student even killed a kid with a trident.
There are two morals to this story: first, don't mess with man-students. And second, ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS respect the pact made in peer editing groups.