Further Adventures in Online School
Recently I took a typography course from the internet-based institution of higher learning that I attend. As with a previous class I became suspicious that the instructor was not paying attention.
So I decided to see if I could get away with slipping something into one of my projects.
I chose an assignment where I had to research Robin Nicholls, buy the creator of the Arial font. Specifically I had to look up information about him, and then turn that information into a design assignment.
At one point, in a block of text I wrote “I bet nobody has read this far, have they?”
I also claimed that the Arial font was the inspiration for the System of a Down song Aerials. And then I just wrote out the lyrics to the song.
I received full credit.
Online school ROCKS.
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March 2nd, 2010 at 9:20 pm
I suddenly feel GREAT about the online classes that I will be taking this fall. Awesome.
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March 2nd, 2010 at 9:51 pm
Haha, I took an online history class and, since history is my major, I ended up writing a very long answer to a series of short questions. My instructor sent me an email that basically said, I’m not going to read that much, but I assume you know what you’re talking about. Please don’t write that much again.
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March 3rd, 2010 at 2:34 am
That’s awesome!
Reminds me of a time in college when a friend of mine had to write an essay that was so many pages long – and slipped in instructions on how to skin a deer to make up the space.
I’ve never gone quite that far, though I once wrote one where the first letters of every paragraph spelled out BURN THIS PLACE TO THE GROUND and nobody seemed to notice – I just got told I shouldn’t ramble on in my next one.
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March 3rd, 2010 at 6:45 am
I once handed in a paper in which the word “dunnah” appeared at least once per line. Seventeen pages. The last page was my bibliography and an ascii shark. I got bonus points for my “clever artwork”, and nothing was said about the rest of the paper.
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March 3rd, 2010 at 9:31 am
I was too much of a goody two-shoes to plump papers with nonsense, but I discovered long ago that even the lamest joke or most tenuous excuse for putting a cartoon in the diagrams will get you at LEAST five extra points on your grade. More, if the teacher is ready to weep with despair after reading twenty-five semi-literate essays on the French revolution. It works as well in grad school as it worked in eighth grade.
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March 3rd, 2010 at 12:52 pm
When I turned in my junior paper, my teacher caught my use of passive voice and chewed me out for it. I calmly pointed out that I was talking about the late eighteen hundreds here, so I could use it.
Otherwise… a friend of mine once inserted song lyrics into his paper because he was listening to his iPod at the time. Nobody called him out on it and he got full credit.
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March 3rd, 2010 at 3:51 pm
I once inserted a “Your mum” joke into a PSYC Lab report – it fit into the point I was making and I didn’t get told off for using it – B+ on that paper, not bad for something I wrote in 4 hours. I also cited “Jagger, M., et al., 1968; De La Rocha et al., 2000” in a Social Work paper to back up my point that violence and the perpetrators thereof have no place in society (specifically, that there’s no place for a street-fighting man). A-. I love my BS degrees…
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David reply on March 3rd, 2010 6:21 pm:
While my guitar gently weeps… :(
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March 3rd, 2010 at 6:31 pm
I have always been leery of correspondence courses, although I’ve taken quite a few and even some for college credit, and always been leery of giving “full credit” to a claim of a degree from an online school. There are, first, unfortunately too many fraudulent degree mills that are unaccredited and, second, I believe not the same quality of instruction and mentorship as is available from on-campus faculty instruction.
I’m biased, I admit it. Its unfair, and I admit that too. The distance education that I have participated in has been, for the most part, of a very high quality and on-par with anything on-campus in that degree field that I’ve experienced. In several cases, the correspondence work has been brutal because the instructor knows you have “ample free time” (heh!) and full access to all of the required texts (yeah, right). On the other hand, I still have sympathetic hand cramps and flashbacks to writing out essay exams in “blue books” for a Poly-Sci professor who was stuck on the fact that his PhD was from Hahvahrd. he turned out to be a harsher writing critic than any Lit prof I’ve ever had.
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Minty reply on March 3rd, 2010 8:23 pm:
Ooh, you want harsh? Tolkien, man. Tolkien was a bastard. English Majors still shudder in fear at the mention of his name.
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Anonymous reply on January 11th, 2015 4:38 pm:
Was he the kind of guy who, when reading that the curtains were blue, would say “The curtains represent represent his immense depression and lack of will to carry on.”?
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March 3rd, 2010 at 9:10 pm
The man wrote four novels as an out growth of making up his own languages!
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March 3rd, 2010 at 11:25 pm
ha. Years ago, my friend Bobby was taking night-classes in English. They would turn their projects in at the beginning of class and while working on new assignments, the professor would read/grade them. Bobby wondered whether he could read that fast, it seemed like he was just flipping pages….So in the middle of one of his 5 page papers, he inserted the words ‘peanut butter’ into the middle of the sentence in the middle of page 3. He turned it in, and as usual, the prof read/graded them during class. Bobby was supprised by his grade A-, and the note “Peanut butter?” at the end of the last page.
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March 6th, 2010 at 8:42 pm
End-of-term report at college, freshman year. On a simulation for a river and a sewage treatment plant. Glossy binder, &c. Title page, bannered title, four words. Said words composed of ‘S’s, ‘H’s, ‘I’s, and ‘T’s respectively.
Handed it in; the TA looked at it very oddly (it did look very slightly odd). A little while later, he’s howling in laughter.
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March 9th, 2010 at 6:13 am
I shared an office with a typography graduate. They are the most obsessive artists ever. Couldn’t type a letter without commenting on the font he was using.
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March 21st, 2010 at 5:35 pm
I am in love with this, for some reason. Maybe because I just can imagine it actually happening. Now, I am going to listen to that song…
*is listening*
Oh Lord, that just makes it funnier…
Captcha: low faulkner.
Faulk·ner? ?/?f?kn?r/ [fawk-ner]–noun
William, 1897–1962, U.S. novelist and short-story writer. Nobel prize 1949.
That is an awesome name. :3
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May 14th, 2010 at 3:45 pm
In one of my high school english classes one of my teachers had a daily assignment. the assignment was to fill a block about ten lines in height and from margin to margin. In that block we had to describe what we had just read out of William Shakespear’s Julius Ceasar. I think one time i rambled on about sharpening pencils while eating a hotdog watching crabs crawl by.
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