Midterms

Midterms are strange things. They don't actually fall in the middle of the term, as I had expected, but rather are placed at random throughout the semester at the whim of the professor and sneak up on you in rather uncomfortable ways. 

An example of this is the mid-term paper I completed this very morning. I wrote 7 pages comapring two versions of "Cinderella". The strange thing about this paper is that my essay contained more than the two books I was writing about put together. But then the books had pictures and as we all know a picture contains a thousand words. But I digress. I knew this paper was coming up. I wrote it in my diary. I highlighted it. I thought about starting early. I went on a trip to the library. Yet somehow I was up at 2am with only 4 pages completed and no semblance of a conclusion. I just don't understand. 

To my mind the only good thing about these midterm thingums, is that it does bring the whole class together; everyone was panicing as one. Everytime I came across someone from my Children's Lit class on Campus we asked each other how the paper was going, and there was facebooking, and texting and library gatherings. In short we bonded over our mutual procrastination. 

The only other thing I have to add to this brief discussion of Midterms before I get back to the grindstone, is that my Old English professor has the best approach to them out of everyone. After lengthy debate over the best way to test ourselves mid-term, an agreement was come to that rather than one big paper, we should do 3 little papers each worth five percent. The best thing about this whole situation is that he's told us exactly which five lines he's asking what questions about. And he said we can substitute the grade with a better one if we write a response paper and get higher marks. He's lovely.