Help

 

I have discovered that while community colleges have everything necessary to produce quality work, they do not have the necessary standards to require quality work. I've been in four classes thus far and the student's willingness to work has been astoundingly low. Because my performance in my classes has always been high I am often requested by my fellow students for help.

The main problem I have found thus far is students unwillingness to actually study between class days. They show up at class, the more studious ones actually take some notes, the majority fail to ask questions about what mystifies them, then all of them leave furiously texting someone or talking on the phone.

The resulting grade averages make me wonder if I just happen upon all the low end classes, or if maybe average college students are fails in their grades but some how manage to make it through with a degree. What ever the case may be, I have had only one professor who I would describe as next to impossible to work with. While I will not give this individual’s name I will say the ambiguous nature of their teaching style has mystified even the most driven students. On the average I would guess it is the student, not the teacher, who is responsible for the necessity for help.

As a result of student's lack of education they find themselves looking for help. Of course the first question is if the teacher will curve the class. Curving the class is the most effective way of dismantling the educational benefit of a class. If the students do not get a curve, none of my four classes have had a curve, the next person they go to is the one student who turns in assignments on time and asks questions during class.

Unfortunately I desire to learn, and thus if something puzzles me I will ask a question about it. This establishes in the minds of my fellow students that I am actually paying attention to the teacher, and thus has set me up as a source of help in all four of my classes. I do not claim to be smart, nor particularly driven. However, what I am is diligent by nature and when I pay several hundred dollars for my education I feel the responsibility to get the most out of that class that I can. As a result I apply myself when other do not, and thus I make a good grade while others do not.

I am faced with a choice of helping my fellow students or not. There is only two reasons I would refuse to help my classmates. The first is to facilitate bad behavior. When a student has an emergency and cannot make it to class then I am more than willing to send that person my notes. When that person habitually fails to attend class and continues to ask for notes and summation of what we went over I begin to feel guilty that I am facilitating this person's failure to apply themselves in that class. If someone doesn't put in the work, they should not reap the benefits.

The second reason I might refuse to help a classmates is when they approach it from an exploitative angle. I am almost always willing to help a friend or a stranger, but when a stranger pretends to be a friend in order to get help from me and once the help is given abandons the friendship disguise I feel they are exploiting me. As an example, in my history class last semester a student entered the class several weeks late and asked if I had notes on the lectures that had been given upto that point. I said yes and sent her all of the notes. She never pretended to be my friend, simply asked for assistance.

This is in sharp contrast with a fellow student in one of my classes this semester who will pretend to suddenly want to talk to me and spend time around me when ever they need help. This kind of behavior turns me away from wanting to help that person.

I have come to one conclusion. I will not let myself help someone because of their individual merit in my eyes. When I pick and choose who I will help I open myself for others to pretend to be friends or to try to use their appearance to solicit help. In addition to being impartial I must also set a reasonable boundary. I will be willing to send notes or to look over someone's essay, but going beyond that requires that the student requesting help demonstrates they are actually working hard to do well on their own.

I do not want in my rush to help, ruin someone's academic development. Hard work will produce good grades, a simple principle that everyone should see. If I give of my hard work to others and there by cripple their ability to grasp this concept, I've done them a disservice and by no means have benefited them in anyway.

Assignments

Sometimes I just lack basic motivation to do what I should be doing. I have two essays I need to have done, one for biology, and the other for English.

The biology essay should be fairly intuitive. It is simply taking the Atkins diet, and drawing up a well outlined report on it. My professor Joseph Trackey did an excellent job showing us precisely what he wanted and thus this should be fairly easy. The only trouble is the essay itself is coupled with another assignment. This other assignment is to take the record of my diet over the last 10 days and see if the two areas of improvement I attempted succeeded. All of this (due on the same day) is going to have to be turned in with a very specific format etc. The long and short of my biology assignment is “time consuming.”

The English essay is a bit worse. Not only is it time consuming, it is vague. Our teacher (God bless her heart) hasn't really given us a clear understanding of what specifically she is looking for. With this essay I'm kinda going out on a limb hoping what I come up with fits what she is looking for.

Principally I'm hoping to get good grades in both these classes so I can transfer as a “transfer” student into Sam Houston with a 4.0, which I currently have. Providing I don't screw up either of these classes I should step outta community college with a good grade, and a semester of college complete.

Assignments and me have problems when I don't feel motivated. For the last two years of my high school I was motivated by graduation, something a little intangible when 'college' graduation is now four years off... or three and a half. 

In order to combat this fatalistic sense of fatalism I try to organize my days into something that is enjoyable to live through. Maybe the truth of the matter is my life is as empty on a day to day basis with no more motivation than the motivation to keep breathing, and if this is true reality really is gonna suck for the next couple of years. However, I will keep trying to writing day to day purpose into my life that inspires me from assignment to assignment.

Life used to be easy from day to day, because having a family was my goal and it was made tangible by someone special. However, that special person being gone life has gone back to the day to day grind of working towards all these wonderful things people guarantee will eventually materialize. 

Hope to the future, hard work to the present, avoid repeating the past...   

Escapism

I have ever and always wished to escape the life I live. Emotional pain and physical responsibility ever and always characterize my existence and although the pain is growing pain, it is pain none the less. Thanks to this I have developed nifty ways to escape the reality I'm in.

Traditionally I've always done this through writing. I love writing short stories and things like that which allow me to escape into characters and stories I create. Characters such as Jake Maxim personify me without the chains of traditional responsibility to fulfill my God given destiny. I think this concept is mostly what I desire to be able to escape.

I know God has a future planned for me, one I must pursue by going to college for an education, to deal with situations that present disappoint me, etc. Because of this responsibility I cannot just go join the Army, or French Foreign Legion, I cannot decide not to go to college, or not to do a million things which would be easy.

Escapism helps me get out the desire for adventure, while still fulfilling my responsibility to do what is right. Although writing for the longest time was the primary way for me to escape, it is also the most time consuming.

In addition to writing, movies often offer a form of escapism but not in the usual sense. I do not escape into the movie, it is after the movie that I escape into the story line with an entirely different story, with me and things I know plugged in. In a form of day dreaming, this form of escapism may seem slightly egotistical in that I put myself in the positions of the movie characters, but more it is a way to simply pull back from what is going on.

The last way and what has become the more common way for me to escape is using music. It allows my mind to wander mostly uninterrupted. Mindful of the music I listen to, escapism in this form tends to allow stress to diffuse and can mystify people around me that I don't seem to care that life might be going down the tubes and I'm as indifferent as if I wasn't there at all.

As long as escapism doesn't take over, it offers me a wonderful tool to allow creativity and relaxation to creep into my over crowded schedule. Don't let your dreams rule you, but keep them alive, because that is why we really live.

Face book

Facebook has become one of the leading (if not THE leading) social network world wide. Most people began Facebook for no other reason than, “everyone else did...” I personally had specific reasons for joining it, and after looking at those I want to record what I view as the pros and cons of Facebook itself.

When most of my friends disappeared off to college and failed to write back emails, return phone calls, or reply to texts I decided to get on face book to keep in touch. As I discovered when I joined, those friends rarely communicate with me via Facebook and the principle reason being they developed new friendships at their colleges.

Finding this out I contemplated deactivating my face book, but I found that Facebook offered opportunity to keep up with some of my high school friends who (as I became busy with dual credit college) had became slightly distant. Using Facebook has given the the opportunity to keep up with them. While my original purpose wasn't held intact I did find a legitimate purpose for having it.

Friends in debate attempted to create what was effectively a 'Home school face book' which although it was started with the best of intentions didn't get much momentum that lasted. Like most participants I staid active for almost a month before I dropped off the face of the program, which now is ending because of lack of funding. This attempted “Home school Facebook” known as JibeNow illustrates some of the good points of Facebook.

The principle good in Facebook is the sense of community it provides for it's participants. My good friends the Sears moved to Michigan and I'd started to loose contact with them. Through Facebook I sustained a running friendship with both Tim and Steve (my two bro's through all but blood) and now Tim and I are both joining the U.S. Army and planning on attending college together.

No one can dispute the fact that Facebook does provide a real backbone to friendships and relationships, but the meat of everything, as always, is up to the people. It allows people to be able to share their experiences and what is currently going on with them with those who aren't intimately involved so that all of their friends can keep up with one another.

Although the capability for good is great, the bad or negatives are just as present. First and foremost is the time drain it presents for it's participants. I know many people who spend their days observing and involving themselves with other people's lives without doing meaningful things with their own lives. Not dissimilar to how blogs can become monsters that devour people's lives into spending every moment so they can record it, letting everyone know about whats going on with you prevents people from actually doing anything to let people know about.

High school and college polls are recording the time spent by an average Facebook user in amounts of days, not hours in a given week. What this means is that for many Facebook users, they can spend in excess of 48 hours spread over the 168 hour week. This means averaging about 6 hours of passive (not necessarily constant) involvement on face book a day.

Weighing the pros and cons I think I will probably keep my Facebook until I start a family. The only purpose it serves now is to full a social need most humans have that I don't get even attending college part time. Once my face-to-face social life gets more time, Facebook is going out with the rest of the unnecessary elements of a child's life...

Why I write

Humans have always and ever written for two general purposes. One, and I would contend the more admirable purpose, is that of recording information. This can take more forms than many people think about, the record of a person's feelings so they can go back and critique themselves.

The second reason for writing is for another audience. In the blogging world unfortunately this is most often prompted by narcissism. In fact, narcissism has permeated the blogging world until it effectively has characterized the practice. This was my primary concern when I decided to start this blog, was the narcissism that so often accompanies people's desire to write.

This now brings the question as to why I write a blog. To be completely honest, I follow the first path or reasoning. I desire to record my thoughts and feelings so that in the future I can look back at who I was and better develop the person I want to be. If however this is my purpose, one can only ask why don't I just write a journal and keep it in my vast system of archives that is my computer disk.

First, let it be known that I do not want a huge swath of people following me and reading this, I only want the people who find it useful. My mother, an avid blogger, offered to teach me the tricks of the trade to develop a wide base of readers and followers but since I'm not in a trade so to speak I gratefully declined.

When I say useful, I firmly believe in an almighty God. I believe in his son Jesus Christ, and his Holy Spirit. I believe God can use what ever I produce to help others, thus when I hide what I go through, my experience limited as it is, I limit what God can do with that. For this reason, and this reason ALONE I am posting this online.

"Steganography" it it's greek means "concealed writings" that is exactly what this record is. With a name like Steganography, the audience looking for that name will not be interested in what my blog has to offer and thus will most likely skip me by. The only thing that might keep someone on my blog is is God leads them here. For all intents and purposes, these are "Concealed Writings"...

This all leads to one final question, what exactly will this blog look like? I can't say, only that it will be an accurate record of what I feel. If I watch a movie and want to express what I think, you will find it here. If I go through a Biology or English class where I stand for Christ, you will find a record of the experience here. If I fail in some aspect of my life, you will find that record here.

With my intentions outlined I will try to post often, but my life isn't going to be spent recording for the sake of recording, so if posts don't come it's because more important than recording life, I'm living my life...