Home Stretch, Fall ‘09

As much as I’ve disliked this semester, it has been in many respects quite easy going. There have been moments, as there always are, but never have I headed into a final week of school feeling so underwhelmed about what remains to be accomplished. With the final day of classes being this Friday, and with finals week taking place during the following week, I’m sitting fairly pretty. My TA responsibilities are basically done and over with at this point. I had to grade over 40 essays during the past couple of weeks, but because the final exam for the class in which I’m a TA is a multiple choice, fill-in-the-bubble type of test, I won’t have anything more to grade myself. The machines will do it. That leaves only my own assignments for the classes I’m actually taking as a student. I have a final paper on intentional action due this Friday. It’s supposed to be 10-15 pages long, but we’re allowed to expand on one of our earlier papers of the semester, which I think I should easily be able to do. I already have a decent idea of what to write, and I’ll only need to write about 3-4 pages worth of new material to bulk up to an acceptable length the paper I’m hoping to expand. So, I’m quite hopeful this assignment won’t be much of a burden at all. The only other assignment left pending is my final paper for my early modern philosophy class, which only has to be something like 6 or 7 pages. Quite beautifully, it’s not due until the following Thursday, leaving me almost a full week of time—a full week without classes to attend, mind you—in which to write it. The only reason I’m not jumping up and down with joy is that I’m currently clueless as to what I’ll write. I don’t feel like I’ve gotten much out of that class at all, and I think that has more than a little to do with the fact that I have no promising paper ideas. The sole idea I had was shot down by my professor and rested, it seems, on a misunderstanding of what I’d read. So … yeah. There is a little bit of stress about that. But it’s much better than having three 15-page papers to be writing from scratch, all due within a couple of days of each other. That’s often how it works out. So for now, I won’t complain. For once.