What I learned In Boating School is…: A Reflection of English 21007

A distinction, I suppose, I should address before discussing anything of importance is the ways through which an assignment or the pursuit towards a goal can help a man grow. The obvious part is the act of doing the task itself, as that burgeons man’s cognitive faculties and calls for him to take pride in his work by only publishing that which he would not mind be the only thing that he is remembered for after his death. But another crucial aspect that I believe that many people overlook due to gross negligence is the discussion of the assignment in a banal manner. It is necessary that the tone be non-serious as it forgives or pardons any fruitless discussions, which occur merely for the sake of discussion itself. This makes the interlocutors more free in the discussion of ideas and takes of the burden of choosing their words carefully and filtering it so only that thought emerges which is the most mundane and unproductive. It is in the risk in humoring that which we are socialized to not engage in wherein true innovation lies. The act of talking in that instance is seen as an end in and of itself as opposed to means to and end. The non sequitur of numbing grossness is the argument that productivity only has one form. In this essay I will help develop my purely inductive reasoning on how one can develop their supposed theory of writing and through the many anecdotes I choose to derive a rational argument whose domain is limited such that it is applicable to other conceptions insofar as they also pertain to the metadiscussion of discourse itself. It is from the application of this heuristic that one can apply it appropriately to his own circumstances and reap a fruitful reward not only in his theory of writing but in the steps needed to further improve the rate at which his theory of writing itself develops from ascetic reflection.

Ah yes! Engineers. If there ever was a more niche group that suffered from delusions of grandeur it would have to be the kids who got awarded an equally large trophy for merely participating. Scoff to your heart’s content at the liberal arts majors who have the courage to venture into a field they are genuinely passionate while you are dragged along the well trodden path of a STEM career that starts at 9 A.M and ends at 5 P.M. Go ahead and develop your coping tropes that are so well drawn out that even DaVinci would hang his head in shame. Picking apart various items in your childhood does not necessitate that you were destined to be an engineer it merely necessitates that you were curious, probably out of boredom. This curiosity from boredom could have manifested in countless other ways but it just so happened perchance to have manifested in a way wherein you could make a faux connection to engineering. Propagate this faulty extrapolation all you want, but know it is merely projection (not the vector kind). Reading the name of this course I had signed up for as I found my seat for class left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. One whole semester for something that could be done in 5 sessions. However, I was surprised with a genuinely passionate professor who seemed to enjoy his job, or at least was very good at putting up the facade of doing so. I suppose there was a bit of relief among the students when the professor fails the test that everyone uses to gauge the difficulty of the class. If, during the first day, the professor does not go over the first topic and instead spends time having the students introduce themselves to each other, then subtract one from the total number of classes you have to study for this semester.

I seemed to have not gotten the memo that a class, although supposedly being on the easier side of the spectrum, still has deadlines which you are expected to keep up to, and as such I might have procrastinated far too much for my first two assignments that were assigned simultaneously: the interview report and the resumè. The former you were given almost a month to make the necessary arrangements to complete, the latter, only a weekend. I opened up a fancy looking template on Microsoft Word and slapped in all the information that I had stolen from my other resumè that I used to apply to other jobs before this class. Rearranged the format a bit, and in fifteen minutes was done. Now came the hard part. Procrastinating by playing video games while knowing you have less than three days to arrange an interview with someone within your field and draft a five page report on it. It seemed quite tempting for me to declare my major as undecided and interview someone else who was also undecided in their major but Mr. B seemed to have caught on and included the caveat of interviewing someone in a field that you were leaning on. Smart man. After I was done playing (read as losing) my video games I decided to fire up LinkedIn and spam people with messages begging for an interview until the website officially blocked me from sending messages as they were concerned with me being a potential bot spammer as all my messages were copy pasted and the only thing modulating was the name of the interviewee.

And then, genius struck. Like Newton discovering gravity or the Egyptians discovering slave labor. In a spur of brilliance I realized that many of my friends got into the field of engineering and thus they must have a close connection with someone in my field. I started messaging people I knew asking for any leads and lo and behold:

I was left on read.

But there was one guardian angel amongst my friends, whose dad happened to be an engineer. I was set up with was an Electrical Engineer and since I couldn’t go to his office due to clearance issues I settled for a coffee shop. It felt like a very awkward date. I shakily pulled out the questions I had devised the night before by referring to my philosophy on question drafting. He seemed quite eager to have someone to talk to and not be subject under such scrutiny as to choose his words carefully as an idiot who barely knows how to interact with other people couldn’t possibly threaten his career. He spoke with perfect candour not thinking of any consequences. He told me exactly how much he hated his job and how he has to tighten his reins in order to survive in such an apathetic world. Although, he found great solace in art and was genuinely passionate about the craft, he never pursued it due to the fear of failure. Back then when I was drafting my write up I coped, like him, thinking there must have been some wisdom in his actions. Now I believe the veil of ignorance needs to be lifted. Every time I think of him I think of the analogies of lobsters for some reason that I probably heard somewhere on YouTube in a half conscious state of being. It went something along the lines of how lobsters get washed up on shores every now and then by the tide and instead of crawling back to the sea, which they can do quite easily, they remain stationary at the shore waiting for the tide to come pick them back up. Sometimes, the tide never comes and they die. Some people merely expect life to happen to them even though it is extremely easy to achieve what they want with just a little bit of effort. And while we’re on the topic of sea animals…? Sea food…? Crustaceans! While we’re on the topic of crustaceans, there are some crabs in a bucket who tell you to never even bother trying, never bother trying to become an artist or never bother following your passions because these people go hungry, they don’t know if they can make next month’s rent and although it is wise to practice discretion in your choices that will affect you for the rest of your life I believe it is a bit short sighted to let metaphysical speculations stop you from making the most of the only life you’re given. It is the ability to look at things objectively and through a clear lens that many people seem to lack, especially when their own life is under the scrutiny of the lens. You can lie successfully to the entire world if you’re clever with it, but you cannot lie to the man in the mirror, at least for long. If you have an inability to look at your actions through a neutral lens and be able to switch your perspective and stance at the drop of a hat, or at least be reserved about it’s status as being right, when you figure out that there exists some reason to doubt yourself, then you will have a hard time getting anything of importance done. It is your own growth that is halted through such refusal to be your own worst critic. But at the same time one should not strive to be a people pleaser merely live and work towards the ideal that you have found independently or based off of someone you admire a lot. It is principle that separates man from brute beast. This confliction of principle was most evident in my lab report.

They say that before you die and are sent to hell, the Gods plague you with a most unfortunate encounter. The man you are today will meet the man you could have been. For the pain of regret far outweighs that of gratitude, and although it may seem as if I am exaggerating my actions by quite a bit, it is the principles that I chose to have adopted for this assignment that still leave a bitter taste in my mouth. I had chosen to explore the predictability of faux randomness as there is only so much that can be said about simultaneously rolling a set of dice. After talking about the expected binomial distribution and the most likely sum, there was not much else to be said of importance so I chose to tackle the main issue that my lab report hoped to start a conversation on. And that is on the paralogism of random behavior. Instead, of taking the academic risk I was careful not to rock the boat, stick to the assignment and do what was required of me, albeit the bare minimum. In hindsight, which I know is 20/20, I should have went over the page limit as the content which I chose to discuss was of actual importance. Any person with an elementary grasp of Excel can replicate the dice study, and thus my contribution to greater academia was negligible. It is the ability to take risks that separates the good from the great, and my inability to do so will slowly but surely bury me alive in my work of astounding mediocrity. Instead, of following any well trodden path there is always greater glory in going where none has ventured before, while paying homage to those whose work you have used to get you to where you are as of now. It is the depths of mediocrity where you will see me recording the thoughts of the scholarly in the neat hand writing of the illiterate while barely adding anything new to the conversation. I hope to never err in such a manner again. It is the darkest dawns that are followed by the brightest of days… or so I thought. For I had to yet to experience the flames of Gehenna. It was amidst the blooming flowers of April, but I a fool. The bells tolled for me and in the whispers of the wind I heard my name. It was just Mr. B doing roll call before informing us that we need to group up in fours and come up with a project proposal to help improve the school. Simple enough, I foolishly thought, I know two people in this class, one of which I’ve known for almost two semesters. Teaming up with them and working together doesn’t sound so bad. A blow to my ego when I found that the person I thought I’d known for two semesters never even bothered learning my name. Don’t let them see you cry old boy. And this is where I single handedly started the journey of ruining my relations with almost everyone in my group to the point where I’m not on speaking terms with two of the three former group members as of typing this sentence. I used to worry about my future interactions with group members in a project further on, but since then I’ve grown apathetic and adopted the slogan “I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it”. Regardless, I thought, for some reason, that the best way to break the ice was to bring up two ideas that seemed logical enough, expose them as paralogisms and then shoot them down without any mercy, although try to explain my thought process on what exactly did not work about them. This seemed to have spooked off the other members and make them apathetic about the assignment as they saw their ideas as an extension of themselves, and thus my critique of their ideas, a direct critique of their character, which I am vehemently opposed to (I’m not a fan of ad hominems or just fancy name calling). Instead of trying to salvage the situation, I doubled down and created a five page document that I shared with everyone where I shot down even more ideas after entertaining them for long enough and finally decided that none were worthy enough to entertain. As you can probably tell, I am not the brightest cookie in the toolshed. Unsurprisingly, nobody read a single sentence in the document, not even bothering to skim over it. Why would someone willingly sit through 800 words when the person writing it can’t get any air to his head from his high horse. People’s apathy turned to general avoidance, and soon enough a project where we all had to pull our own weight and complement each others’ skills felt like every man for himself and only doing their sections without a care in the world about how all of this would come together. Thus, the final draft came out looking like a Frankenstein of ideas and writing styles with no clear direction as a culture of critique had rendered all debate moot and seemingly hostile. Add to that conflicting schedules and bad team chemistry and you are going to have a bad time. Almost the entire report was drafted the night before the assignment was due, and last minute PowerPoint changes happened seconds before the presentation started. When all was said and done, I had the liberty of taking a breather and reflecting back on all that had happened so far. Apart from the obvious which was to start off on a good foot it seemed that I had genuinely learned nothing from the whole experience. You can only make your first impression once, and after that people hear what they want to hear and see what they want to see. It is a fact of superficiality that you cannot bypass but must merely accept. Maybe this is why Mr. B gets us to have a two part title. The former title is to drag them in and the first sentence does not need to have much substance to it, merely style. The reader has already made a subconscious decision on your content without being exposed to any actual content, it is the style which he confuses for substance and with which he will see all your future work under. Quite grim.

If things seem so grim, why not try and brighten up the room. I said it myself, that the easiest way to connect to the audience is through humor. So why not use the next assignment which is a technical report as an opportunity to end the year on a good note. I picked a topic that seemed interesting enough to make everybody want to listen about which was quantum computers. This was my first ever lesson on why reading the room is important and how badly it can go when you fail to bring your charisma to the table. Laugh tracks exist because they point at the audience and say “Hey, we made a joke and we expect you guys to laugh about it. Here, join in the canned laughter and conform.” Some try to protest of course, praising shows like The Office for not having a laugh track but failing to realize that the a laugh track does not necessarily have to be audio, it can be visual. Scenes of perfect silence of a character looking at you are meant to clue you in on the joke, and this is especially important if the delivery of the joke is rather dry and nonchalant as opposed to the usual eccentric jokes people are used to. I tried to break the ice with a joke on how quantum seems to be a prefix for adopted by every sci-fi film to hint at some futuristic technology that can do far more than anything imaginable. Crickets. Alright, maybe my material was bad, how about the a joke on how spooky action was named such because it was casual Friday at the office. Silence. Okay, maybe it’s my delivery how about I deliver the joke of using an African elephant as a scale for comparison of a transistor which is only a few nanometers small. A deafening hush. Oh god at least crack a smile or roll your eyes. I had a few more jokes but none of the prior ones were landing. I had to call it quits and adopt a professional attitude because everybody was thinking “Who is this clown?” Not only am I a clown, but I’m one of the lesser known clowns. When it comes to large audiences that you do not have the liberty of knowing personally and you’re not in an environment where they expect to be laughing you have to clue the audience in that this is socially acceptable to laugh and that the speaker wants you to laugh, or at least the speaker is trying to evoke laughter. You have to rely on obvious queues, to socialize the audience into doing something rather than hoping that they would pick up on your subtle hints. Being subtle doesn’t sell.

And now comes the shotgun round where I blaze through my thoughts on trivial matters which I would have never paid heed to unless my grade depended on it. Here goes. Information literacy: I use CCNY’s online library all the time and it is by far the most useful source I have ever come across and am eternally grateful to the college. The few sources that are not under CCNY’s library’s domain are few and far in between. Citation: I have never bothered using even remembering what APA stands for and all my citations are preformatted by CUNY oneSearch so I never have to worry about what APA is. Drafting: All my projects with the exception of the project proposal follow the motto “One and done”. Collaboration: Refer to paragraph discussing the project proposal. Reading: I found the textbook online, however I reported it immediately to the authorities and totally did not illegally download it (please don’t come for me Big Brother), I only ever read one chapter and found that I could have spent that time playing video games and never read a single page of the textbook again. Reading research papers is fun but sometimes you can tell that the researcher has no interest whatsoever in the topic and only published this article because doing so was part of the grade. I hate those types of papers. Synthesis:  I had a lot of trouble with synthesis only in the technical description as I went through hundreds of sources but most of them were superficial and the few that I did end up using were quite a long read. Since quantum computers is a bit of a complex topic I found myself unknowingly borderline plagiarizing the sentences I read but thought were my own thoughts and thus paraphrasis, SafeAssign begged to differ. Use of technology:  If I were to quote Kaczynski ” The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” But on a much more serious note, all the technologies used in this course were not unique to this course only and were used for several other courses, so it did not necessarily help me learn or do better in the class necessarily as there is no other class that I can hold as a reference of comparison as all my other classes use blackboard and office productivity software. It is the norm. Audience: It saddens me quite a bit to see so many people making their portfolio website private and even going as far as deleting it soon after it has been graded. It seems that people see grades as the end all be all, rather than a gauge of the amount of work that they have been recognized for. People work with the expectation that the only person reading their stuff will be someone who is literally paid to read it and thus the authors diminish the quality of their work by quite a bit and all the hours that were slaved away working on the assignment immediately become wasted after the assignment is graded. The audience for my work is more than just Mr. B it is anybody who has time to waste and would like to read of my journey in developing a theory of writing or just curious as to find out about my experience as a student in Mr. B’s class. If your work loses meaning immediately after it is graded then the satisfaction is derived in seeing how you can minimize the amount of time wasted in finishing the assignment rather than focusing on maximizing the final quality of the product that the author’s name will forever be attached to. Students in college need to be reminded that they should be writing for as large as audience as possible and lying about how you are writing to a particular audience while secretly only writing for the professor harms nobody except the author himself.

To conclude this eleven page monstrosity, I would first like to revisit my prior claim near the beginning of the essay. This essay is mainly a product of a stream of consciousness that flowed out of me and I merely transcribed it into this website via the keyboard. If this went through a myriad of filters it must have been much more boring to read and I expect the only audience member I would have gotten reading this is Mr. B which I hope is not the case and other curious internet bystanders would stop their journey of traveling through cat pics and read through a couple of sentences, who knows they might enjoy something. It is the process of constantly putting yourself out of your comfort zone and trying to be the best at everything you try your hand at, while understanding that you will never be the best at everything you try your hand at. True improvement lies in absurdism, in realizing that things in and of themselves have no innate meaning and meaning lies only in that which we assign meaning. It is in perseverance and struggle where there lies man. It is the process where he is forever content with rolling a boulder down the hill endlessly, for one must imagine sisyphus happy.