I'm reading the first round of placement essays for in-coming freshmen, in an attempt to corral them into various levels of remedial classes. I did not develop this prompt, and it's a bland, horrific one that does nothing but ask students to list one mundane inanity after another. The prompt: "What are your hobbies and why do you like them?" Like I said, it's a horrible prompt... but the answers! Oh, the answers. They make me wonder if students are really as boring as they indicate on paper, or if the prompt has shaped the wasted answers of students.Top Five Hobbies (no order, other than that it seems more suspenseful to create a list):
5. Watching movies/TV: is this really what you want your professors to know about you? Essay after essay has attempted to convince me of the importance of going to the movies as a social, educational, and time-wasting activity, a necessity, if you must know.
4. Shopping and hanging out out at the mall: really? We needed an essay on the reasons you like shopping and talking with your friends in the food court?
3. Playing games on the computer: Yawn!
2. Facebook: how is this a hobby? Seriously: how is spending time on Facebook a hobby? Does one count collecting friends as comparable to, I don't know, collecting stamps or coins? Is commenting on or liking someone's status something one would boast about to others?
1. Drinking coffee: apparently what one does every day, simply to wake up, is now considered a hobby. I didn't even know I had this hobby! Billions of people around the world share this hobby and don't even know it's a hobby.
I'd love for someone, anyone, to write that they like to climb cell-phone towers and photograph the view from above, or that they collect used remote controls and catalog their tiny parts according to size and then store said parts in miniature Ziploc bags and bury them in the backyard in time capsules, or someone whose idea of a hobby is to tie gigantic bows on people's cars in parking lots just to make them smile (or enrage them; either one works for me), or even lick windows to compare their various textures, which are then catalogued in a notebook that one also needs to lick. When did what used to be an interesting pastime turn into simply listing what one does regularly and then count that as a hobby? I might as well count eating lunch as a hobby.
Yes, the prompt is lame, but people, you can make shit up on placement essays. Just to alleviate the boredom of having to write a placement essay, I'd claim that my hobby is to crash receptions on campus to see how many people I can chat up before someone realizes I don't belong, or I'd claim that my hobby is to collect placement essays to turn into 'found' poetry haiku when insomnia strikes, and finally, I'd buck the system, convert the prompt, just to show that I have SOME bone of creativity in my body by claiming that hobbies are so 1994 and I now no longer have hobbies but have a philosophy that forces me to follow Lady Gaga around the country to document what she's wearing and then emulate it on a weekly basis.
I don't get it: are they really as boring as the prompt?
"My hobby is sleeping" (genuine student quote).
ReplyDeleteThe above student needs the coffee hobby. ^^^
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised that the list wasn't topped by masturbating. Now you know why I did away with "get-to-know-you" surveys like this in my clases years ago: reading them was too depressing. But now you know, when they can't solve 1/3 + 1/4 = ?, or when they've never heard of the War of 1812, what they've been doing all their lives. "The Dumbest Generation," by Mark Bauerlein, has more on this: notice how three of your top five items involve consumer electronics.
ReplyDeleteAlong with golf and summarizing Proust
DeleteThe original list of hobbies was strangling animals, golf, and masturbating. When the censors bleeped out masturbating, the conclusion was that strangling animals is OK.
DeleteWhat you need is at least one essay like this:
ReplyDeleteDate: Thu, 17 Aug 95 08:49:47 EDT
From: [who knows]
Subject: One Amaz'n College Student
This is an actual essay written by a college applicant to NYU. The author was accepted and is now attending NYU.
3A. IN ORDER FOR THE ADMISSIONS STAFF OF OUR COLLEGE TO GET TO KNOW YOU, THE APPLICANT, BETTER, WE ASK THAT YOU ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION:
ARE THERE ANY SIGNIFICANT EXPERIENCES YOU HAVE HAD, OR ACCOMPLISHMENTS YOU HAVE REALIZED, THAT HAVE HELPED TO DEFINE YOU AS A PERSON?
I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently.
Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.
I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.
Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.
I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie.
Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don't perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat .400.
My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.
I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations with the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.
I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven.
I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin.
I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.
But I have not yet gone to college.
----- End Included Message -----
Written in 1995? That explains it! But yes, how hard is it to come up with anything that shows an awareness of the silliness that is the placement essay, and the prompt?
DeleteAnd he doesn't always drink beer, but when he does, he prefers Dos Equis.
DeleteOr she, as the case may be.
DeleteHe
DeleteUnfortunately, this essay exceeded the word limit so the applicant was dismissed.
ReplyDeleteSeriously? If you don't have something interesting to write for a prompt like that, you make some shit up. In one of my early Spanish classes, we had to do a short composition about a time we had been on a train. I'd never been, so I made up this story about how I traveled across Europe on a train. I figured that the teacher was going to have to read a bunch of dull, identical essays, so why not throw in something different?
ReplyDeleteI wonder if some students are just too dumb to know what "hobbies" means, and think it means "what do you do when you're not in class."
The intro to that essay is wonderfully vague, just enough to actually be not untrue.
ReplyDeleteSince my hobby is popping internet hoaxes, Snopes, via about.com, reminds us that this essay was actually written for a humor contest, in which it won, and was not the student's application essay. The student did, apparently, go to NYU afterwards. The two events may, or may not, be related.
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blbyol3.htm
I collect Victorian dip pens.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, it's better to just make shit up.
Yes, they are that boring.
ReplyDeleteAnd they so often complain of being bored. My grandmother, or perhaps my au pair--or was it my Albanian lover right before he left to trek solo across the Kalahari? Anyway, one of them said "Only boring people are bored."
ReplyDeleteRelated is Chesterton's observation that there are no uninteresting subjects, just uninterested people.
DeleteDidn't there used to be a panic about how all our kids are over-scheduled? How can they be signed up for six different types of lessons and still not have a hobby?
ReplyDeleteI think the problem is that they don't often choose these or know that others didn't used to do all of this so they think that it's just part of how things are, versus being a hobby.
DeleteKids who’ve been scheduled by their parents every moment of their lives don’t have hobbies. Hobbies are activities one does voluntarily, in one's spare time.
DeleteOh crap! If drinking coffee doesn't count as a hobby- then drinking vodka won't count either! Dammit! I guess I could start a "bottle" collection, I just have to empty them first...
ReplyDeleteSounds fair. "I collected alcohol bottles, which I then empty." When I was a kid, I collected cigarette boxes to store my treasures in. I probably called it a hobby then.
Delete