I’m not the kind of person to just accept what I’m told. I might even be willing to admit that I have issues with authority. This isn’t to say that I’ll attack or antagonize someone in charge just for the sake of doing it. I just want to make sure that I’m clear on the how and why of the reasoning behind certain things.

For example, when I arrived at Northern Arizona University’s Master’s program, I went ahead and planned out the whole two years. Of course, I made some adjustments along the way, but I was pretty sure of what courses I wanted to take and when I wanted to complete those courses. My first semester, I took ten hours, which included a teaching practicum and a one hour writing center seminar. I was informed that I would be required to take the writing center seminar for every semester I worked in the Writing Center (potentially four semesters, though I ended up only working there for two, since I began teaching Eng 205 my second year). I couldn’t help but ask what the point of it was. I thought, “this is one hour of every week that I can’t get back.” Let alone the fact that the content of the “course” was going to probably be repeated each semester.

When I asked a second year student about this, she simply said, “I’ve had to take it every semester, so you will too.” Where is the logic in this? It makes me think of a sorority/fraternity gone wrong: “well, every semester we shave our heads and dance around in peanut butter after drinking five kegs of beer, so of course we’ll do this again!”

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