"Surviving is Necessary to Stay Alive" (and Other Insights from College Freshmen)

At Palomar College where I teach part-time, the English 50 final exam is a two-hour, hand-written, prompt-driven essay. Students are given a brief article to read a week before their final, are allowed to annotate the article and do whatever preliminary "research" (term used loosely) on the general topic addressed in the article, and then, upon arrival the day of the final, are given a prompt in which they are asked to discuss an open-ended question addressing some aspect of the article. Typically, the prompts ask the students to agree, disagree (or worse, both) with the issue raised in the article. 

On the Friday after the students have completed their exam, the English professors assemble as a body to grade the student essays. Professors who teach the subject don't grade their own student essays. Two readers evaluate an essay separately and a final grade is assigned based on the average of the two scores. 

Needless to say, generally speaking, the papers are . . aren't . . . (how to put this politely) . . . Put it this way: they could be better. Many students, it seems, come ill-prepared for the task, either by failing to engage intellectually with the topic, or, um, by failing to engage intellectually with the topic. 

It's a bit depressing, I admit, reading one vapid essay after another. D's and F's are frequently assigned, B's are seldom seen, A's, never. You can hear the sighing, the groaning, and, occasionally, the laughing. Last semester, to lighten the atmosphere during the grading session, professors began wandering up to the white board to jot down some choice phrases from the essays. 

Here's a sampling: 

People who have only one body need to take care of it. 

The American dream is only 48% of what it used to be. 

What's love got to do, got do to, with Tinder. 

Tinder, which got its name from the word "tinder," meaning "can be ignited by a match."

Surviving is necessary to stay alive. 

Social media is now changing what the heart wants. It is causing chaos towards romanticism. 

Even those who say they are not judgmental are wrong. 

When someone works hard for their money and then spends it on a rental, they're showing pride of rentalship.

That last one is the one I contributed to the white board collection. I actually thought it was pretty clever. I don't know if the writer was trying to be funny. I like to think he was.