/lit/ - Literature

They're not teaching you how to think. You're supposed to do that on your own time. The writing courses are designed to teach you to write. What is used to teach you to write is up to people whose opinions are likely different from your own. Liberal arts classes are what you make of them. If you choose not to get anything useful out of them, then that will be what you get.

it's about what you think, but there are standards as well. you are studying material and should understand the material to a certain level. this is reflected in the quality of your analysis and "opinions." the situation is probably that you didn't understand the material.

>>553531
this pleases your 4chan audience

/thread

>>553538

>thinking
>college

Go to your professor's office hours and TA's office hours. Get to know them. If they believe you know what you are talking, you write about whatever you want. If you are the quiet kid who the professor or TA won't recognize on sight, you are much more restricted in what you are allowed to get away with.

This is your fault. Go, now, and find out when office hours are. Do all of your reading before hand, have a thesis ready, prepare to back it up. If you are smart, they will allow it. If it's clear you're missing something or just making shit up to be controversial, they'll tell you.

It's all about defense. If you are good at arguing your point, they will be happy to read it. It's easier to write something interesting if the grader is prepared for it.

>>553557
Two green words and a reaction image? I've been permanently silenced by your extremely convincing rebuttal. Well done!

>>553557

ITT: People who have never been to college. Just because middle school was a breeze for you, it does not mean college is the same.

It depends on the professor.

I've had professors that grade based on how well you agree with them (no fucking joke), that grade on "professional" your paper sounds, professors that grade based on how well developed your ideas are...

It can be a gamble if you don't take time to figure out which kind of professor you have.

>>553531

I tutor in the fiction department at an arts college, and I'd argue this isn't always the case. Given there was a schism away from the English department, that it's an arts college, and we use a workshop teaching method, not all writing courses are cut from the same cloth.

Now, if you're talking about classes in rhetoric, yes, those can be bullshit, meant to acclimate students to a life of repeating what they're told within set parameters of creativity. Still, the essay form isn't flawed, only the presentation. An instructor who discourages opinion and exploration in favor of regurgitation is probably a withered husk of a being (with tenure) and will hopefully die soon.

But, as was said, thinking is your responsibility.

No, absolutely no thought is required in the papers that I write and get "A" grades for. I write whatever I think the teacher want to hear.
The reason is simple, why take the risk a presenting something somewhat original and getting a bad grade? If you fuck up on one or two papers in a class and you can lock yourself out of getting an "A" for the semester.
You can't take any risks in college classes if you are like me and can only stay on scholarship money.

I don't know, but I was a dual English lit / math major (weird, I know), and I have to say that some of the English courses were more rigorous than the math courses -- at least the lower level ones. Granted, my school was really heavily into the humanities / liberal arts so they took that stuff super seriously. The coursework was ultra conservative -- none of this revisionist, postmodernist, feminist stuff. They wanted you to read the damned Cannon, Capital "C" starting with the Greeks. I imagine that it was the type of education that the landed gentry would have gotten in Edwardian England... so, yeah, it's entirely useless, of course.

make sure you're right, then go ahead

JUST SUCK HIS DICK AND HE'LL GIVE YOU AN "A"

yeah I hate doing that.

>>553855

furthermore, this is why I am no longer an english major.