I’m angry, both with myself for turning in a substandard product and, irrationally, with things external to myself, some quasi-legit, some totally ill-legit. 5.5/10 on my project abstract for transportation & land use. Truth be told, it deserved that, and was written and turned in at the last minute. (I was 20 minutes late to a 75 minute class, and it was still warm from the printing). I can plead a few things here, 1) ass surgery & pain meds. That’s quasi-legit. I was awake enough to play board & video games, cook meals, read intricate sci-fi plots, and generally fart around, hence the “quasi”. 2) unreasonable instructor expectations. He asked for a fucking map on my abstract. Yeah, it’s a very spatial course, and I’m doing a very spatial project. But this is an _abstract_. None of our example abstracts had a map. None had charts. None had tables. A small minority had bullet points. And he asked for a map. If I had the fucking map, the project would be mostly done by now. I doubt the lack of map detracted nearly as much as the vagueness of my data source references. If I’d bother to do assignments more than 24 hours in advance, maybe my life wouldn’t suck so much.
Those are the big ones. Grr. Hateselfhateteacher.
It’d probably be more productive to view this as constructive criticism. That is, after all, the goal of a checkpoint, to provide constructive criticism, and there is much to provide. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be loving life more. Let me finish my paper on Pittsburgh’s economy over the past 30+ years and we’ll talk.
I don’t think *I’ve* ever needed a map on an abstract, & I’m the geographer!