03.02.10- College Pressures + 47 word sentence

47 word sentence

I am a sentence that likes to go ride bicycles while eating bananas, though I don’t know why I am restricted to only being forty-seven words because I want to be something more than a bicycle riding banana eating forty-seven word sentence that I’m told to be.

College Pressures

William Zinsser’s article College Pressures was a little had for me to start reading, one: that it was such a beautiful day and two: that the excerpts were a little annoying to read.
Beyond that I really enjoyed the article a lot. Though it was talking about the students at a Yale law school in the 1970’s I could relate. Today I wanted to just sit on the lawn soak in the sun and just listen to the sounds outside, yet I’m under the pressure to pass this English class. I am under pressure to do well. Either for the benefit of raising my GPA so that I can get better scholarships to help pay for this education that I need to get to do well in the world or simply to become “the best person I can be”. Either way there is ALWAYS pressure upon the modern day college student. We (I use “we” in that I am part of this whole experience) are taught that we must decide on a subject to focus our studies on so that we can get a degree in a particular field. This degree is supposed to get us started ahead of everyone else so that we don’t have to start at the bottom of the ladder. This degree is supposed to prove that we are knowledgeable in a particular field. That it makes us worth more.
The thing is that though the standards have changed, the standards that raise the competitiveness that we are brought up in to believe to be the best and you will be happy, that pressures Zinsser states are all in the same: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and even self-induced pressure.
The concept of “the Gentleman’s C”, is a glorious concept. And in theory it is the standard of passing. Getting the grade “C” is the minimum someone can learn while proving that they can be knowledgeable in the subject. If you car getting “Cs”, lets say in all of your classes and all your classes are supposed to be different subjects. Yet that isn’t the case anymore. All the classes one takes these days are related to the ultimate goal of that glorious degree. The gentleman’s C is supposed to make you well rounded, to be knowledgeable in all things of the world, from history, to arts, to philosophy, to science. I like this concept of the gentleman’s C. It takes the pressure out of trying to be the best.