In The Name of Education

People do all sorts of things in order to get a good education. In America people do all sorts of things to bs their way around a good education.

Everyone remembers those projects in school that seemed so endlessly boring until you and your friends came up with a creative way to get credit while doing very little actual work or doing plenty of work, but designing it solely for the purpose of pissing off the teacher (or in my case to piss off that one kid in the back of the room).

My older sister's boyfriend once put together a business plan for a Baby Farm. I'm talking in the style of A Modest Proposal. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, your English classes sucked or you were asleep.) That's right him and his friends put together a legitimate project on selling babies for food. They had to get full points for doing the project, but completely pissed off the teacher.

My freshman year of high school I had science class with two of my best guys friends. We had a truly pathetic teacher. He was one of those teachers that was there for coaching and nothing else. We spent the entire year having doodle battles in his class, we were responsible for his aversion to the term "blast off", and we turned in the same assignment for every one due and still got full points. I actually once answered the question "Where does lightning come from?" with "God doesn't like people so he shoots lightning at them." When it asked me to draw a diagram of this, I drew a picture off God zapping people with lightning. I still got full points. This teacher hated us a lot. Our sophmore year when some of our freshman friends had the same teacher we'd bother them before class started. We actually got physically banned from ever entering his classroom again.

My sophmore year of high school I took world history with a couple of my friends. I actually liked this class, but was no less lazy because of this fact. When the teacher would give us layered curriculum, I'd do enough of the super simple D and C projects so I would pass no matter what. Then me and my friends would make a video for the A level. We'd then turn it in without doing any B projects and still get an A because the teacher couldn't figure out how to calculate it. Also she was never quite sure if she just lost the project I did.
A Side Note: these videos were really bad yet historically accurate as far as the facts. They weren't so historically accurate as far as the portrayal of modern teenagers playing entire countries, potatoes, mold, continents, plagues, and just about anything that could lead to us tackling my friend, Veg.

My junior year of high school for psychology class me and my friend had to conduct a study. We decided to see how people might react to a survey taker based on how they were dressed. After standing in front of Wal-Mart all day wearing camo, a pirate costume, and regular clothes, we discovered that people don't want to take surveys period. If you're dressed funny they are likely to just runaway (literally). We were supposed to do several days of this, but since we are lazy and procrastinators we waited until the last minute and did it only once. We then just shoved everything together to resemble data and then did a presentation where we just described some of the better reactions we received.

My senior year of high school while we were reading 1984 in English class we had to come up with a distopian society that relates to the one in 1984. Me and my pals did a matriarchy. We actually got quite into this one and ended up doing way more research and work than was necessary. It turned out totally awesome and we even got the teacher to try and convince the class to argue for it being a Utopia (The Fish as we called him was quite awesome). Also we managed to piss off that one kid in the back.

Now that I'm in college I still bs projects. (Mostly English essays which I still get A's on.) I, however am far more dedicated to most of my classes than I was in high school. Yesterday I was an actor in one of my classmate's short films. Since it was a mock mad scientist horror movie I played the experiment. I spent three hours duct taped to a bench that was ripped out of the back of a van, in the basement of an old church. My friends (the crew) of course couldn't pass up the opportunity to torture me once I had no way to evade their attacks or fight back. My feet were slapped repeatedly. While, I got to lay there and do nothing for most of the shoot it wasn't exactly comfortable. (Seriously, try it sometime.) I felt very much like I was abducted, by jerry-rigging aliens. I had people standing over me holding boom mikes, cameras, and tripods (not to mention their constant poking) My forehead was dabbed repeatedly with a mysterious smelling cloth that was dipped in a bowl of teeth filled water. I'm either going to die from some mysterious disease or gain immortality. (Result are pending.) If I wasn't a film student I would not be doing this. If I wasn't dedicated to this I also would not be doing this.

The things we do in the name of and education. Or rather the things I do for an education.