I awoke with paper scars from napping on the scantrons of
two thousand five hundred and fifty six days.
Nine semesters.
Bachelor serving a doctor’s time; malpractice.
My name is a seven digit number and I am a three point five.
Four sheets of scrap paper and two number two pencils and as
an English major I’m throwing out more fucking numbers than
a politically correct ‘waste management engineer’ in a shut-down
calculator factory that inevitably failed because the CEO didn’t finish
his business undergrad program.  Because that shit happens.
Five thousand times nine is forty five thousand.
Twenty one credits means seven classes, which means
up to ten books, which means
possibly one thousand extra dollars that doesn’t include tuition.
Credits are the equivalent of how many hours you are in class a week so
that’s twenty one hours.  Two hours shy of an entire day according to the Earth’s enormous hourglass.  Paradox hour glass.  Not enough sand on days we need it and too much on days we don’t.  Either way we are slaves to it; will we ever be okay?
And again I’m an English major and I’m throwing out more numbers than
the model chick at the bar getting harassed by deformed TKE boys
before the rejection hotline was a real thing.
I’m an English major, so force me to take spin class.
Hold me hostage in an Earth science class because
I give a fuck about what kind of rock a rock is.
Let the pastor at my funeral with the philosophy
degree say: “His tombstone is granite
and that is an igneous rock.  It forms through
the slow crystallization of magma below
the Earth’s surface…he learned that in an fucking area course”.
Yes, I want the pastor to say ‘fucking’ because
‘fuck’ has been used since the sixteenth century and
that is something I learned as an English major.
But, penalize me because I can’t fill in a bubble
on a scantron right.  Penalize me because I can’t remember
which Bronte sister wrote Wuthering Heights and which
one wrote Jayne Eyre.  I forgot. I’m an English major
so state tests know I’ve read every book ever written…
ever.
Deprive a human that is genuinely concerned about the
education of adolescents because HE knows that it’s like
to struggle in high school.  He fathoms what it’s like
to get an incompetent teacher on a power trip that gets
the same euphoric sensation  a cop gets with a badge that he or she gets
behind a desk with an apple.  One a day keeps students away.  Give
a dastardly ditz with a branded brain of memories douche jocks
gave him/her with a scorned attitude that screams “my students will
pay for the ignorance of my fucked up classmates” a job.
Give a tenured position to a teacher that refuses to stay passed
3:05 because he/she works in Jersey City, where his/her students
live and it’s dangerous to walk to your car after sunset.  Your life is more
valuable.  Fuck those “the bell doesn’t dismiss you, I dismiss you” teachers
that just love that power over a kid, but don’t feel the need to address
informal and formal language and code switching, so a student can
go on a job interview and not call someone “bruh”.  
 
Penalize the passionate.  Penalize the people that would love their job,
but struggle with tests.  Colleges don’t train English majors for tests.
I have paper scars from the essays that get counted as finals because
giving a test to English majors is so far from the answer it’s out of the
question.
“At most colleges students have less than a fifty percent chance of graduating
in less than four years”.  Yes, that is in MLA formatting.
Less than fifty percent…glad I took that statistics area course. I’m an English
major, so you do the fucking math.