A few years ago I was teaching a class that I had a lot of problems with.  Nobody seemed to want to do the work and it was very hard to get any of them to participate in the class discussions.  I assigned them a psychology essay in which I was hoping to draw them out of their own little lives and into the classroom.

I offered them the opportunity to come to me if they needed some essay assistance and not one student took me up on that offer.  Needless to say, I was very disappointed and didn’t know what else to do with this class.  To make matters worse many of the essays that were handed it to me, were not their own work.

I am sure that over half the class went to a buy essay website to purchase their essays and this really made me angry as the whole reason for a signing in this project was to find out about more who they were as people.  I never in my whole life want a class like this again.

When I first entered college, I was really confused as to what assignments the professors were giving me.  You see, while one professor was assigning a dissertation to the class the other was asking for us to write a thesis.  I thought these are two different things and I was confused as to why my English professors would want different things for each of their classes.

In an effort to relieve my confusion, I decided to go online and look up the definition of what my professors were asking me to do.

As it turns out, they were both asking me to write an essay for their class.  Had I known that the answer was this simple I probably wouldn’t have stressed out so much and wouldn’t have been worried about the amount of work that I had to do.

My twelve year old son was working on a book report for his Language Arts class and I could tell that he was getting very frustrated. You see, he has always been very smart and has always been a perfectionist and I think for the first time in his life, he was having problems understanding the book he was writing on.

He asked me if I would please help him with it and this surprised me because he never ever wanted help with his homework before this point. I told him I would and asked him what the book was about. He told me it was about a family that was going whaling, but that there was a lot more to it than that.

I decided that I would read the book myself that night, so I could try to help him understand it. When I was talking to him about it the next day, I was sure he had a pretty good grasp as to what it was all about. He wrote the report, with very little help from his mother, and he did very well on it.

Of all the things that I remember from my years in college, I would have to say that the most boring thing I remember is writing the countless term papers I needed to complete my degree.  I don’t know if the professors just wanted to inflict pain on students as the number of papers that I wrote was a little ridiculous.

I especially didn’t care for the few research papers that I was forced to write as the amount of work needed to complete them interfered with my other assignments.

At one point, the workload was too much and I went online and did a search for "termpaper", to see if I could buy a paper instead of writing it myself.  But at the time, the prices were too high, so I had to pass on purchasing one.

I’m very happy that I don’t really have to write anything for my current job as college sucked the writer out of me.

I learned, early on in my education that, including a bibliography was an important part of research papers. The first one that I wrote did not include a bibliography, as I did not feel like writing it and didn’t think that one small page could really affect the final mark that much. And, really it didn’t.

So, when it came time to hand in my second essay, to the very same teacher, I decided to try this again. This time it blew up in my face. Because I had been too lazy to do this, she gave me an incomplete mark and I ended up getting a big fat zero for the assignment. I decided then, that maybe it was important to do all the work after all.

All of the term papers that I have written since then, have included the bibliography. The funny thing about this is that it really only takes about five minutes to do this and I ended up with a low mark in a class because I was too lazy to do five minutes worth of work. It doesn’t make sense after spending ours writing the actually paper. I will never take something like this for granted ever again.

As a professor, I am not at all happy with the fact that it is so easy to go and buy term paper assignments. I know that there is very little that I can do about it, as it would be very hard to prove anything, but I know it is a lot more common than any of us want to admit. It is a little bit fishy when you have a struggling student who hands in a perfect paper.

I have brought up the subject in my ethics class. I posed the question both ways. I wanted to know if there were people that would never pay for a custom written essay, but that would write it because they wanted the money. It is interesting that there are many students who feel it is more wrong to hand one of these in than it is to actually do the writing for someone else.

As an added piece for this class, I gave them the assignment of writing book reports. One would be handed in and the mark given to the student who wrote it. The second report would be marked and the mark would be given to a different student. I was curious to see how the quality of writing would differ. It was an amazing experiment, as they took very little care in the reports that were being graded for other students.

For those of you out there that have seen me play golf, well, don’t laugh.  I know that I am one of the most horrible players out there.  I mean, does a hole in eighteen constitute as good?

Alright you now know the truth.

But, just because you are bad at something, doesn’t mean you can’t improve.  So with that hope in mind, I have enrolled myself in a Florida Golf School in a couple of months.  This will give me a chance to get better at the game I love.

What I do like is that the Academy of Golf offers this professional golf instruction at a reasonable price.  Which is great for someone like me that doesn’t have a large budget to work with.

So, we will see what I can pickup at the golf lessons - it would be nice if people didn’t laugh at me for a change.

I am really good friends with a high school English teacher. She knows how much I love to use the computer and how much time I spend on one, so she asked me to do her a favor. She wanted me to do a search and find out how easy it was to get a custom term paper online.

She had a couple of students that had improved in their abilities to the point where she was pretty sure that the work was not theirs. I keyed in “buy essay” into a search engine and showed her the hundred of results that I had come up with. I could tell that she was not impressed.

She asked if there was any way I could find the custom research paper that her one student had handed in. I tried and it was a lot easier than I had thought it would be. The poor kid was busted, but I am sure he will not be doing that again. Not at the threat of expulsion.

I really miss my husband. He is at home nearly every night, but he is not really with us. He is working on his dissertation. It consumes pretty much all of his time and he is pretty nonexistent in our little world. I am not angry with him, as I know this really important for the future of our family. But, it doesn’t make me miss him any less.

I really have to admit that I had no idea what thesis writing would actually do to a young family. I really fear for my husband that he is missing out on too much of our baby’s life. He seems to miss all of the really big milestones, such as our son’s first steps and his first words.

I hope that things are drastically different when he does finally finish his dissertation. I am sure he will have more time for us. Maybe he will even work at a nine-to-five job and will be with us in the evening. It will be great when he can finally leave his work at work. I know it is not much longer and I need to keep supporting him. I am proud of him and his accomplishments.

I am taking a commerce class at the local college on investing. I have been investing, myself, for a few years now, but I wanted a more in depth education on the subject. I have enjoyed investing since the day that I started and this got me to thinking that maybe this was a career path that I needed to be considering.

I did a lot of stock picks research for a term paper that I was writing and I learned so much through the research that I did. It was a great learning experience for me and I was so happy that I had chosen that particular subject to write on. My professor was equally impressed and actually urged me to continue with my education, as I could help a lot of people who did not understand the stock market.

He said that I was a natural and it would be a shame to waste that gift. It was easy for me to understand this language that most people felt was foreign to them. It got me to thinking that I really ought to give more thought to this as a career choice. I am still thinking about it, as going to school full time is a big commitment and I want to make sure that I am ready to do this.