From the Archives - Dead Week Poetry

Introduction

Man, college was a long time ago … 25 years. But I still remember it so well, especially the really hard parts, like final exams. I used to do these mammoth study sessions in the school library, which was always packed during dead week. Fittingly, I’m putting together this blog post in a public library, which is also hopping.

I wrote the following poem during a study break. It wasn’t much of a break because a) I couldn’t leave the library for fear of losing my seat, and b) the poem itself required mental effort. But writing it did treat my brain to a little novelty. Maybe yours, too!

Pausing in the Library on a Busy Evening – December 10, 1991

What’s on the test I think I know.
I have to plan three essays, though;                          2
My work’s completion’s not yet near
Though I began ten hours ago.

Those watching me must think it queer
That all this time I’m sitting here.                             6
My slouch and frown together make
A nervous bundle, wracked with fear.

With UPTime keeping me awake
My hand, while writing, can’t but shake.               10
My thoughts comprise a jumbled heap
Of doubts about the test I’ll take.

I’m not an antisocial geek,
But I’ve good grades I have to keep,                         14
And pages to write before I sleep
And pages to write before I sleep.    

Footnotes & commentary

Title: Pausing … Busy Evening

I doubt there’s an English major in history who wouldn’t immediately recognize my poem as a take-off on Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I really don’t know what inspired me to suddenly stop studying and do this quasi-tribute.

Interestingly, as I look now on the history of Frost’s poem I see that his effort and mine were somewhat similar. I’d been working all day and into the night preparing for my final exams in English and, during a break, suddenly had a poem idea pop into my head. So it was with Frost, who was working all night on a long poem and, taking a break to watch the sun rise, suddenly got the idea for “Stopping by Woods.” He wrote the new poem “about the snowy evening and the little horse as if I’d had a hallucination,” in “just a few minutes without strain.”  I wouldn’t say there was anything hallucinatory about my poem, though after 15 hours straight of studying that’s not so far off. And I wrote my poem very quickly too, and if there was any strain it at all it came from replicating Frost’s cool rhyme scheme (more on this later).

Line 1: I think I know

My professors tended to give us pretty good clues into the kinds of things that would be on the final exam, but not enough to give me a lot of confidence. We read a ton of books for each class—at least half a dozen—and it was a good idea to read book each more than once. The second time through, a million things would become clearer because less of my brain would be taken up trying to keep characters straight, order events in the right sequence, and figure out what the hell was going on in. But there just wasn’t time to read everything twice, so I had to try to guess what books mattered the most to the prof and would end up on the exam.

My test prep was all about focusing my efforts on what seemed likely to pay off. I’d try to predict what would be on the test, and prepare rigorously for that. Often I’d go into a test totally unprepared to write about certain books, taking a calculated risk that the extra time I spent on certain other books would pay dividends. As it turned out, I was only burned once by this method. Perhaps my real skill as a college student wasn’t in literary comprehension, but in risk assessment. Here’s a sample (from my notes) of that process (evidently based upon a hint from the prof that he’d be asking us to compare two novels):

Line 4: ten hours ago

I don’t think this “ten hours” figure is accurate. If you look at the first picture in this post, you can see an arrow with “15 hrs” indicated. (I often tracked how long I spent studying, though I really can’t say why. Probably just out of habit, like my cycling training diary.) Maybe the 15 hours included some studying I did at home. Or maybe I didn’t feel like reworking this line of the poem to accommodate a two-syllable word (i.e., “fifteen”).

Line 5: those watching me

This was lazy writing. I mean, who could possibly be watching me study? The speaker in Frost’s poem had a horse handy to second-guess his behavior, but I did not. I should have pondered the matter of whether I myself thought it queer to study so long. (It strikes me as queer now, that’s for sure … my attention span has surely shrunk.)

Line 7: slouch and frown

This phrase, “slouch and frown,” is really pretty weak. The slouch is okay but I should have focused on how tight my neck was, how hunched my back, and how tense my entire body was. That would have led in to the next line much more nicely.

Line 8: nervous bundle

I liked this phrase “nervous bundle” right away, as it conveys the idea of being “bundle of nerves” and also the idea of my spine and how all the nerves join in this big bundle or something, and how aware you get of all that when you’re so tired and stressed out that even your spine starts complaining (see previous comment).

Line 8: wracked with fear

I wasn’t the only kid scared shitless about his upcoming finals. The student library was a cesspool of stress during dead week. You could just feel the fear hanging in the air. The atmosphere was suffocating, which is perhaps why, whenever I could, I studied in in the very spacious Doe Library. Doe was one of those almost unbelievably beautiful university buildings. Here’s a photo:

Frankly, that gorgeous room, with its thick oak desks and high ceiling, inspired me to study longer and harder, and the relatively small number of students it accommodated had a calming effect. It was definitely in Doe that I wrote this poem—I can remember it vividly, even down to exactly where I was sitting. I’m not sure how I managed to score a seat in Doe during Dead Week.  

I wasn’t always this lucky, of course. Another time during Dead Week I got stuck having to study in the Moffitt Undergraduate Library, which had low ceilings, tiny study carrels, and a lower proportion of liberal arts majors. (Other majors involved more stress, I think.) Here’s an excerpt from my notes from a study session at Moffitt:

I wish I could blow this place up. This is sheer misery. All these fervent, steaming, stressed-out people, their legs popping up and down like a jackhammer, the wads of gum stuck to this study box now bubbling and dribbling down towards the desk (which is swimming in a flood of grease from pimply foreheads and chins). Somebody has thrown a textbook into a 2nd-floor toilet, where it disrupted a long-abandoned, un-flushed load—turning it to cocoa. This I see in a gruesome flashback, instigated by my still unrelieved bowel.

Line 9: with UPTime keeping me awake

UPTime was, and is, a big horse-pill containing caffeine, gingko biloba, ginseng, cayenne pepper, Spirulina Blue Green Algae, Echinacea, and other stuff.

Whether or not UPTime worked better than NoDoz, it had the advantage of being free, for me. UPTime sponsored the UCSB cycling team with loads of free product, and even after I transferred to UC Berkeley I still had a bunch left. Plus, I worked at a bike shop and I got the manufacturer to send us a whole bunch of free product samples, which carried me through all the way to graduation. If anything, UPTime worked too well: I could stay awake for ages and ages but wasn’t exactly comfortable.

Line 10: can’t but shake

Case in point.

Line 11: comprise

My first boss, at my first corporate job after college, was also a Berkeley grad and really dug that we had the same alma mater. On the downside, he was self-assured to a fault, and once upbraided me for using the word “comprise” in the way I used it in this poem (i.e., as a transitive verb). He declared that it could only be used passively, in the phrase “is comprised of.” He was dead wrong, of course, but he also controlled my salary so I instantly capitulated and used “is comprised of” in all my job-related writing. To this day, using “comprise” as a transitive verb gives me a little rush of liberation. (“You cannot reach me now!”)

Line 13: antisocial geek

Another poor line born of laziness. Everybody is an antisocial geek during Dead Week, except maybe at party schools. Did I really think anybody noticed that I had isolated myself from all society in order to study? Certainly not, no more than I really believed anybody was watching me study (cf. line 5). Probably I just wanted a throwaway line that (more or less) rhymed with “keep” and “sleep.”

Speaking of the rhyme scheme, Frost created something pretty clever there. At first blush it’s not so special: the first two lines rhyme, the third doesn’t, and then the fourth line rhymes again (i.e., with the first two). So the rhyme scheme is AABA. So what? Well, check out the fifth line (i.e., the first line of the second stanza). It rhymes with the third line (of the first stanza), which previously hadn’t rhymed with anything. This convention holds for most of the poem, so the first three stanzas go AABA BBCB CCDC. Perhaps because Frost didn’t’ want to leave any line unrhymed, he didn’t follow the convention for the last stanza (i.e., didn’t do DDED) but rather had every line in the final stanza rhyme: DDDD. So it’s a 16-line poem with only 4 different line endings. Cool, huh?

I’m tempted to pat myself on the back for appreciating this nifty rhyme scheme even without having Frost’s poem in front of me when I wrote my poem. (This was before the Internet, after all). But since I mimicked not only Frost’s convention but the actual rhymes (that is, I did AABA BBCB CCDC DDDD as opposed to EEFE FFGF GGHG IIII), it’s possible I wasn’t actually aware of what I was doing.

Line 14: good grades I have to keep

It’s easy to see why a high school student would be obsessed with getting good grades: after all, as explained here, the conventional wisdom is that if you don’t get perfect grades, you’ll never get into a good college, and you’ll never get a good job or a good spouse and you’ll live in miserable, lonely poverty your whole life. But why would a college kid, already enrolled in the school he wanted, be wracked with fear about maintaining good grades?

Perhaps at this point in my education I hadn’t yet ruled out grad school … though I’m pretty sure I never seriously considered that. Maybe I figured potential employers would actually care about my grades. But more than anything, I wanted to graduate summa cum laude (i.e., with highest honors). I’ll concede this was perhaps an arbitrary goal, and maybe I sought it simply to offset the lack of respect I so frequently suffered due to my major (e.g., “English? What are you gonna do with that?”). In any event, I’m not so sure my effort was worth it. When I was interviewing for that all-important first job out of college, only one person commented on my college record. This was an engineer who asked, “So … summa cum laude … is that a fraternity?”

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From the Archives - UCSB Final Exam Maelstrom

Introduction

When I was a college kid I wrote essays, much like the posts on this blog, and mailed photocopies to family and friends.  (Did all that writing practice help?  Well, as you’ll see below, I once had an addiction to m-dashes—the long horizontal bars that set off clauses like this one—and over the years I have gradually learned how to use these m-dashes more responsibly.  So that’s something.)

I spent my freshman and sophomore years at UC Santa Barbara, and wrote a multi-part guide on How To Be a UCSB Student.  Chapter Three was “Taking Final Exams.”  Since Dead Week at UCSB starts next week, and final exams the week after, I think this is a good time to post these basic instructions.  (Needless to say, this is a humor piece, not an actual guide, so the target audience is anybody who ever went to college, plus anybody who hasn’t and wonders what college is like.)

How to Take Final Exams — March 20, 1989

Part One:  Organizing your Exams

Organize your exam schedule when you sign up for classes before the quarter starts.  The Schedule of Classes lists the exam time for every class; sign up carefully so that you never have two finals in one day.

Often, you won’t get one (or any) of your classes, and you must enter the Schedule Adjustment arena and fight for anything you can get.  Since you usually end settling for classes like Immunology or Twelfth Century Bulgarian Studies just to keep your status as a full‑time student, it actually isn’t very likely that you’ll be able to select your classes with the above guideline in mind.  You may well end up with all your hardest exams on the same day.  This is normal.

Part Two:  Staying on Top of Things

Preparation for final exams actually starts during the first week of the quarter.   I know, that sounds early, but to be properly prepared, you must begin blowing off school early in the first week, and stick with your neglect until a week before finals.  Otherwise, you’ll be hopelessly unprepared for Dead Week, because impending doom won’t hang over you like a dark cloud.  To get that week‑long adrenaline rush you must be well behind in all your classes. 

If there is any reading assigned during the quarter, it can be done during the last weekend before Dead Week.  If you read it before then, you will forget everything and have to reread it all anyway, so save yourself the trouble.  (Actually, you’ll probably forget it all before the test anyway, so don’t even buy your textbooks.  That can save you precious time, and precious money, as the average cost of a UCSB textbook is $140.)

Sometimes your subconscious tells you, “Aw, c’mon, you know this stuff.  You don’t need to study it.  Just look over it the night before the test.”  Listen to your subconscious!  It knows what it’s doing!  Besides, you can always change your mind two days before the test.  I always do. 

Part Three:  Dead Week

Dead Week is the week right before Finals, during which teachers are not to assign any homework or give any tests.  French teachers always give a unit test during Dead Week, English teachers always assign a major paper, and routine assignments are never cancelled.  So why is it called Dead Week?  Well, after you stay up past midnight every day of the week, cancel all your appointments (including meals), and read 4,000 pages per day, you’ll know why.

Dead Week is a very good time to find out exactly what classes you are signed up for.  Nothing is worse than finding out you’re enrolled in a Third World Studies course two days before the exam.  Check into that now, or you might have to cram during Finals Week.

Part Four:  Staking Your Claim in the Library

Many students forget, during the quarter, that the library exists.  However, word travels fast and from Dead Week on, everybody will be fighting for a spot as it literally reaches maximum capacity.

The first indicator of Finals will be the 4.5 billion bikes parked out front.  If you work at a bike shop, a few strategically thrown hand grenades will double business for at least a month.  If you’ve come to study, though, you’ll need to find a place to park.  Be VERY CAREFUL walking around the bikes that are leaning on their kickstands.  I’ve seen the “Domino Effect,” and it’s ugly.  Lock everything; many thieves rely on Finals to feed their families—how else can they get every bike on campus in one place at midnight with nobody around to watch?

[Here’s a photo of the bikes parked in front of the UCSB library on a typical day in 1988.  During finals the number of bikes is like double this.]

Lining up at the library is a lot like lining up at a rock concert, although I haven’t had to camp out yet.  Show up early, and you may be one of the first to stampede the library looking for a study booth.  Normally, there’s room for everyone, but not during Dead Week—booths that haven’t been used for months will be filled instantly.  Once you have your booth, you must place within it a minimum of $1,000 worth of textbooks and supplies to verify your claim.  Once you have done this, leave.  This will infuriate all who pace the aisles late looking for a seat.

If you must go to class or to the store, leave everything behind.  Otherwise you will never get a booth in the library again—until Finals are over.  Often, your things will be looted.  This is normal.  Having a place to study is usually a  matter of who will risk the most to get it.

Part Five:  Attitude Enhancement Through Chemistry

After staying up until 2 a.m. all week and still being behind, a student will often ask himself, “Is it worth it?”  The answer is, of course, no.  But that shouldn’t discourage the tenacious student.  If it does, however, he must resort to chemicals to trick his brain into thinking it either likes studying, or will die without it (as is often the case). 

Brain Steroids, if used frequently, cause an elongation of the head into, well, an egg‑shape.  Most professional scholars agree that this just isn’t worth it (although you have to wonder how they got to where they are today).  Hence, you should use the next best thing:  No‑Doz.  Don’t worry, it’s as safe as coffee—one tablet is as safe as three pots of coffee.  If you usually sleep nights during the quarter, your tolerance will be low and one tablet a night will be plenty—until the third or fourth night, when your body will need ten to twelve tablets.  You’ll know the drug is working when, fifteen minutes after consumption, you beat your chest and yell, “YEEEEEEEAH!  LET’S GO STUDY!  WOOO‑HOOO!”

Part Six:  Making a Little Money on the Side

Set up a booth in the library selling pencils, index cards, and No‑Doz.  You can sell magazines, too—it’s amazing just how many breaks students take while studying.  And you can sell your booth—ones by the window will get top dollar.  I know a guy who made $300 in one Dead Week.  Of course, he had to drop out of school after that.  Now he’s a millionaire.

Part Seven:  Getting to the Final on Time

There are three possible scenarios for your Final Exam departure. The first scenario involves the lazy student who lies around “collecting his thoughts” until two minutes before the test, and must race to campus.  The second scenario involves the well-meaning but absentminded student who loses track of time while doing his last‑minute studying—which is often his only studying—and shows up like half an hour late to his test.  The third scenario involves the responsible student who ... no, I guess there are only two scenarios.

Some students believe in locating the testing room beforehand.  People like me know better.  I mean, racing around looking for the testing room, when the exam has already started, will do wonders for your adrenaline.  Besides, it’s not often that you get to walk in late and actually interrupt something!

Part Eight:  Taking the Final

Above all, don’t panic.  Sure, you’re winging three hour‑long essay questions.  Sure, this test is 80% of your grade and represents the culmination of ten weeks of hard ... okay, ten weeks of neglect.  Sure, you need a perfect score to get an A/B/C/D (choose one) in the course.  Sure, the guy next to you has body odor and is encroaching on your desk ... wait a second, time to panic!

If the proper No‑Doz/adrenaline rush has been achieved, just hold on to your pen and try to keep it on the blue book—responses written on the desk will not be graded.  If you do this right, the pen scribblings from your shaking hand will actually be construed as words by the professor.  He may even like what he thinks you’ve written.

There are two possible scenarios for finishing the test.  You may finish in 45 minutes while everybody else is still writing furiously.  This means your essays were much too vague, and you will do very poorly on the test.  The other scenario involves scribbling like mad all the way through the three hours and beyond—even though everybody else left after 45 minutes.  This means you over-thought the questions and have wasted over two hours of your time.  That’s time that could be devoted to what life’s really about:  hanging out.

Part Nine:  Doping Control

Immediately after finishing the exam, you must report to the drug testing booth.  You must show your registration card when you pick up your vial.  When you get into the booth, do not read the “CLEAN CATCH SPECIMEN COLLECTION” instructions listed for the women.  They are disgusting.  If you have been taking No‑Doz or have eaten dorm food within a week, don’t expect to pass the drug test.  In this case, you’ve only brought this problem on yourself.  Take heart; administrators only analyze the doping control results for top 15% of the grade curve, so your sample will likely be thrown out.  And usually, your grade will improve after others are penalized.

Part Ten:  How Did I Do?

You can check your grade by seeing the Teaching Assistant in his office two weeks after the Final.  Of course, nobody in the history of higher education has ever done this.  After despising your T.A. for ten weeks, would you visit him on your own time?  Not a chance.  You can find out your final grade when your report card comes—unless your T.A. forgot to send his grade report to the Registrar, or filled out the form incorrectly.  In this case, you will receive no credit for the class.  This is normal.