Paper Tigers (or, Were We Ever So Young?)

I'm supposed to be working on my paper for Reli 122, which is due tomorrow afternoon. I'm just starting on the reading for it because up until now I couldn't force myself to be concerned about it. It's too easy.

Maybe it wasn't the most brilliant idea in the world for me to take a freshman-level lecture course the last semester of my senior year, but I wasn't up for a taxing schedule and I really like the professor. The actual freshmen, however, I could do without. They talk merely to hear their own inane voices, they do the reading, and evidently, they don't know how to write a paper.

Now, I don't know if I'm blocking it from memory or in denial or what, but I don't remember being *quite* so incompetent as a freshman. At least I was quiet, and I could write a six-page paper without a two-page handout from the professor explaining where sources could be found and what proportion of my paper should be dedicated to the introduction and the conclusion and that maybe it's a good idea to put your name on it before turning it in, dumbass. I realize that writing papers is not totally instinctive, but at 18 and 19, these kids should be able to scrape together six pages with only minimal guidance from the professor. Instead they sit there, bright-eyed and apparently empty-headed, asking questions like, "Do we have to cite sources?" Um, only if you use them. What? YES! You have to use them!

All this coddling makes me want to a) vomit, and b) defy all given instructions and write whatever I damn well please, which would probably come out better anyway, because I'd spend more time on it and less time chafing under ridiculous, picky guidlines given to a bunch of babies.