For Your Entertainment: British Professor-Speak

Greetings from the other side of a whole lot of writing about David Foster Wallace! I finished a full draft of my essay on Infinite Jest today and will be putting it aside until the weekend while I work on my second essay on e-book editions of "The Waste Land," plus some dissertation work if I can manage it. Although my essays aren't due until March 24 and 27, respectively, this is the last week of Oxford's Hilary (winter) term -- how did that happen? And, since I head off on travel next week, I've given myself the hard-and-fast deadline of next Monday to finish these two papers. Then a good friend and I are traipsing through Turkey and Albania for twelve days! Travel and adventure are the best motivation to wrap up schoolwork.

Since I've been spending a lot of time hunched in front of my computer in the library or in local cafes, and since doing so involves inevitable conversations/venting sessions with friends and classmates about the intricacies, oddities, and occasional frustrations of the British education system, I give you, my readers, this gem a friend sent me a few weeks back. Just as an example of how different (read: incomprehensible) things are here sometimes, versus in the U.S.

And, yes, I can confirm that "quite good" doesn't mean the same thing here as in the States, and that the British way of phrasing feedback is sometimes rather odd. Contemplate at your leisure, while I return to more paper-writing... jolly good!