daily words

inculcate

When I was in high school I took a couple classes in which assignments were regularly given to go out and collect definitions and examples of a whole bunch of different terms. Things like vocabulary quizzes, mainly.

Every week, before we had to have these lists prepared, we would all be sitting in our respective homes, chatting on AOL Instant Messenger (the instant messenger of choice for no other reason than the fact that everybody we knew was using it too) with our dial-up modems, probably downloading a few low bitrate mp3 files through Audiogalaxy Satellite or enjoying the early days of Napster.

I am quite confident when I say that nobody actually liked putting those lists together. More importantly though, I knew that I was not the only person who thought it was a tremendous waste of our collective time to have each person individually find each term and examples of its use and whatever else might have been required.

And so like any good team player would, we started cooperating. It started out with just a handful of us, me and a couple friends with a little bit more computer savvy threw up a forum and blog on some free hosting (hypermart), used one of those old ad-supported free domain registrations and so inculcation.net was born.

The practice of rote memorization of vocabulary through repetition made the choice of name incredibly simple, and being the insufferable adolescents that we were, we found the prospect of being taught down to in such a manner utterly offensive.

Things were great. Every week we would be assigned a list of terms. As I recall, in our Economics class we were even encouraged to collaborate. As soon as I got home, I would transcribe the list of terms into the forum and people would start claiming them, either individually or in blocks.

It got so that we were dividing them up before even leaving school. I remember one time where the class came before lunch, and we'd divided up a big chunk of them during lunch period, and in one of the few times I actually did work before the last minute, I had started getting my part done during a study hall later that day.

Truly, everybody benefited from this arrangement. We, the students, spent less time doing mind numbingly tedious work, and the quality of research generally improved as there was simply more at stake for something wrong. Evidenced by the fact that I actually did work long in advance of its due date for this occasion, I obviously cared more about my esteem among peers than I did my grades.

Things got messy though, as they often did at the intersection of the internet, collaboration and high school, when the teacher of a different class explicitly forbade collaboration on his vocabulary list assignments.

Fearing his wrath, many started abstaining from participating in the collective effort to do less work. The core group who'd gotten this together in the first place, along with a few committed slacker inductees carried on however it had gotten trickier because now we could so brazenly show off our collaboration.

I think I must have been accused personally at some point. I think it happened when I had asked him why we couldn't collaborate on an assignment for which the entire body of work consisted of flipping through a dictionary and taking down what we found. I tipped my hand even mentioned that in similar assignments in other classes, we'd been given the ok on collaboration. Though I don't know any more what I said then, I can only imagine that I made some poorly constructed but impassioned plea for him not to sentence us all, his students, to another night of tedium because he didn't like the idea of us working together.

Whatever I did do, and whatever he did say, I do remember coming away from the experience feeling like I had been personally attacked, that I had become the martyr for this cause in the eyes of that one teacher. As an aside, the year after, when I was applying to colleges, I (now realize quite stupidly) asked him for a letter of recommendation, and he promptly declined. That was a good lesson to learn, albeit a rather unpleasant one.

But that was only the beginning, because soon after we heard that some students had been suspended from using computers for having participated in our little collaboration effort. We took it all down out of fear. We'd gotten other people in trouble, that's not how it was supposed to happen.

A few months later though, we came back, and with a vengeance. The frontpage was revamped, new forums with more security were created. We saw ourselves as committing a grand act of civil disobedience (a topic we'd recently covered because of Thoreau in our English class). I wrote a ridiculous mission statement and we were back.

Of course I never took responsibility for any of this. Even the name I'd registered the hosting under reflected this. Being the thesaurus-happy student that I was, I called myself the "non compos mentis insurgent" which I took essentially to mean that I didn't know and wasn't really in control of myself as I participated in these acts of supposed insurgency.

Ultimately though the effort fizzled out. We were seniors then, and about halfway through the year, once all the applications were out, everybody just stopped caring. Some of us had tried to cultivate some interest among underclassmen but this was high school and we barely knew any underclassmen. So we just let it fade away, and that was the end of it.

It was a lot of fun. We were in it together, sticking it to the oppressive teacher regime. I don't regret any of it, and I kind of wish we'd kept it a little more light-hearted. Although, with a motto of "all work and no play, sucks" how serious could we really be?

For history's sake, I've reproduced here the "mission statement" I had written:

It is our goal here at inculcation.net to alleviate the burden on students from monotonous repetitive tedious and wholly unnecessary assignments and tasks. The menial nature of having an entire class of students type out their own seperate vocabulary lists simply consumes more of the little free time high school students have. Unfortunately, collaboration is often construed as "cheating" even in these cases. Inculcation provides a means of exchange of information regarding these assignments, and encourages collaboration and organization as a group in order to reduce the workload for everybody significantly. The goal here is not to encourage cheating, but instead to foster good teamwork skills, and allow for students to spend their time on more meaningful pursuits.

I even spelled "seperate" wrong. Nice. We were just ahead of our time.