you can do better than that

in college, this english professor was trying to encourage her students to write by giving them a topic she thought they would respond to. the mandatory general topic for a term paper was "sex, drugs, and rock & roll". i felt insulted by the feeble psychological play, and just to be contrarian, entitled my paper, "Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: The Moral Holocaust of the 20th Century". looking back, those semesters in college weren't much better than high school. i was very disappointed. graded, as always, by your ability to divine the instructors' thoughts or willingness to commit incomplete, biased, out-of-context information to memory by rote. i guess in most occupations thinking for yourself is discouraged anyway, so schools have chosen the best lowest-common-denominator approach to teaching and evaluating students.