Rant

Five weeks to go to finish the damn paralegal certificate course. I'm getting kinda tired of this online study thing. I have learned a lot along the way (which was the whole point) but when they make me take a class on the basics of using MS Office during the last of the six terms, I wonder what they hell the point is in that. Especially since I had to submit 17 separate Word documents showing I know how to cut and paste, use find and replace and use the thesaurus for the first week's assignment.
I've been using Word or some form of word processor since 1987 for god's sake! Hell, I even used to teach students how to use the damn software as part of my job when I taught English in Japan. At least I can jump straight to the weekly assignments and not worry about wasting time doing the assigned reading in the fifteen-pound textbook that cost $70.
Oh, and let's not forget the sections where the book asks us to go out and plagiarize web articles and call them summaries without asking for any form of citation. Sorry, but as a former English teacher that is a total pet peeve of mine. You don't just go out and gather various paragraphs from the web, sequence them yourself and claim it's your own work. That's cheating. And it's exactly what the book asks us to do. I added citations anyway. I mean, how hard is it to google up one of those citation-generating websites now?
The $800 or so dollars of student loan debt I'm generating on this course is starting to piss me off. The only saving grace may be the two weeks we spend on Excel because I suck at using Excel and I do need to use it for one of my bookkeeping gigs.