Dear Disgruntled Student,

I, too, have felt the looming weight of tedium, circular logic, obvious insults to my polyester brain matter, and a seemingly endless tunnel of long, dark nights lit only by the digital clock on my desk and the flame of indignation in my heart. Homework need not be your life’s great work, despite what your teachers may attempt to manipulate you to believe. It is, alas, something that must be done.

If you are to rise above the mediocre and airbrushed bureaucratic curricula set before you, you must defeat the number one weapon of the American educational system: pointless busywork. They may try to keep you so distracted recounting dates that you have no time to notice that some of the events attributed to these canonical dates are largely fictionalized. You may be so worn thin by rehearsing equations in endless iterations that any creative application of said formulas drifts as far from your mind as the polar ice cap is to Cancun.

How can you defeat these mind-numbing, vitality squelching tactics? Recognize them for what they are and nudge your pacifism out of the way just enough to view this as the war for your social, political, aesthetic, and humanitarian attunement that it is. Your self-preservation instincts will kick in to propell you through the monotony.

When all else fails and you are discouraged nigh unto eating your no.2 pencil and protractor or graphing calculator, do what I did lo these many years ago and look to the wisdom of the man who inspired me to complete my “formal” education: “BE COOL. STAY IN SCHOOL.”

Pitying the fools,
Señor P.