The Wasted Year

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Well it’s official, I’ve completely wasted the last year of my life. Wasted my time, wasted my money, wasted my energy. I’ve had my suspicions for the last six months or so, but today they were confirmed. I can hear what you are saying, that I wasted the previous forty-five as well and you might well be right. But at least that was my choice. I’ve not really wasted this last year; it has been wasted for me.

Today I got a call at nine am asking me to be at my university by eleven. I wearily got out of bed, had a shower and traipsed off towards uni, pausing on the way to scoff a bacon roll and drink a cup of tea and ponder why I’d been called in out of the blue. The sun shone as I walked across Bute Park. Squirrels scurried up trees and down again, magpies squawked, and trees grew; just a normal day.

I was the last one in to room 1.01. All the others were sitting there looking tired, unshaven and unsure. I searched their eyes to see if anyone had an inkling of what was going on, but was met with only blank faces. I sat in my usual seat and swung backwards like I used to do in school; old habits die hard.

No one said a word, we just stared at the door waiting for our tutor to come in.

But it wasn’t our tutor who entered, it was a woman in a white lab coat who none of us had seen before. She smiled at us, but we didn’t smile back.

“Good morning,” she said. “My name is Doctor Louise Lewis, I work in the psychology department.”

We stared blankly at her.

“It’s my duty to tell you that this year you have been part of a psychology experiment.”
We looked at each other and then back at her.

“We wanted to see if teaching has any positive affect on learning. So the Creative Writing MA this year has been completely different from previous years. You see this year we’ve not taught you anything at all, nothing at all.  All your lectures and workshops have been dummy lessons. They’ve looked like lessons and felt like lessons but they had nothing to do with the syllabus that is usually run.”

“What the fuck?” I said.

“They were in effect placebo lessons. Nothing really to do with creative writing. We wanted to see if just by virtue of being on the course, would your writing improve. And we are pleased to announce, that in 11 out of the 12 cases we have seen improvements that are as good as, or better than the previous three cohorts.”

“You’re joking! You must be fucking joking.” I said. But I knew she wasn’t. it all made sense now. The vague lessons, the disjointed syllabus, the elusive tutors, the missed deadlines.  yeah, it all added up, we’d been guinea pigs, just toys in their game.

“Of course you will be offered free entry onto the course next year.” Doctor Lewis said, but I wasn’t listening.

“How dare you? How fucking dare you? This was my life you’re messing up.” I said.

“There’s one other thing,” Doctor Lewis continued unperturbed. “Eric?”

I hadn’t noticed before but Eric, one of my fellow students, was wearing a suit and was suddenly looking older than the rest of us. He stood up and moved to the front of the classroom. We all knew that if eleven out of twelve of us had made improvements Eric was the one in a dozen who hadn’t. He wrote like a professional footballer gives interviews, he never listened to feedback and often handed in the same piece with no changes week after week. The galling thing was he’d been getting good grades.

“Hi,’ he said. “My name is Dr Eric Potter, I’ve been doing another experiment to see how you’d react to having someone clearly below the standard on the course.

I’d like to thank you for your patience, your help and for giving me so much material for my research project.”

“You’re joking?” I muttered.

“We did the same experiment last year in the US and students were much less helpful and supportive, some even asked that I left the course, but you guys were just so, well British I suppose.”

I’d had enough. I needed to get the fuck out of there before I hurt someone. I grabbed my coat and stormed out.