Which Reminds Me

The high school term paper that I wrote on the assigned topic of population growth met the minimum length requirement of 20 pages and featured Turabian-style footnotes. It was written at home using my parents' manual typewriter. It featured various statistics projecting the growth of the planet's population, then estimated at somewhere near 4 billion, soon to reach 6 billion. Where are we now? Could there be a time when the population outstrips the food supply? These are mind-boggling questions for a high school student to contemplate. Dr. Bidle's criticism was mainly that it was "amorphous," not very organized, although I think that I did get a good grade. Yes, even so, there probably are some other points that I did not elaborate or even touch upon in my term paper. So why do I sometimes get the feeling that I am being called to account for someone else's lousy term paper? How ridiculous is that? There were probably 20 people in the classroom, all writing term papers on the same assigned subject. So why do I have to explain what I did or did not write about in mine? I really don't care to know what they wrote in their term papers, those other dummies.