Grrr....

I need to vent. I feel like I'm working a 60-hour a week job with none of the benefits, like a salary, pension, or health insurance. Ok, yes I get most of my tuition paid for, and 80 bucks every other week, but still, I'm really just a slave working for 2 cents an hour. The amount of homework and paper-grading I had to do this past 3-day weekend was insane. And I was only able to get about 1/3 of it done. Saturday was spent recovering from the previous week, but Sunday and Monday I worked literally all day long. What is this slave labor that pretends to be graduate school? Ever concerned with how things ought to be done in education, rather than the way things actually are, it seems counter-intuitive that graduate students, A) have more work than undergrads (grad students have more responsibilities in general: bills to pay, children to feed, etc.), and B) the graduate students with assistantships have to take at least 10 credits a quarter, but yet they have more work to do outside of school work (grading papers, teaching classes, running the recital hall, making copies, sending out emails, heading committees--ie--the busy work of professors). And this makes sense how? I'm so busy with miscellaneous "stuff" that I don't have time to do the thing I came to grad school for: music. Writing music, performing music, listening to music. I'm wondering how I'm ever going to put together a recital when I've been averaging about one composition per 3 quarters. Seriously, I just finished a composition I started at the beginning of fall quarter. Ug! Not only do we have all this misc. "stuff" to do, our graduate program here is so stuffed with credits (60, compared with the 30 of most grad programs) that I am forced to take large ensemble and private lessons even though they are indirectly related to my specific degree program. Even more aggrivating, it that it is an unwritten rule that all grad students take 2 years of lessons and large ensemble when the graduate catalogue says I only have to take a year.

On top of all this, I don't have time for real life: exercising, corresponding with friends and family, sending thank-you notes for birthday and Christmas presents received, reading for pleasure, writing for pleasure, making crafts, playing piano for fun (I don't have time to play the used piano I just bought! It is a beautiful upright I found for 300 bucks), and the list goes on and on. By the time my weekend comes, I am spent. But if I don't do homework during the weekends, the next week is completely shot. If this is what being in the academic or real working world is like, I want nothing to do with it. I don't want to spend my life feeling frazzled and stressed out. I'm crabby, tired, always feeling like I'm coming down with something, stiff and sore from not exercising, and just plain not happy.

It all makes me wonder about the efficacy of graduate school, and of institutionalized education in general. I feel like I'm not learning anything except how to cut corners, speed read chapters in my music history books, practice once a week and get away with it, and in general, half-ass everything. I really feel like I won't be a "master" of music when I'm done--just a master of faux-learning.