Procrastination Nation

Well, its down to the wire. I have 5 final exams in 12 days ending on Dec 15. Am I worried. Of course I am. Except for paleo, seem to have learned didly squat this semester. Sure I now know how a glacier works and the names of countless parts of the human skeleton, but frankly, unless I keep using this stuff, the details will go the way of much of my American and European history knowledge. It will be forcefully pushed from my short term memory such that I will only know where to look it up if ever I need to know this information again. This is a common occurance among University students. Many attribute their immediate loss of information due the amount of binge drinking that they do immediately after an exam, but i don't have that excuse. Rather I attibute the ubiquitous loss of minute detail with time to the fact that we aren't actually learning this stuff. We procrastinate to the last minute, wasting enormous amounts of time on things like blogs and social lives resulting in a mad panic when exams come around. Right after a round of bad exams, a student will swear that they'll start to study more, but it's only marginally effective. Tomarrow I'll sing a sweeter song. The procrastinators motto pronounced by Colleridge on being unable to finish a poem due to the fact that he was coming out of an opium trip. When we cram everything at the last minute its true that we have it in the forefront of our mind, but that doesn't mean that we'll remember it beyond the exam. A good measure of how well something is learned is if it can be recalled a year after the exam. So what do I remember from Ecology which I was finishing up this time last year, or from Mechanisms of Evolution or even general zoology of the vertebrates or paleontology of the Invertebrates or one other class which seems to have been entirely blocked from my memory. Well I don't seem to remember very much about the differences between the varieties of brachiopods, but I could recite the entire history of amniote evolution if you wanted me to tell you all about the evolution of various vertebrates or their physiological mechanisms only because that was covered and expanded upon in Paleo 318. As for ecology, I remember the basics and could look it up in a heartbeat. And until now, I couldn't even remember that I only took 4 classes my first semester and five the second.
As for the classes that I will be tested in very shortly. I will definately continue to use Paleo (as that's my major) and I think that I'd be interested in writing a book on the history of Paleontology, so that incorporates my history of science class (though that sect of biology and geology was barely covered, even in passing). As for physiology. I think that I'll chalk that one up as a mulligan. Nothing that was covered had any bearing on anything even remotely identifiable in the fossil record. As for Human Osteology... Yech!!! Now there's a class that seemed like it would be useful for future studies. Now I suppose that if the Prof was able to teach or if the TA's had any interest in inparting the information to the students rather than collecting their meager pay checks it might have been useful. However, human beings are so minutely described that no phylogenetic study would ever include the thousands of characters seen on the bones of human beings. Also, humans are so drastically different from reptiles that any studies that I would conduct in my chosen field would include only the broadest similarities to one an anthropologist might conduct. And to think that I had the option to take Evolution of the homonids.