Wide context

Complete PICLE corpus of essays by Polish advanced EFL students (330,000)

/^t/One area in which we urgently need the help of our imagination is school. Every young person realizes that this institution is not the most attractive place in which to spend those short and therefore precious hours of youth. So rather than face the boredom of educational grind, we manufacture scores of elaborate excuses in order to avoid responsibility for our misdemeanors. And this in itself constitutes a miraculous mental exercise. Ages of formal instruction could not equal the intellectual benefits we reap of those intense bouts of creativity when we try to explain our absence, lateness or lack of homework. And what is more important, our inventive efforts have to remain vigorous all the time, since any excuse used twice becomes inescapably cliche.