Hoop jumping

In which your humble narrator describes slogging through the writing of an academic paper with no parameters.

In my continuing quest to complete my Ph.D. in Educational Psychology so that I can become unemployed, I am currently involved in the revision of my oral preliminary exam paper. My department gives both written and oral preliminary exams  for doctoral students. I passed the written preliminary test when child #1 was 6 months old on the Saturday before we moved to our new house. It was a giant waste of time.

For the oral prelim, I have to write a 20-50 page review paper of some literature without providing any plan for my dissertation (that's part of the next hoop, dummy). It's ostensibly supposed to show my "evaluative skills" and prove to my committee that I can write a literature review, though I think it's actually just to provide some framework for what they might want to ask me about during this upcoming 2-hour fun-fest.

My adviser's instructions for writing this paper (as the department provides virtually no direction other than what I mentioned above) were to (wait for it) "write about something I know a lot about."

I wrote most of the paper this summer while I was teaching and was allowed to leave the house more than once a week. Now I'm reduced to working on it during the 24 minutes between when the children are finally settled in their beds and when my brain turns off and NASCAR starts seeming interesting. 

Perhaps it would have been better to finish this degree before transmitting my genetic material to another generation of crabby, demanding little persons.