The part about thinking perms were "mostly a way to sell chemicals" hits home because I said the same thing in beauty school and my instructor just smiled and handed me a perm rod. Joke was on me, my first spiral wrap looked like a bird tried to nest in someone's hair and she made me redo the whole head. Four months of hold on her mom though, that's a solid flex for your wrap. I still owe my instructor an apology for the eye roll I gave her on perm day.

I had almost the same thing happen in my poli sci class sophomore year, the TA circled a whole paragraph and wrote "so what?" in red pen next to it. At first I was mad but then I realized I never actually said what my point was, I just laid out a bunch of stuff that happened. The bullet point thing works great too, I do it on the back of the blue book before I write anything and it takes like two minutes. One tip if you ask TAs for feedback earlier, go to office hours with a draft of an outline instead of just asking "how can I do better" because they give way more useful stuff when they have something to react to. Also save the comments from every paper, I still have mine from junior year and the same notes keep coming up, which tells me what to actually work on.