What was the stupidest thing YOU did as undergrad that could have labeled you as an undergrad? See my answer in the comments to this really early thirsty (it's no longer the weekend here).
I fell asleep nearly weekly in my Creative Writing course; a class that was taught by my future supervisor when I became a GTA.
All the courses for my major ran T/Th, and in an incredibly stupid run for the gold, I was taking 21 credits to finish out my degree a year early. They were all one those days of the week and so I had solid class from 8 in the morning till 10:30 at night when my senior project met with no time for food.
If I didn't eat at that time I got migraines (actually, I probably still do, but circumstances have changed a lot since then). I didn't want to eat in class because I considered it rude. My migraine meds (or alternately Benedryl) would knock me out on my ass at the same time pretty much every day. I would give my feedback to the work being critiqued, as it was a workshop style course, and promptly pass out. I was getting enough sleep, I found the class very interesting, and there wasn't a thing I could do for what the medication was doing to my system as I was only partway through my day.
I never should have attempted that schedule and I perhaps if I had suffered through the pain I'd have been more awake, but I regret to this day being such a douchebag to a good teacher.
Foolish mistakes are not the same as snowflakery. It would be an example of snowflakery if one blamed the prof for putting one to sleep or asked for special marking adjustments to make up for sleeping in class rather than accepting the consequences of one's mistake like an adult.
I have some medical issues which when I was in Grad school included fatigue, and I nearly fell asleep in more classes than I would like. Fortunately, I got myself to disability services and got documented. I don't know for sure if it made my profs feel better, but I tell that story to my students now in the hopes that if they have a real issue they will tell me.
I used the grandfather dying excuse to try to postpone a final exam that I felt I was not prepared for. I even called the prof at home. If you're loading weapons and planning the manhunt, I completely understand.
The prof told me to take the final exam and that we would see how things turned out. I got a better grade on the final than I expected. I don't know if he showed some sympathy or if I actually answered the questions correctly. The guilt haunts me.
Ben, you deserve a rough enema with a bottle of Grape Nehi, unless you enjoy that sort of thing, whereas we'll have to think of something worse. Strelnikov will administer the honors, once he gets into his hazmat suit.
Lit a cigarette in the middle of lecture -- back when smoking was allowed in lectures, but nobody else in the class was smoking. The rather mild-mannered professor arched an eyebrow, but carried on.
Some folks need to brush up on their snowflakery. As the CM Glossary tells us (though it's been absent from the sidebar for a while), a snowflake is: "Overly entitled student. Over-inflated sense of self-esteem and self-worth comes from being told that they are precious and unique, just like each snowflake."
Sultans note above is right on the money. All of us have foolish or bad deeds from undergrad days - likely - but who among us has truly been a snowflake?
While that may be true, I think we're pretty quick to assign the label to our students. I was sleeping during class and I sure as hell never explained why. That was rude and stupid. I did explain why later, of course.
If one of us posted about a student who had really great things to say but never the less zonked out halfway through the section every day I'm pretty sure we'd make far worse assumptions. :)
I was a piss-poor student, and probably an arrogant bastard, but not very snowflakey, I was very deliberate in my slackery. Several friends/room mates shared core classes, and we would rotate who showed up to take notes/turn in all of our homeworks. In other classes, I routinely skipped, usually calculating when I needed to be there and what assignments needed to be completed to maintain my B average. I was called on this a few times. Once, my advisor encountered me in the hall and told me if I didn't show up to his class (an 8 AM major/core upper-level class), I wouldn't pass, no matter what I scored. I showed up the rest of the semester. Once, I miscalculated and missed a test in a math-based elective. I was actually sick, but hadn't bothered to care about being excused. The syllabus allowed no retroactive anything, and the prof wouldn't bend. I attended every class from then on. My math suggested my best possible score, sans test, was a B. I received an A. Not sure what lesson I learned from that.
I skipped so many classes as an undergrad I am surprised I passed. Along comes a beautiful spring day and I could ride my bike along the river in the woods or go to lecture. Guess which option won far too many times....
I drew cartoons about alligators at a 4th of July picnic all over my organic chemistry midterm because I slept through about three straight weeks of class. I made the fireworks explode into the structures of molecules that were on the test, and I wrote "1, 2, 3, 4" on every question asking to rank things. My teacher must have liked me because he found 27 points worth of "partial credit" on there.
The optics paper was due the same day as the department party. I turned a tipsy eye to the professor of the course and asked him what time it was due and he said "Seriously, I won't be in until noon tomorrow". I did a Homer Simpson cheer with double fist pumps and managed not to fall down the observatory stairs on my way to the library... to pick a topic.
And in 7th grade, after a lesson in health about reputations, popularity and the ease of influencing 12 year olds, I wrote "Wombat of the Copier is f****** hot!!" on the table in wood-shop with the wood burner. Why do they put wooden work tables in a room full of 7th graders and things with which to destroy wood?
I can honestly say that whatever stupid things I did, like going to a high school math class having eaten a hash brownie or cutting an extremely boring psychology class more often than not, I never expected special treatment. I hoped not to be caught, and that was all. When I was caught doing stupid things, I was deeply ashamed and apologetic, and never thought about arguing with the consequences.
My college had an honor code, and that worked pretty well to keep me in line -- the idea was that if you were adult enough to be in college, you were entrusted with doing the right thing. If you cheated or disrupted class, vandalized or put down a professor, well, then, you found yourself in front of a jury of other students, which was much more humiliating than a teacherly admonition. If you slacked enough to end up on academic probation, you were required to leave for a semester and then present a case for coming back, which happened to all but one of my friends -- also humiliating and very difficult for parents. It all worked pretty well. I don't know if that's a generational thing or a matter of the kind of students who chose my college.
I'm probably going to skew the curve as one of the straightest arrow outliers. (How's that for a mixed metaphor?)
Seriously, a notch or two down from those high on life pep rally cheerleaders, I was sincerely excited to be at college (middling state college though it was).
Mere weeks into my freshman Intro Bio class, I tried to impress a girl by sharing my lab report with her when she asked for some help trying to "get a handle on it." I was crushed when the professor called me in and told me that I either took her report and expanded it or she took my report and condensed it -- ONE of us had plagiarized.
Yeah, naive keener me, was genuinely petrified I was about to get kicked out of college before I even finished a semester. Fortunately the (quickly former) object of my affection owned up and dropped the class.
OK, I did lose consciousness in one tranquilizingly dull philosophy class. All I remember was blinking my eyes at the beginning of the class and when I opened them again, people were getting up to leave. (Wish I had been able to perfect that skill, would have come in handy over the years.)
Truthfully, I was the student flakies loved to hate. Probably the main reason why I'm now a proffie flakies love to hate! :)
I grade-grubbed. A lot. I honestly never considered that it might be annoying.
I visited the professor's office following many exams in many classes, exam in hand, questions readied about why the partial credit was doled out the way it was. I think my attitude was, "If you don't want us to obsess over grades, why do the grad schools to which we're applying care about them?" It was a passive-aggressive way to tell the system, "If you value grades so much in your assessment of me, I'm going to exercise my right to make sure they're calculated meticulously."
I once got the highest score on a midterm in a class of ~200. I submitted it for a regrade because I thought I deserved some points on a question where the grader had misunderstood my answer.
Karma is a bitch, though, because now I'm on the receiving end of the grubbing, and I wish I could go back and tell myself to stop annoying the professors and just focus on learning. To all those to whom I grubbed, I thank you for your patience, and I apologize.
I fell asleep in my Kant seminar regularly--it was after lunch, and Kant is awful. I didn't expect special treatment, though.
I did take a week off of classes in the middle of the quarter to go visit my SO, who was swimming in regionals and hoping to get to Nationals. I think we had too much sex, because my dear one missed the cutoff in the 200 'fly by .02. I always wondered if it was my fault.
Yeah, I've heard philosophically inclined Germans who are fluent in English say that an English translation of Kant is easier to read than in the original German. As Mencken noted, "Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell."
I asked for "reconsideration" on a freshman history test. When I met with the professor (whom I've seen on the History Channel a few times since- who knew?) he told me I was lucky he didn't give me the lower grade he determined that I actually deserved.
But as I was leaving he told me to always question a professor when I thought there had been a grading mistake (go figure.) That actually came in handy years later in two courses where grading/recording mistakes were made.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. I was a nice, polite, studious, clean-living lad, etc.
Oh, all right, I’ll confess: I wasn’t perfect. There was the time, the morning after a heavy night’s activity, when I woke up in a laundry hamper full of bras. Some guys might think that sounds great, but they were only bras, and they needed washing. Still, it was a Sunday morning: it wasn’t a week night, much less every week night. (I never did find out who put me in that state, but some laughed louder than others.)
There was also the time I considered using the dead grandmother excuse. I did not, however, because I was just too ashamed to bring myself to do it.
I did screw up every now and then, but when I did, I was embarrassed. I certainly didn’t try to blame my profs, because I knew darn well it was my own fault. It never once occurred to me to damn my profs to their superiors, even though at least a couple of them had genuinely been obnoxious to me, because I’d been unprepared, or didn’t know things I really ought to have known. So no, I don’t suppose I was ever a snowflake.
I showed up for the midterm by accident in a class I had otherwise not been attending. It wasn't listed on the syllabus. I just happened to be on campus that day and figured I might as well go to class. I passed.
I used to regularly fall asleep in a night class, with lecture hall seating in a U-shape. I perfected a technique to pick a particular seat and to rest my face in my left hand in such a way that the prof couldn't tell if I was listening or totally asleep. One night, while totally asleep, by face slipped off my hand and I hit my forehead on the desk - BOOOM! - and I had the presence of mind to quickly become fully alert and assume a poker face, while the rest of the class snickered and the prof was left wondering what the hell had just happened.
Even in my last year as a PhD student, I fell asleep in class more than once. I remember that class well. The proffie was a nice old man who sat through every class and never used notes. He permanently went to sleep a year or so later.
I asked a professor known for doing lecture-only classes if attendance counted and asked if we had in-class quizzes. He did not give quizzes, had two papers and a midterm and final exam. The only classes I attended were the first day, the midterm, and the final exam. I turned all other work in to his office early and aced the class. It probably should have been an online class, given that he did nothing but lecture straight from the readings in the textbook.
I had taken the AP English in high school and received a high enough grade to get credit for the first two college English classes (comp and comp II). That did not turn out to work super well for me as rather than use the credit to get going immediately on higher level English classes, I used the free space in my schedule Freshman year to take fun elective type courses in other disciplines. I thought at that time that although I was super wonderful awesome (in my snowflakey way) at the subject, I was not going to pursue any kind of career in it, and would just take the minimum English courses to graduate. Sophomore year came around, and I had to take English again (we had quite the core curriculum at my undergraduate institution). So by this time I had had a year off from literary analysis, I had never done it at the college level, and I of course thought I was super wonderful awesome....every word I typed on the page I thought was super wonderful awesome, no matter what. The first paper rolled around, and being, as I thought I was, my high school teachers had told me so, after all, super wonderful awesome, I rolled out of bed early that morning it was due and whipped out four pages of super wonderful awesome drivel in an hour or two. I am so old that I actually had to type it----so I did not even get to go back and self edit as I went. Just a pure brain dump.
I was sure it was super wonderful awesome.
How well do I remember getting that essay back. The professor did not think it was super wonderful awesome. I did get a passing grade---a C+, which from my current perspective seems pretty darn good, considering that I did it while hungover using a typewriter. How quickly did the hot tears well up. How could this be? I was super wonderful awesome!!??!!
I went to the prof's office after class and let the tears flow. This essay is super wonderful awesome! How could she miss my brilliance!!! I was super wonderful awesome!!!! THIS WAS THE VERY BEST I COULD DO AND MY BEST HAD ALWAYS BEEN SUPERWONDERFUL AWESOME!
The prof looked at my dryly. If this is really the very best you can do, she said, then English is just not your subject. Perhaps, she suggested, I should drop the class and take a more basic one. I was not, she was clearly thinking, all that superwonderful awesome.
If I was not a snowflake, I don't know who is. I love her response to me. To this day I love that woman. I looked at her through my wet snowflakey eye lashes. How DARE she think English is not my subject, I thought to myself. I gathered up my C+ essay and swept from the room. I am sure she was not sorry to see me go. I rewrote that essay (as she kindly allowed the class to do....I do not think many of those first essays in that class were, in her estimation, all that super wonderful awesome) and got an A, and actually worked on all the rest of the essays in the class, just to show her that English WAS TOO my subject. And in the process, I convinced myself of that as well.
@Bella: This is a wonderful story, but the ending is most unsnowflake-like. A snowflake would have stormed into your prof's Chair's office and demand the prof be fired, or reprimanded with a cattle prod, at the very least.
My military experience, as well as others', makes me think that harsh, abrupt, and above all honest and fair feedback applied suitably and not too often can work wonders as a motivator. Of course, if you try to use it with undergraduates today, you're liable to be lynched.
I fell asleep nearly weekly in my Creative Writing course; a class that was taught by my future supervisor when I became a GTA.
ReplyDeleteAll the courses for my major ran T/Th, and in an incredibly stupid run for the gold, I was taking 21 credits to finish out my degree a year early. They were all one those days of the week and so I had solid class from 8 in the morning till 10:30 at night when my senior project met with no time for food.
If I didn't eat at that time I got migraines (actually, I probably still do, but circumstances have changed a lot since then). I didn't want to eat in class because I considered it rude. My migraine meds (or alternately Benedryl) would knock me out on my ass at the same time pretty much every day. I would give my feedback to the work being critiqued, as it was a workshop style course, and promptly pass out. I was getting enough sleep, I found the class very interesting, and there wasn't a thing I could do for what the medication was doing to my system as I was only partway through my day.
I never should have attempted that schedule and I perhaps if I had suffered through the pain I'd have been more awake, but I regret to this day being such a douchebag to a good teacher.
Foolish mistakes are not the same as snowflakery. It would be an example of snowflakery if one blamed the prof for putting one to sleep or asked for special marking adjustments to make up for sleeping in class rather than accepting the consequences of one's mistake like an adult.
DeleteI have some medical issues which when I was in Grad school included fatigue, and I nearly fell asleep in more classes than I would like. Fortunately, I got myself to disability services and got documented. I don't know for sure if it made my profs feel better, but I tell that story to my students now in the hopes that if they have a real issue they will tell me.
DeleteI used the grandfather dying excuse to try to postpone a final exam that I felt I was not prepared for. I even called the prof at home. If you're loading weapons and planning the manhunt, I completely understand.
ReplyDeleteThe prof told me to take the final exam and that we would see how things turned out. I got a better grade on the final than I expected. I don't know if he showed some sympathy or if I actually answered the questions correctly. The guilt haunts me.
Ben, you deserve a rough enema with a bottle of Grape Nehi, unless you enjoy that sort of thing, whereas we'll have to think of something worse. Strelnikov will administer the honors, once he gets into his hazmat suit.
DeleteLit a cigarette in the middle of lecture -- back when smoking was allowed in lectures, but nobody else in the class was smoking. The rather mild-mannered professor arched an eyebrow, but carried on.
ReplyDeleteSome folks need to brush up on their snowflakery. As the CM Glossary tells us (though it's been absent from the sidebar for a while), a snowflake is: "Overly entitled student. Over-inflated sense of self-esteem and self-worth comes from being told that they are precious and unique, just like each snowflake."
ReplyDeleteSultans note above is right on the money. All of us have foolish or bad deeds from undergrad days - likely - but who among us has truly been a snowflake?
While that may be true, I think we're pretty quick to assign the label to our students. I was sleeping during class and I sure as hell never explained why. That was rude and stupid. I did explain why later, of course.
DeleteIf one of us posted about a student who had really great things to say but never the less zonked out halfway through the section every day I'm pretty sure we'd make far worse assumptions. :)
I was a piss-poor student, and probably an arrogant bastard, but not very snowflakey, I was very deliberate in my slackery. Several friends/room mates shared core classes, and we would rotate who showed up to take notes/turn in all of our homeworks. In other classes, I routinely skipped, usually calculating when I needed to be there and what assignments needed to be completed to maintain my B average. I was called on this a few times. Once, my advisor encountered me in the hall and told me if I didn't show up to his class (an 8 AM major/core upper-level class), I wouldn't pass, no matter what I scored. I showed up the rest of the semester. Once, I miscalculated and missed a test in a math-based elective. I was actually sick, but hadn't bothered to care about being excused. The syllabus allowed no retroactive anything, and the prof wouldn't bend. I attended every class from then on. My math suggested my best possible score, sans test, was a B. I received an A. Not sure what lesson I learned from that.
ReplyDeleteI skipped so many classes as an undergrad I am surprised I passed. Along comes a beautiful spring day and I could ride my bike along the river in the woods or go to lecture. Guess which option won far too many times....
ReplyDeleteI considered Friday afternoon classes attendance-optional.
DeleteI drew cartoons about alligators at a 4th of July picnic all over my organic chemistry midterm because I slept through about three straight weeks of class. I made the fireworks explode into the structures of molecules that were on the test, and I wrote "1, 2, 3, 4" on every question asking to rank things. My teacher must have liked me because he found 27 points worth of "partial credit" on there.
ReplyDeleteThe optics paper was due the same day as the department party. I turned a tipsy eye to the professor of the course and asked him what time it was due and he said "Seriously, I won't be in until noon tomorrow". I did a Homer Simpson cheer with double fist pumps and managed not to fall down the observatory stairs on my way to the library... to pick a topic.
And in 7th grade, after a lesson in health about reputations, popularity and the ease of influencing 12 year olds, I wrote "Wombat of the Copier is f****** hot!!" on the table in wood-shop with the wood burner. Why do they put wooden work tables in a room full of 7th graders and things with which to destroy wood?
I can honestly say that whatever stupid things I did, like going to a high school math class having eaten a hash brownie or cutting an extremely boring psychology class more often than not, I never expected special treatment. I hoped not to be caught, and that was all. When I was caught doing stupid things, I was deeply ashamed and apologetic, and never thought about arguing with the consequences.
ReplyDeleteMy college had an honor code, and that worked pretty well to keep me in line -- the idea was that if you were adult enough to be in college, you were entrusted with doing the right thing. If you cheated or disrupted class, vandalized or put down a professor, well, then, you found yourself in front of a jury of other students, which was much more humiliating than a teacherly admonition. If you slacked enough to end up on academic probation, you were required to leave for a semester and then present a case for coming back, which happened to all but one of my friends -- also humiliating and very difficult for parents. It all worked pretty well. I don't know if that's a generational thing or a matter of the kind of students who chose my college.
I'm probably going to skew the curve as one of the straightest arrow outliers. (How's that for a mixed metaphor?)
ReplyDeleteSeriously, a notch or two down from those high on life pep rally cheerleaders, I was sincerely excited to be at college (middling state college though it was).
Mere weeks into my freshman Intro Bio class, I tried to impress a girl by sharing my lab report with her when she asked for some help trying to "get a handle on it." I was crushed when the professor called me in and told me that I either took her report and expanded it or she took my report and condensed it -- ONE of us had plagiarized.
Yeah, naive keener me, was genuinely petrified I was about to get kicked out of college before I even finished a semester. Fortunately the (quickly former) object of my affection owned up and dropped the class.
OK, I did lose consciousness in one tranquilizingly dull philosophy class. All I remember was blinking my eyes at the beginning of the class and when I opened them again, people were getting up to leave. (Wish I had been able to perfect that skill, would have come in handy over the years.)
Truthfully, I was the student flakies loved to hate.
Probably the main reason why I'm now a proffie flakies love to hate! :)
This isn't an undergrad story, but I once used my very real medical condition in order to get out of class the night Obama was elected.
ReplyDeleteNo way was I going to wait until 10pm when class let out to find out what happened. And I feel guilty for having used my condition so wrecklessly.
I grade-grubbed. A lot. I honestly never considered that it might be annoying.
ReplyDeleteI visited the professor's office following many exams in many classes, exam in hand, questions readied about why the partial credit was doled out the way it was. I think my attitude was, "If you don't want us to obsess over grades, why do the grad schools to which we're applying care about them?" It was a passive-aggressive way to tell the system, "If you value grades so much in your assessment of me, I'm going to exercise my right to make sure they're calculated meticulously."
I once got the highest score on a midterm in a class of ~200. I submitted it for a regrade because I thought I deserved some points on a question where the grader had misunderstood my answer.
Karma is a bitch, though, because now I'm on the receiving end of the grubbing, and I wish I could go back and tell myself to stop annoying the professors and just focus on learning. To all those to whom I grubbed, I thank you for your patience, and I apologize.
I fell asleep in my Kant seminar regularly--it was after lunch, and Kant is awful. I didn't expect special treatment, though.
ReplyDeleteI did take a week off of classes in the middle of the quarter to go visit my SO, who was swimming in regionals and hoping to get to Nationals. I think we had too much sex, because my dear one missed the cutoff in the 200 'fly by .02. I always wondered if it was my fault.
Yeah, I've heard philosophically inclined Germans who are fluent in English say that an English translation of Kant is easier to read than in the original German. As Mencken noted, "Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell."
DeleteI asked for "reconsideration" on a freshman history test. When I met with the professor (whom I've seen on the History Channel a few times since- who knew?) he told me I was lucky he didn't give me the lower grade he determined that I actually deserved.
ReplyDeleteBut as I was leaving he told me to always question a professor when I thought there had been a grading mistake (go figure.) That actually came in handy years later in two courses where grading/recording mistakes were made.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. I was a nice, polite, studious, clean-living lad, etc.
ReplyDeleteOh, all right, I’ll confess: I wasn’t perfect. There was the time, the morning after a heavy night’s activity, when I woke up in a laundry hamper full of bras. Some guys might think that sounds great, but they were only bras, and they needed washing. Still, it was a Sunday morning: it wasn’t a week night, much less every week night. (I never did find out who put me in that state, but some laughed louder than others.)
There was also the time I considered using the dead grandmother excuse. I did not, however, because I was just too ashamed to bring myself to do it.
I did screw up every now and then, but when I did, I was embarrassed. I certainly didn’t try to blame my profs, because I knew darn well it was my own fault. It never once occurred to me to damn my profs to their superiors, even though at least a couple of them had genuinely been obnoxious to me, because I’d been unprepared, or didn’t know things I really ought to have known. So no, I don’t suppose I was ever a snowflake.
I slept through a midterm. And the makeup for the midterm. And the makeup for the makeup for the midterm.
ReplyDeleteI showed up for the midterm by accident in a class I had otherwise not been attending. It wasn't listed on the syllabus. I just happened to be on campus that day and figured I might as well go to class. I passed.
ReplyDeleteI used to regularly fall asleep in a night class, with lecture hall seating in a U-shape. I perfected a technique to pick a particular seat and to rest my face in my left hand in such a way that the prof couldn't tell if I was listening or totally asleep. One night, while totally asleep, by face slipped off my hand and I hit my forehead on the desk - BOOOM! - and I had the presence of mind to quickly become fully alert and assume a poker face, while the rest of the class snickered and the prof was left wondering what the hell had just happened.
ReplyDeleteEven in my last year as a PhD student, I fell asleep in class more than once. I remember that class well. The proffie was a nice old man who sat through every class and never used notes. He permanently went to sleep a year or so later.
ReplyDeleteI asked a professor known for doing lecture-only classes if attendance counted and asked if we had in-class quizzes. He did not give quizzes, had two papers and a midterm and final exam. The only classes I attended were the first day, the midterm, and the final exam. I turned all other work in to his office early and aced the class. It probably should have been an online class, given that he did nothing but lecture straight from the readings in the textbook.
ReplyDeleteI had taken the AP English in high school and received a high enough grade to get credit for the first two college English classes (comp and comp II). That did not turn out to work super well for me as rather than use the credit to get going immediately on higher level English classes, I used the free space in my schedule Freshman year to take fun elective type courses in other disciplines. I thought at that time that although I was super wonderful awesome (in my snowflakey way) at the subject, I was not going to pursue any kind of career in it, and would just take the minimum English courses to graduate. Sophomore year came around, and I had to take English again (we had quite the core curriculum at my undergraduate institution). So by this time I had had a year off from literary analysis, I had never done it at the college level, and I of course thought I was super wonderful awesome....every word I typed on the page I thought was super wonderful awesome, no matter what. The first paper rolled around, and being, as I thought I was, my high school teachers had told me so, after all, super wonderful awesome, I rolled out of bed early that morning it was due and whipped out four pages of super wonderful awesome drivel in an hour or two. I am so old that I actually had to type it----so I did not even get to go back and self edit as I went. Just a pure brain dump.
ReplyDeleteI was sure it was super wonderful awesome.
How well do I remember getting that essay back. The professor did not think it was super wonderful awesome. I did get a passing grade---a C+, which from my current perspective seems pretty darn good, considering that I did it while hungover using a typewriter. How quickly did the hot tears well up. How could this be? I was super wonderful awesome!!??!!
I went to the prof's office after class and let the tears flow. This essay is super wonderful awesome! How could she miss my brilliance!!! I was super wonderful awesome!!!! THIS WAS THE VERY BEST I COULD DO AND MY BEST HAD ALWAYS BEEN SUPERWONDERFUL AWESOME!
The prof looked at my dryly. If this is really the very best you can do, she said, then English is just not your subject. Perhaps, she suggested, I should drop the class and take a more basic one. I was not, she was clearly thinking, all that superwonderful awesome.
If I was not a snowflake, I don't know who is. I love her response to me. To this day I love that woman. I looked at her through my wet snowflakey eye lashes. How DARE she think English is not my subject, I thought to myself. I gathered up my C+ essay and swept from the room. I am sure she was not sorry to see me go. I rewrote that essay (as she kindly allowed the class to do....I do not think many of those first essays in that class were, in her estimation, all that super wonderful awesome) and got an A, and actually worked on all the rest of the essays in the class, just to show her that English WAS TOO my subject. And in the process, I convinced myself of that as well.
@Bella: This is a wonderful story, but the ending is most unsnowflake-like. A snowflake would have stormed into your prof's Chair's office and demand the prof be fired, or reprimanded with a cattle prod, at the very least.
DeleteMy military experience, as well as others', makes me think that harsh, abrupt, and above all honest and fair feedback applied suitably and not too often can work wonders as a motivator. Of course, if you try to use it with undergraduates today, you're liable to be lynched.