BLOG 602 is the latests project from Keep Alex Weird, an effort to write a 900-word essay each day until Jan. 7. This is the second entry.
I have never been what you would call a “grade person.” In high school, I was not the guy who would freak out over how I was doing in a class. I was in class with those people, those fun AP classes that turned out to be a lot more work, only to take a test that was crazy hard, and I didn’t get credit for anyway. Not bitter, promise.
At Indiana State, I passed on the Honors diploma. I had advisors telling me I was just the person for it, but really, after watching my then-girlfriend freak out over her Honors class, I was sure I made the right decision. I wasn’t the person who worried about grades, and anything above the bare minimum was more work than I was prepared to do.
Amazingly, and through the work of something far more powerful than me, I got by with pretty good grades. I graduated with a 3.8, which was actually down a couple of notches due to a History of the Labor Movement class I had no business taking (and didn’t do any of the homework for) and a screenwriting class (with the worst teacher in the history of the world) where I ranked up a C in each.
The last two years of my time at State, those years that found me not freaking out over a C, were spent working at the Indiana Statesman. A lot of work, yes, but work that was about as far from schoolwork as you can get. It was something different everyday, whether I was working as the Opinions Editor or, later, as Editor-In-Chief. Schoolwork took a back seat, and I was more than happy with that situation.
This, however, is grad school, and it is a brand-new beast for me.
I’d already passed out for the night when I got a text from Adam (the same Adam mentioned in the last BLOG 602 post, by the way) saying that grades were online. And… freakout.
This last semester was not my strongest, academically. It’s been a time of transition, meeting tons of new people, getting used to living on my own in a brand new town, and learning the hard way that heat/AC/water/anything doesn’t come for free. Needless to say, my head has been in about a hundred different places, only occasionally stopping to think about school.
That is, until about two weeks ago. The end of the semester was quickly approaching, and for some reason I thought then would be a good time to start thinking about grades. Okay, not really.
The only time I really started thinking about my grades was last Monday night, when I had a fifteen page paper due the next day and found myself staring at a blank screen. Maybe I should have given school a little more consideration.
After phone calls to most of the people I know, and a very needed breadstick break with Dan and Liz, I actually started the paper at around 10 p.m. I worked, more or less, all night and came up with what I thought was a perfectly mediocre paper that made a decent argument about the face considerations present in professional wrestling, and specifically, the way tag teams represent positive personality traits, and then are buried for it. Fun stuff.
While I still like the argument I wrote in that paper, I’ll be the first to admit it is a hot mess. The formatting, I think, is all wrong, and most of the wrestling stuff isn’t cited. I was hoping for a B in the class.
Now, the fact that I was hoping for a B brings with it certain connotations. I’ve been carrying around these hopes of a doctoral program and one of the things they look at, especially when you come from a small Midwestern university no one has ever heard of, is GPA.
In undergrad, you take around forty classes, which gives you plenty of time to pull up your GPA if one class treats you wrong. In grad school, you take twelve, and your first semester knocks three of those off. Not a whole lot of time to fix those errors.
So, the fact that I’m now okay with a B because I’ve got no idea how a woman who specializes in Health Care Interpersonal Communication is going to react to my hastily written paper on the Highlanders, is a bit of a big deal. Honestly, a B puts the best doctoral programs into question.
But I’m okay with a B, because I’m not a grade person, right?
Right?
About that. So I get Adam’s text saying grades are up, and I freak out. No, I think, no I’m not okay with a B, I deserve a B, I’ll probably get a B, but I don’t want a B. I’ve skated by the last nineteen (really?) years of education without really applying myself, and I get it now, I really do, I should have been working this whole time, I’ve seen people around me freak about their grades, and I get that I’m really lucky to be able to get by the way I do, and I know I should be more thankful for that and I know, now, that I should actually probably apply myself, and that chances are good I can turn into something really cool, chances are good I can get into that really good grad school if I put my nose to the grindstone, well, chances are I could have before I put that paper off, really, the Highlanders?, as exciting as I find wrestling, no one cares about the Highlanders and trying to explain what’s going on with two cousins from Scotland who wear matching kilts and aren’t really cousins, and to expect anything resembling a decent grade out of that is absolutely ridiculous, I expect a B, I deserve a B and I got…
I got an A.
All three classes.
My GPA right now, one semester through grad school, is a 4.0, despite the fact that my final papers were based around, tag-team wrestling, a total bluff on my part about a researcher from the University of South Florida, and a stretch of an argument that a feminist plan toward rhetoric was needed in 1995 because the same male-centered vision of rhetoric had driven society to war, cyclically, since the beginning of time and because that rhetoric led the U.S. and Russia to the brink of mutually assured destruction cause cosmic forces to align and promote a rhetorical theory that turned everything Aristotle believed upside-down.
And now, seeing that 4.0, I think I’m a grade person. I think I’m done skating. Maybe this moment, right now, is my version of the universe aligning to promote that new vision of rhetoric, one that understands that that cycle of destruction eventually has to catch up to you if you keep doing the same thing over and over and over again.
Oh, and if you’re wondering how that part of the story ends, where the feminist rhetoric ended up, it was pretty much the laughing stock of our intro to Rhetoric class. Good times.
