I’ve just returned to grad school after a month off and finally checked my mailbox in the drama department. Little did I know I would find two of my final papers from last semester’s classes. I know I passed both the classes, so I wasn’t going to look at all the individual comments. At this point, I don’t even care, but I was curious about one particular paper.
I was very interested to see how I did for one particular paper because, quite honestly, I was surprised by my grade. Now grades in grad school are different. I don’t want to say they don’t matter, but frankly, they don’t matter as much. Nobody cares if you got straight A’s in grad school. They care that you got your degree. While I want to do well in all my classes because I have some pride, I’m not going to bust my butt for a class I don’t really care about.
I wrote a paper for one such class. It’s difficult to describe what it was like to be a student in that class, but as a former teacher, I was frustrated. The professor was highly knowledgeable in the subject. That was very clear, but he did not do a great job of conveying that knowledge to us. I won’t say anything more because I’ve spent the past semester bitching about it, but I will describe what happened when he gave us the assignment for our final paper.
He spent an entire page describing what we had to do, and yet, I had no idea what he wanted me to do. When he handed out the assignment to us in class, he wanted to spend just a brief amount of time talking about it, and then the rest reviewing, but we were all so confused, that we spent the entire three hours asking questions about it. The discussion didn’t really help that much, so when I went home and had to begin the paper (mind you, after already writing several papers for another class due earlier in the week),
I said to myself
So I wrote the paper how I wanted to write it, turned it in, and said
Actually, I tried burning the assignment with a lighter outside, but there was too much wind. The flame went out, so I ripped the assignment in half instead. It was very cathartic.
When I saw my grades over break, I was pleasantly surprised to see a grade that was much higher than the one I expected. In my mind, the professor: a) Actually really liked my paper; b) Took pity on me; c) Just gave up.
So I couldn’t help but glance at the back page of my essay and saw that he wrote comments for, not only for how I did on my paper, but for how I did in the class as a whole.
His comment: “You were a very thoughtful (though sometimes inscrutable) student.”
Inscrutable student? What the hell does that mean? I had two thoughts:
1) I was hard to read, and he never quite figured me out. This would go with the word’s denotation.
2) Did he just call me dumb? As in, I was incapable of analyzing anything?
Then I laughed to myself because the comment just epitomized my entire experience in that class. I was never sure whether I dazzled my professor with my wit or my obtuseness.
In conclusion, I leave you with another form of inscrutability.
You can always tell a Milford man.
thelongwayaroundmylife 