I’m done with the first quarter of grad school! I even did pretty well: I’m not too pleased with my B in Research and Bibliography, but that’s definitely the grade I earned. Each assignment was so totally different from the last that I just couldn’t get the edge I needed to get an A. On each assignment I would either get a high B or a low A. I suppose the final paper must have gotten a B.
Oh well, thank heavens I don’t have to take that class again! I am a bit nervous about next quarter, where I’ll be in a Seminar course. I took Seminar courses at Scholars’ College, but interestingly enough my memories from that era are rather hazy. Since starting grad school I have consistently felt pretty stupid, though, and I assume a seminar course means feeling even more so.
In two more quarters I’ll be able to teach Freshman Comp. Won’t that be interesting? Poor, poor little freshmen. My friend Kerry has been telling me horror stories about students who leave class and then show up at the last minute trying to get a passing grade. The policy is that if you miss a certain number of classes, you fail the class. Period. Still, people think they all deserve special treatment. They get their parents involved and threaten to file grievances against you in the department. So very often, when instructed by her superiors to give one of these students a chance, a teacher finds herself scrambling to grade a huge pile of delinquent assignments. I can’t wait! It’ll be a blast. At any rate it’ll be a nice change to be grading assignments instead of doing them.
