So I'm a masochist

Hello, my name is Pitt Undergrad and I'm addicted to checking to see if my professors posted final grades.

This is particularly sad seeing as Fall Semester taught me how insignificant final grades are in the grand narrative that is my life. See, I had an ex-hippie English Professor from Southern California tell his Junior Seminar on the first day of class that he would not be grading them this semester. He felt that grading students turns them into demonized others while at the same time unfairly exalting the professor. Since he was not grading us, he felt it only fair that we only put as much effort into the course as we felt appropriate (read: NO 15 page research papers on what constitutes the trans-national novel). While my fellow English majors spent hours in the library researching symbolism in Frankenstein, I curled up with my laptop and a cup of hot cocoa and reflected on the weeks assigned reading. Since the university required my professor to grade us, he required us to produce some sort of response to the course that would automatically receive an A.

Telling that to a room full of type-A English Literature Majors (the majority of whom have had visions of graduate school dancing around in their heads since declaring the English major) caused several panic attacks. Our entire academic careers up until that point relied on the assumption that graduate schools and future employers care more about our GPA's than people skills. When I talked to other professors about my Junior Seminar professor's no-grading policy they either believed he was staging a communist revolution, or trying to get by doing the least possible amount of work. It never occurred to them that students possess the motivation to learn for the sake of learning. My classmates and I struggled for the first half of the semester trying to grasp just what it ment to learn for the sake of learning.

But throughout the course of the semester something strange happened. My classmates and I stopped looking at the novels we were reading for answers, and started looking at our own lives. I'll give you an example. When discussing The Virgin Suicides we had a lively class debate about gendered Halloween costumes. We questioned why girls found it acceptable to dress as "the morning after" (their boyfriend's polo, a pair of panties, and smeared lipstick) while boys dressed as monsters and pimps. We came to the conclusion that the gendered scripts our society forces us to internalize better explain why the Lisbon girls committed suicide more so than our initial assumption that the girls were just plain crazy.

So as I sit here waiting for the grades to come in on my other 4 course, I'm reminded that I need not derive my identity from a bunch of letters. I should evaluate the success of a semester by how much knowledge I gained, not by how high my GPA was. In the end, I'm not going to remember if I got an A- or a B+ in Bible as Literature, but I will remember the differences between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. And knowing the difference between Matthew's Jesus and John's Jesus makes for an interesting icebreaker.

That being said, it's time to pay my.pitt.edu a visit...

Finals Week Withdrawl

Another Finals Week has come and gone at the University of Pittsburgh. A lot of my friends have been counting down to the end of the fall semester the way children count down to Santa's arrival on Christmas Eve. I should feel happy that for 17 glorious days there will be no more 25 page papers or 2 hour exams to prepare for. But I don't. I feel incredibly bored. Let me explain what I mean...

Over the last 2 weeks, I've read 3 novels, one textbook debating the conservative movement, hundreds of pages of online criticism, and about 50 pages of drafts for various classes. I lived off of canned corn and frozen hot dogs. I only cleaned my bedroom in order to find drafts of papers I wrote the night before. And I loved every second of it. Finals week always gives meaning to my life, as pathetic as that sounds. Yes, the degree by which the Bible calls Christians to be environmetally conscious may never come up in casual conversation. But learning how to organize material, find my voice in a sea of criticism, and meet a deadline will. Even though finals week is exhausing even to those less inclined to procrastination, the end result is exilerating. I've proven I can succeed despite your crazy demands. Take that academia!

So how to explain the boredom? I've got an entire season of House to catch up on and a pile of do-not-even-think-about-picking-up-until-Christmas-break books on my book shelf. I'm not bored because I lack things to do, I'm bored because I lack meaningful things to do. While only my poor social philosophy professor will read my rant about Christian environmentalism, that paper was more important to me than House marathons (sorry Hugh Laurie!).

During finals week, we college students live off of coffee (or in my case hot chocolate) and pure adrenaline. When the week ends, we lose the adrenaline high. We have nothing to look forward to but Stephanie Meyer and Nora Roberts. We are then expected to go home to our familes as if wrestling with Aristotle and Foucaut didn't change our worldviews. We go home to a house that feels foreign though little has changed. Then we realize that home is exactly the same. It's the pitt undergrad that's foreign.