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...