Smudge Marks

I don’t know about you, but my graduate school experience was somewhere between a colonoscopy and a vasectomy. Not painful, necessarily, but certainly uncomfortable and unfortunately necessary. A history of cancer in my family and a conscious decision to stop having children made the first two no-brainers. And while I understand that I had to go to grad school to take the next step in my career, I can’t figure out what I learned that I wouldn’t have figured out on my own. By contrast, I am unqualified and frankly disinterested in figuring out the inner workings of my colon or vas deferens on my own. 

Join me, won’t you, on my brief, all-too-true journey back to grad school. 

Exhibit A: 

During our cohort’s second class, the content of which I have buried somewhere in my subconscious, our professor returned our papers to us to begin class. As an English teacher, the papers, which made up a majority of our grades, were the easy part. I actually looked forward to them, to be honest, because it hurtled me back to my undergrad days and forced me to write, something I just didn’t do much of at that time in my life. 

In black ink, the letter B announced itself on the front page of my work. It was my first B, but I didn’t expect to crush every paper. I was sure it was a valid representation of my work. At first, I didn’t hear the din of the classroom increase. There were 27 of us, so it was always relatively noisy during these transitions. Eventually, though, I started to hear folks discussing their grades with abject anger. Some even swore.  

The professor stood in the front of the room, a lamb to slaughter, and finally addressed the room. 

“What’s going on folks?”

The short version is that once people received back their papers, they all decided that they didn’t understand the assignment, which explained their dismal grades. Though totally invalid and something at which we would roll our eyes if our own students tried this, the professor caved. 

“I understand. How about this? Everyone gets an A!”

Immediately, the tenor of the room shifted to glee. The mob had prevailed. That is, the mob minus one. 

“Whoa. Hold up,” I started. “I understood the assignment. I’ll take the A, but I earned a B. And I understood the assignment.”

I know what you’re thinking: this is the kind of dude who probably gets punched a lot. He probably has exactly zero friends. At this point in our program, I hadn’t made any real connections with the cohort, so I didn’t feel like I owed anyone anything, and I was not going to allow this course to become a free-for-all. Call me crazy, but everyone-gets-an-A is a bizarre cure all for a group of adults in grad school. 

Ultimately, the professor honored her proclamation, and everyone, including me, did get an A. But it was at that point that I knew I was enrolled at Mickey Mouse University. 

Exhibit B:

In the very next class, the content of which escapes me again, papers were returned without a chorus of boos and a panicky reaction. Rather, papers were returned with grades affixed to the upper right hand corner of the first page. Order had returned to the universe. 

*Record scratch

I flipped through the paper twice to find nary a marginal comment let alone a grade. While our professor was underwhelming (he once fell asleep while he showed us a video clip), surely he didn’t forget to grade my work. 

“Dr. (whatever his name was), I think you may have forgotten to score my paper.”

He looked up, took the paper from my hand gently, and then it dawned on him. 

“I didn’t score it. Look at the smudge marks on the cover page. You need to reprint it.” 

A cursory glance at the cover page, and only the cover page, did confirm that there were, in fact, two light, toner-is-running-low lines running horizontally across the page. No words were obstructed and the smudges didn’t appear anywhere else. 

“Ok, I’ll take care of that. Can you comment on the paper, though? I’m sure you read it, right?”

“I scanned it, yes.”

I returned to my seat, collected my things, and walked out. Petulant? Maybe. But back-to-back classes had produced two of the most bizarre experiences in my academic life that I had had enough. 

We all have smudge marks in our careers, and few if any, can be erased or reprinted. For me, grad school is my smudge mark. Maybe I am that grad school’s smudge mark. But I’ll tell you what: I learned that everyone does not get an A and that sometimes our work isn’t perfect. 

Also, sometimes professors are super sleepy. 

The defense rests.