This year, halftime at the Super Bowl will feature a performance by the Rolling Stones. Amid the refilling of salsa containers and redistribution of consumed beer, Mick Jagger and the gang will be entertaining the audience with live renditions of a few of their greatest hits.
Unfortunately for students, the halfway point in the academic quarter is not approached with the same appreciation for intermission. If the fifth week of school were a halftime show, it would be Yoko Ono, Kelly Osborne, Pat Boone and Eddie Murphy singing Monkees' b-sides with Satan on keyboards.
Papers, midterms, group projects and presentations scatter the pages of agendas and the creases of scholastic minds as the holiday that is the opening weeks of classes come to an end. The devil has come to collect his due; Robert Johnson had the guitar, college students have daily drink specials.
While you're studying in the hallway before that big Psych exam, trying to glean information from your fellow crammers - praying to not utterly fail like Tim O'Shea and our hapless Bobcats did against Miami on Sunday - find some space in that bulging brain of yours for this prospect: It doesn't matter.
Now I'll admit to being as GPA-conscious as the next senior facing a future in a Bush-ified economy. Grades and jobs have an unfortunate corollary. But we, as an educational community, have developed such an acute case of final-grade tunnel vision that our most-valued intellectual aspirations are flying by.
Helping students to look at the world from diverse viewpoints. Woosh. Developing a more fertile and inquisitive mind. Zoom. Exploring more deeply the aspects of the field of study you've elected to pursue. Okay, I can't think of any more onomatopoetic words for things flying past you. But, you get the picture. They're gone; you never saw them. And why not? Grades are sexy, to use the parlance of my friends from Scripps. They're dramatic, competitive and easily organized. It's so easy to get caught up in the eye on the prize mentality that flows through every aspect of our lives that we forget to take a nice stroll through the poppy field of learning - or stopping to smell the scholastic roses. Please, only feel the need to remember your favorite plant-related metaphor. (I bet I know which one Philosophy majors prefer ... give you a hint ... it's not roses.)
Grades perpetuate this approach. You don't read that copy of Candide because you're interested in Voltaire's philosophical ideas; you read it because you have a history exam. That innovative theory in Physics is just fodder for study. (This point would be more compelling if I actually knew of any innovative theories in Physics.) Students are so well trained in the act of treating education as a cause and effect relationship that we forget to realize it's the cause that matters, not the effect.
Many readers might dismiss this as yet another mush-minded declaration of grades as not being groovy enough for a lazy student, who'd rather take tequila shots than exams. Ole! Of course grades matter; it is critical that teachers evaluate the level of dedication and comprehension a student displays in class, and any means through which a teacher decides to obtain that information is fine by me, I suppose.
But my guess is professors are just as sick and tired of hearing Chowder ask fifteen questions about their grading policy as I am. Why doesn't that dim-witted plebian in the back with the especially rigid hair actually ask about the material? If I have to listen to his inane questions
he should at least take off his stupid sunglasses so I can see the vacant look in his eyes.
The measure of an academic career is more than marks you received; it's what you come away with. It's how studying any particular discipline has affected your life and understanding of all the aspects that make up that life. Education is an exploration of ideas you'd never even conceived of, and learning to develop the ideas your own little head can conjure up based on those previously mentioned ideas. Scantrons be damned.
So as you go through those conjugations, formulas or whatever hoops your professors have you leaping through like a trained Orca, realize that the grades you earn mean little compared to the importance of the real education you're endeavoring to receive.
With that being said, good luck, 'cause if you fail you'll be following APD's horse cops around with a shovel and bucket on a Saturday night.
- Eric Dryden is a senior creative writing major. Send him an e-mail at ed890402@ohiou.edu. 17
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Eric Dryden
