I spoke to my writing professor today about a paper that’s due tomorrow. I’m not totally sure that the guy is still going to jail, but it’s a tough argument. I suppose that if we were given the easy arguments, we wouldn’t learn anything.
Anyway, I asked about last semester’s grade. I recieved a C in writing, and while I generally don’t have much of a policy of griping about grades, I was wondering if there was anything specific I could do to improve. The first half of the answer was about what I expected: our school is pretty strict about curving grades – professors need to make strong arguments if they don’t want to fail the bottom 5% or so of the class, and bend the curve accordingly. There are 14 people in my writing class – I’ll leave doing the math as an exercise for the reader. Additionally, I’m willing to say that my section has some particularly sharp cookies. I feel pretty good about my classmates, but the my nonreaction to competition may place me at a disadvantage.
The other half of the problem is that I don’t go into enough depth. He said that the arguments are good, but the problem is with waiting for other people to read a lot more into the argument then I write.
Perhaps I’m not too smart for my own good. I’m assuming others are smart.