How to Get Good Grades

Whenever I stay true to my mission and actually write a column on campus life, I tend to shy away from the academic sphere. Sure, I've offered a rant here about the Core and a rave there about shopping period, but overall I feel much more justified in simply avoiding academics altogether and talking about extracurriculars, campus politics or administrative action. This week, though, I have been stirred to actually delve into the world of the classroom.

Last Thursday, Professor Robert Coles gave a lecture that I have needed to hear for a while. It is the story--and I urge you to take Gen Ed 105 so you can hear this for yourself--about the time Coles, a grad student at Harvard, spends a week mixing a particular chemical in lab, only to mistakenly pour it down the drain at the very end. His instructor stood there watching and laughing, and didn't stop him. Coles cursed, dropped the flask, and walked out.

The moral? Well, for starters: What in the world are we doing here? Why are we spending our time on tedious five-day chemistry experiments and why do they matter? Are we being evaluated on what is important? What does it all mean?

Coles started this story after asking us what drew us to Gen Ed. He mumbled something about us all wanting As, and knowing that we'll protest to our teaching fellows if we chance to get anything less. In the back row of my section in Sanders, I nodded to myself. I would love to say that I am one of those kids who actually signed up for Gen Ed for the reading list, and that I sit each in the front row of Sanders listening intently for each lecture. But I signed on for all the wrong reasons. I had it pegged for this semester about three years ago. A perfect excuse to have fun doing as little as possible.

I do not think that I am academically lazy or that I do not like to think deeply. In fact, I actually spent all of freshman year doing all my reading, going to all my sections and believing that hard work pays off.

Suddenly, however, in sophomore year it didn't seem so true. For starters, I was getting more involved in activities, and once in a while started to cut corners, like not reading for section, starting a paper the night before it was due and eventually not studying for a midterm at all. Before long I was not doing well anymore, but at the same time I was not doing badly. I was the queen of the perpetual B and B+. I was rather pleased with my new skill--give classes my least, unless something particularly interesting was happening and forgetting about it. I even convinced myself that my large economics classes were bringing this behavior out in me, and that I could always do better if I wanted to.

The problem was, I couldn't. By junior year, when I resolved to buckle down again, my grades didn't budge. I was taking classes I liked, but I didn't seem to be turning in anything that TFs thought was much better than an Expos paper. Stubbornly, I took on long final papers to try to prove myself, but I ended up with the worst semester yet.

None of this seemed to make sense until a very strange thing happened to me about a week ago. I got back a couple of papers, and, strangely enough, I did quite well. I know my classes are even harder this year--what could be the difference? Suddenly, it occurred to me that I did one simple thing differently when I went about writing these: I did not write for the sake of getting it over with so I could do more exciting things than my academics, but rather I got excited about creating something that made me proud. For a seminar paper, I integrated information that had interested me from other classes and outside reading. In another non-economics course, I looked at the question from an economic perspective and I realized I was actually interested in my topic when I sat down to write.

And then there's Gen Ed, everyone's favorite "scrapple of the guts," as this publication termed it earlier this year. I have one of my favorite teaching fellows ever, I'm reading some of the best books I've encountered in college, and I like going to lecture. Sure, if you want it to be a gut, you can make it that, but I honestly believe you can make most anything a gut. You owe it to yourself to do better than that.

All of this probably seems to be common sense. I am sure these are lessons that many of you learned long before you were seniors. But this time of year, my epiphany might serve to help you get through that tedious lab or that long final paper. So before you drop that flask and curse your TF, remember that we are here for the process, not for the product. The rest will take care of itself.

Corinne E. Funk's column appears on alternate Tuesdays.