Grades

     GRADES.... 

     They can terrify, dishearten, and frustrate students everywhere. They can discourage, and depress teachers everywhere. They can either make parents proud or horrified. They largely determine whether you get saddled with tons of loan debt or come out okay financially each semester. Pretty impressive power for a string of letters to hold.

     Prof. Semrow said once that a grade is just an opinion of how much effort the teachers think you put into a project. I guess that makes sense. Good teachers know that we have a handful of classes we're juggling at the same time, so you can't always give everything all you've got, you kind of have to prioritize the tasks required over the next few days and then run from there. You can(and should) polish as much as possible before deadline, but at some point you have to kick a field goal and take whatever you get; accept that it's impossible to score a touchdown or hit perfect bulls-eyes every time. That doesn't mean you shouldn't aim for perfection in everything. It just means that you probably won't always have a nice grouping of your arrows on the target.
     I guess it comes down to discipline. You just do it, just like Nike's told the world for the last thirty years. Somebody defined discipline as "doing what you need to even when you don't feel like it." So you just plow along and get that assignment or whatever it is finished as best you can, and then wait anxiously for the verdict. If you do well consistently over time, that creates expectations for next time, and as Philip Gulley humorously pointed out about a friend's daughter in an essay on expectations, "if she fails, the entire town will basically lose its will to live. Other than that, I don't think she's under much pressure."
   

     That pressure can be tough to deal with, though. Because the longer you do well, when you slip, it's a longer fall. That's why it's better for a college football or basketball team to lose games earlier in the season than later; the impact is less. And it's the same way in baseball; because it's the World Series at the end. And to fail....well, you kind of feel like the guy in the video above this paragraph.

     And I suppose grades do matter in some sense, because good ones allow other people(in one way or another, the government) to pay the way-too-steep prices for an education that will lead to you earning a slip of paper that's apparently the Golden Fleece, the way employers hire. And that slip of paper means that you managed to survive four-to-five years of incarceration in public (or private) factories. So in that sense, they matter.
     And it's easier to get good grades if you enjoy what you're studying. For example, then you say things like "You know you're in the right major when you're ecstatic about dissecting a cow heart.", or "You know you're a MassComm major when you watch the Super Bowl because it''ll be homework for the test on Tuesday." or "Practical things being a theater major has taught me #4826 - How to sew!" (I pulled those from Facebook, didn't write any of those quotes.)

     And if you enjoy what you're studying, and therefore get decent-to-good grades, then you'll probably have a small dose of confidence going into the next test or class or semester or whatever. (The exact level depends on many, many variables.)  And as this Tina Fey quote printed in the September 2012 copy of Reader's Digest says, "Confidence is ten percent hard work and ninety percent delusional thinking."

     So that's all I can think of to say on this topic at the moment. More will probably be said at some later point.