Temporary Death

I had a bizarre experience in October. It was in my English class of about 40, and the Prof was handing back the first essay we'd done. My mark was lower than I'd ever seen before, but it didn't bother me that much because I knew the same thing was true of everyone else I knew, not only in that class, but in most others as well. We all had to learn the new way of doing things, avoid making the same mistakes again, and not allow the same deficiencies into our work again. The prof began the lecture by saying he had expected these problems with our work, and he'd spend about half of the hour showing us how to deal with them, So I knew it was going to be a fairly painful learning experience.

What I didn't know was how painful. The prof had a photocopy of one of the essays in front of him to refer to, and slides of parts of it that he projected onto the screen. It was mine! Turns out that nearly all the errors you could possibly make were in my essay!! He didn't say whose it was, and I used the same layout and fonts as everyone else, so you couldn't tell from looking at the screen either. But I thought some of my friends in the class would know (not so, it turns out), and I also felt that my face had turned into some kind of red and green flashing beacon, that would dazzle everyone in the room and everyone would know who it was. I was all set to slink discreetly out and pretend afterwards that I'd felt sick -- not that far from the truth, really. But then I realized that would only serve to identify me even further with the egregious errors.

Then he proceeded to trash pretty well all I'd done. Paragraph after paragraph was gone over with a fine tooth comb, and every conceivable fault pointed out that anyone could possibly make. It was devastating.

However, some way into the process, he made it better. He said that actually one of the better ones -- clearer than most which made it the best one for him to show how we should correct our approach. He also said that he knew it must be embarrassing for the person who'd done it, and that he'd got to know us well enough to be confident that whoever it was was one of the stronger people in terms of self-image, so only temporary death would result from what he was doing. I don't usually like to boast, but I do think he was right about that. Then at the end, he pointed out one or two things I'd done which he thought were really good. "Better than I usually see at this Level", was how he put it. And in fact, although the mark was far lower than I'd ever had before, it was one of the better ones.

A learning experience for sure! Learning the hard way!! Well, my mother never did promise me that everything would be easy.