Like a fermented grape, I know when it's time to let out a fine whine. And now is that time.
What am I going to whine about, you ask? Midterm week offers more gripes than a humble girl like me could ask for. From a sea of bellyaches and sleepless nights and terrible theme songs stuck in my head during an econ exam, I have chosen shin splints. And by shin splints, I mean professorial hypocrisy.
My shins are hurting, you see, because for the last six weeks I have been hightailing across campus at stultifying speeds, having bolted out of class five minutes after the lecture should have ended. As other empathizing students know, these cross-campus marathons are hopeless attempts at punctuality. Four minutes after my subsequent lecture has begun, I gingerly enter the classroom and am gunned down by the professor's censorious gaze.
An hour later, that very same professor holds his students seven minutes after the class's scheduled close, and I must run my feet raw once again to hand in a problem set that will not be accepted after 2:30:00.01. And so the cycle continues.
Now what bothers me about this hourly sprint is not that that my mandatory precepts, which with a few exceptions are little more than charitable opportunities for grad students to practice their English, are often totally devoid of nutritive or enriching content anyway. Nor is it that punctuality is often named on syllabi as a peculiar course "requirement," usually part of that nebulous "class participation" chunk of the total course grade; nor is it that professors and grad students, in moments of diva-dom, refuse to allow equal time for a late-coming quiz-taker or collect the homework of a breathless and tearfully tardy freshman.
What bothers me about my daily Tour de Frantic is that the huffy teachers who do not tolerate tardiness are usually the very same ones who cause it. I don't attribute this behavior to happenstance or sadism. This behavior is a manifestation of a universal grading criterion used at Princeton: the exclusivity of one's dedication.
In my experience, professors — even if subconsciously — often evaluate a student's performance based on not only an objective standard of quality or effort, but also on what degree he prioritizes that class over all other commitments. Prioritizing a class is not necessarily correlated with ability or interest level, but for some reason the sacrifices made for a class are often seen by students and instructors alike as evidence of merit.
In order to do well in a course, a student must give at least the appearance of slavery to the course in all its minutiae, even during midterm week. Students wanting halfway-decent grades must be willing to bleed for the cause. Given the blistering shoes I typically wear, I deserve first quintility on pedal hemorrhaging alone.
As a sophomore, I now enjoy the luxury of not being pegged to a particular discipline, which would at least theoretically preclude my prioritizing other disciplines in its stead. Anyone who knows me well knows that on any given day I am newly enamored with a different department. And right now I am not quite content to like and devote myself to only one discipline. I want to be rewarded for liking and devoting myself to many of them.
I dread the day when I will finally have to choose a major, and by specializing also confess to professors of non-departmentals my relative lack of passion for their subject matter. Wanting to leave a class on time will look even more treacherous. Catherine Rampell is a sophomore from Palm Beach, Fla. She can be reached at crampell@princeton.edu.
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