Students Who Make As

Two different types of students earn As at the end of the semester. One type knows how to follow directions; they experience the course like a Martha Stewart acolyte baking a dinner party dessert. They carefully collect readings and notes as if they were assembling ingredients, measure numbers of words, sources, and quotations with care, all the while obeying instructions from the syllabus and assignment sheets as though they were following a complicated recipe. They never consider making substitutions, never consider if they did X instead of the prescribed Y that their papers might "bake" more "deliciously."

These A students thrive when directions are specific but have great anxiety when assignments are open ended. Verbally announcing a new assignment in the last 30 seconds of class sends these students swarming to the professor's office needing specifics: How many words? How many sources? Is a rough draft necessary? Giving them an assignment sheet with all requirements spelled out, on the other hand, means that they will disappear to do exactly what the sheet says. Although they deserve their As at the end of the semester, their work is as predictable and as bland as white cake. They earn their As but not my respect; I forget them days after the semester has concluded.

Then there are the mavericks, the second type of A earner. The mavericks never ask for clarification or permission; they substitute X for Y and turn in original and thoughtful work that gets attention. If they register for rule-driven professors who penalize unauthorized deviations from assignments, they consider the less-than-A grades badges of honor because they maintained their intellectual integrity. They got what they wanted out of the class. They typically are artists of one kind or the other—working on a novel, playing in a band, designing tattoos—even if they are pursuing degrees in biochemistry or civil engineering.

I love watching these two types of A students in class. Last Thursday, for example, my students were finishing a short piece of in-class work. Laurie, who sits dead center in the front row, held up two sheets of double spaced notebook paper, one in each hand, to ask, "Is this enough?" To be honest, it probably was as Laurie is a solid, clear—though uninspired—writer. Her response, I'll bet, completely answered the question I had posed. Her handwriting, however, is medium, and since she flashed the work to everyone sitting behind her, I had to say, "It doesn't look like it meets the word requirement to me." Laurie reread what she had written, determined where she could expand, and continued writing until the very end of class. Kenny, who sits in the back of the room and rests his head against the wall, brought up his paper with fifteen minutes to spare, collected his things, and left. I glanced at his work to find that he too had produced two double spaced pages in medium sized handwriting. Even though it didn't quite meet the word requirement, Kenny had thoroughly answered the question as well as drawing a well supported conclusion different from the one we had reached in class discussion. Both students will get As but for completely different reasons: Laurie because she did everything I asked and Kenny because he demonstrated that he wasn't a sheep and could think for himself.

I was a maverick as an undergrad. I learned that even the most hard-ass professors would let me ignore all of the assignment guidelines if I turned in original and thoughtful papers, especially if I synthesized information from two different classes. I once argued that Clarissa Dalloway had Taoist leanings in the glimpses a reader gets from her thoughts, combining my twentieth-century novel class with Far Eastern religions. The directions specifically said I was to find a variety of critical essays about the Virginia Woolf novel and integrate that research into my paper, not the works of Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu, long dead before Virginia Woolf was born. I sweated the days waiting for Dr. Connor to grade that essay, but despite his you-will-do-exactly-what-I-say-or-else speech in class, I got an A.

I also got great satisfaction breaking the rules and being penalized for my rebellion. I remember I was once assigned a paper on Frankenstein, the goal of which was to point out the ways the novel illustrated the Romantic movement's dissatisfaction with rational thought. The title of my essay was "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: A Celebration of Reason. In the paper, I argued that Shelley valued classicist ideals, not Romantic ones; I concluded the essay with this sentence: "Shelley does not show that reason has limitations; instead, she proves that human control over the passions too frequently slips." My poor insecure professor, so worried that one of her students might see more than the standard interpretation and thus challenge her authority, gave me a C-, a six-inch red C- in the middle of the cover page. She handed my essay to the person at her right to pass from student to student all the way around the big table to the seat where I waited to receive it. I guess the public humiliation was supposed to knock me into line. We had, needless to say, an antagonistic relationship for the rest of the semester. On the next paper, I stuck to the assigned topic but fixed it so that the first letter of each new line on page 1 spelled "Fuck you Dr. Greene" if read top to bottom.

Even though I prefer mavericks, I always give abundant and clear directions that, if followed, will earn "white-cake" work an A. No one I know can teach students how to have flashes of genius, insight, or creativity, so it seems unfair to punish them for not having innate abilities. Grades should indicate what students have learned, not whether they can later make an intuitive leap with the knowledge that will cure cancer or establish world peace [either of which would require maverick thinking]. If the students can answer correctly in an entire category of Jeopardy relevant to the course, they deserve As even if their papers don't contain a sparkling, fresh insight that the professor would really like to see.