When I was at Pitt, one of the graduation requirements was completion of two "W" classes. Not necessarily English classes, these courses were meant to stress writing, critiquing one another's work, rewriting. (In practice, the "W" courses I took were by no means the ones for which I did the most writing or editing. But among the more valuable lessons you learn in college is the distinction between theory and practice.)
Piece of cake. I figured I'd knock off a "W" in my first semester. I signed up for Critical Writing.
Critical Writing turned out to be a weirdly abusive little class. You probably think this was just the perception of a thin-skinned, drama-prone eighteen-year-old. Please be assured that it was every bit as bad as I remember it, and that it wasn't just me. After that semester, my advisor refused to register any students for that instructor's courses ever again.
Someday, I may write more about the specifics of why Critical Writing was so awful, but I get a perverse satisfaction from subverting one of the bits of dogma that was so deeply abused in that classroom: Just this once, I choose to tell rather than show.
Without naming names, can you imagine what the most ludicrously on-the-nose surname would be for an English instructor who puts you through a surreal experience in which the rules are never explicitly stated? A TRIAL, if you will? An adventure which that puts you through, how you say, a METAMORPHOSIS?
Really. I swear. It's true, it's true!
Now, let's cleanse the palate with a veritable lemon sorbet of positivity.
When I was at Pitt, we could opt for a really clever variation on the Pass/Fail option: Satisfactory/Audit. If you passed, you earned full credit. If you ended up with less than a C average in a class, you didn't get credit--but you also didn't have an F on your transcript. Instead, your record would show an audited class. I still think this is a truly elegant way to encourage undergrads to indulge in some intellectual risk-taking.
The rules were very explicit in stating that professors were not to know, let alone ask, whether their students opted for S/A.
Back to the liver and onions... the Critical Writing instructor was a big proponent of S/A. Her rather twisted logic was that she could battle grade inflation by giving out Cs to most everybody, which we would gratefully accept because it wouldn't hurt our GPAs. (So rendering the grade all but irrelevant reinforced its value? Huh?)
She assigned an essay on whether or not we'd opted for Satisfactory/Audit.
The person I am today would without hesitation drag the instructor's non-tenured butt in front of a dean. But I was eighteen, fresh from the sticks, and I had about as much grasp of University politics as I did of marine biology. I was scared.
She was scary. But it was scarier that my lifelong MO of excelling by following the rules was failing me.
The next few weeks were weird, weird, weird. I still have my folder of work from that class, and I look at it sometimes to reassure myself that, yes, girlfriend was a sociopath.
Finally, the end of the semester rolled around. We had to submit essays proposing topics for our final essays. Really. I submitted a draft; it was rejected, as was everyone else's first draft. I tried again, incorporating the instructor's critiques into Draft 2. Rejected. Everyone's second draft was rejected. I tried again, and possibly again.
I don't remember the precise moment that I realized that it was OK to quit. It was abundantly clear that I was being jerked around for someone else's entertainment. I certainly wasn't learning anything--not about composition, anyway.
I never again set foot in that room. I got an audit on my transcript. I didn't even fall behind in progress toward my degree because I had a whole boatload of AP credits.
Here's what I learned in Critical Writing: Sometimes, you run into sociopaths. You don't have to deal with them on their terms.
