Thoughts on Poetry Part 1

Years later, when I look back at my time here in Cambridge, I'll remember it as one that was filled with poetry. I think I always wanted to be a poet. I remember a couple of poems I wrote as a kid called "Goat Coat" and "Price-Tag Bag" (see how clever? Those words rhyme!). And then I cranked out a lot of lyrics for punk/folk songs over the years, and finally threw in a couple of week-long summer workshops at the University of Iowa. But it's sort of like I've been circling around poetry without ever taking the full plunge. But I did this year. One of my four classes this semester was a poetry workshop, but psychologically it often felt like it was well over half of my entire workload--probably because I enjoyed it the most.

So what is it about poetry?

Well, for one, it's nice to birth new things into the world. That's what my poetry professor said one day when we were sitting in front of some of our new poems--that these were brand new to the world.

I like that. Maybe it's only marks on a sheet of paper, maybe no one but a few people will ever read it, but you've just added something to the world that didn't exist before. Reading literature is great, taking a philosophy course is fine, but in those endeavors you fill up your mind with someone else's stuff. When you write poetry, your only task to bring something new into the world. Not a bad thing at all.

I Loves Me Some Grade Inflation

Well, I got my first official grade for an assignment. It was a philosophy paper. I got an A-.

Grades really recede into the background here, as they should. My Arts in Education class is pass/fail, so I never think about it. My philosophy class has two papers and two grades, and I'm waiting for the second. Grades haven't come up once in my poetry workshop, and you get your grade after your final project in neuroscience.

I almost never think about grades. Most folks in the program don't.

As it should be.

In that pass/fail class, we recently turned in a big paper. No one would ever fail the course--unless you never turn anything in. So passing is a foregone conclusion. But when I wrote the big paper, I put in the same effort as I would a graded paper. I thought about it, organized it, outlined it, researched it, wrote it, rewrote it, edited it, and had other people proofread it.

In neuroscience you're not really accountable anything specific. They don't take attendance since it's a big lecture, you're never given a recall exam over the information, and you're never quizzed on the readings. No tests either. And yet, you go to all the lectures, you take notes, you do all the readings. Why wouldn't you? Would you pay thousands in tuition, blow off the work, and then "trick" a professor into giving you a good grade? What kind of sense would that make?

So back to my A-. Probably a classic example of grade inflation. Grade inflation is simply that: no one gets a C (unless you do nothing), and your poorest effort garners you at least a B-. It's not like high school or undergrad.

People who went to school before grade inflation like to complain about the current phenomenon. But really, who cares? Grade inflation is another way to forget about grades altogether, to the student's benefit. It's done me well.

Here's how grade inflation works, as far as I can tell: What used to be an A- is now an A. And what used to be a B+ or B is now an A-. And what used to be a B- or C+ is now a B+. What used to be a C is now a B, and a C- or D+ is now a B-.

By that scale, my A- philosophy paper was basically a B. Just like my grades in high school and college. Some things never change.