Bad Student

….or Good Student. Does it matter?

It may not surprise you to learn that I was a pretty good student. Not perfect, of course — I put everything off to the last minute and did a fair amount of late-night cramming when I was in high school and college — but when the grades went out, I was almost always near the very top.

Good grades, I assumed at the time, would reflect the intellectual effort I put into my studies and display a high level of mastery of the subject. I did especially well in English classes, and I think I devoted myself to that subject because someone told me, at some point during middle school, that if I was thinking about writing as a career, good grades in English would be especially attractive to future employers.

I have been a professional writer for 35 years, and at no time in that long (and up and down) career in the writing game has anyone ever asked me about my grades.

My entire academic record, in fact, has been utterly irrelevant to my life and livelihood. The interesting and (to me, anyway) highly original way in which I interpreted Spenser’s Faerie Queen — in a nutshell: that the Red Cross Knight does not become St. George as much as he lives up to his own identity and fate, and that the hero’s story in general is one of becoming who you really were all along, but didn’t realize — hasn’t crossed my mind in nearly forty years. The previous sentence, to be honest, is the first time I’ve ever mentioned it since sliding the smudgy-typed pages into the office cubbyhole of my English professor at Yale, about two hours after it was due.

Grades, school performance, ratings and rankings —these are all utterly useless ways we drive the students in our lives, and ourselves when we were students, to distraction and anxiety. They will never be looked at again, and they will never be measured by anyone of consequence in life from the day you leave the campus and yes, I recognize that this would be one of the worst commencement speeches ever, were I to deliver it.

Except: right now I am sitting in the library at the well-known divinity school where I am studying for a master’s degree in Divinity, and tomorrow morning I will be taking an exam in New Testament and Exegesis and I am realizing, to my serious disappointment, that I am unprepared. I have a raft of excuses: it was a busy semester with a lot of personal turmoil (don’t ask); I did all the reading and attended every lecture but still forget whether it’s Romans or Galatians that has the circumcision stuff in it; I get James and 1 John mixed up even though I know it’s 1 John where the word Antichrist shows up and that James never mentions the crucifixion or the resurrection of Jesus, and barely mentions Jesus at all. I know all of that, but I don’t know it know it, and the exam tomorrow is a straightforward, honest multiple choice format rather than the more forgiving essay-style, where I could probably bluff my way to a good grade with an essay like, say: “Saul does not become Paul as much as he lives up to his own identity and fate, and the Christian hero’s story in general is one of becoming who you really were all along but didn’t realize.” Or something along those lines. Hey, it’s a proven model.

All around me in the library my much-younger classmates are buzzing with knowledge and ready-answers, and I’m straggling at the end of the line, like an old man trying to keep up with a complicated dance move. They will all do much better than I will tomorrow morning because they have studied dutifully and they know more than I do. But I know one thing that they don’t and it’s this: it won’t matter.