One of the most memorable experiences of my undergraduate education was when I got about two-thirds of the way through the semester in a Linguistics seminar and realized that I could not do the final project (a fifteen-page paper analyzing a metaphor theme, preferably in a foreign language: I was not competent in any foreign language and also still did not, at that point in the class, understand what fifteen pages of analysis of a metaphor theme could possibly look like.) (I still don’t today.)
Mathematically, if I didn’t pass the final project I wasn’t going to pass the class. I decided that I would just stop attending the class, since it was an exercise in misery and bewilderment and not accomplishing anything. But since there were only seven of us in the class and there was no way my absence would not be noticed, I decided to go to office hours and tell my professor that I was, effectively, dropping out of his class and accepting the consequences.
So I got there, sat down in front of his desk, and spit out the few sentences I had rehearsed to explain: I hadn’t learned how to do what I had to do to pass the class, so I was going to fail and it didn’t seem worth anyone’s time to keep coming to class.
He did not argue with me or insist that I had to. (He also did not explain how to analyze a metaphor theme. Maybe it was not a thing that could be explained at office hours, or maybe he just recognized an undergraduate at the end of her rope.)
“Okay,” he said. “What have you learned?”
“Uh,” I said. “Well, I’ve done all the readings. They’re interesting, they just didn’t teach me how to analyze a metaphor theme.” (We had a book on metaphors that gave lots of examples of kinds of metaphors without any extensive analysis, and a wildly scattershot course pack that was half philosophy.)
“And what grade do you need in this class? What’s your GPA?”
I had a scholarship that depended on keeping an A- average, but I had some wiggle room and it was my senior year anyway, so I was unlikely to have it revoked for one semester. “Um. B? I mostly get As and Bs.”
“Okay,” he said. “Write me a paper on the readings, what you found most interesting and useful in them, and I’ll give you a B. And if you don’t learn anything else in college, learn this: everything can be negotiated.”
I graduated with honors, and also an intense experience of what Christians call grace: being given something I had not earned–could not have earned–simply because someone took mercy on me. But I had to acknowledge the failure to get there.
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