Sometimes, teachers suck.
Today was my last day of work at Assembly Hall. =( Sadness. I'm going to miss it. I took my nametag. At least they WON. It was against Eastern Illinois, which is not a Big Ten school, but you know, in-state rivalries and stuff. So it was fun to watch them win.
Ugh. So today, had to pick up my portfolio from narrative writing. First, let me lay out the class requirements. We had to write three original stories to be workshopped by the class, and then either a fourth story or a substantial revision of one of the three (worth 70%). We also had our Daybooks (worth 10%), which contained story ideas, drafts of our stories, and eighteen Daybook Entries, which ranged from describing a room in detail to researching a town and writing a story based on that town's history. Those are the things we turned in... the other 20% was class participation. Which consisted of having read and substantially commented on 3 student stories each class meeting, as well as having read stories in our course packet.
There is one daybook entry I didn't do (the town one). I DID read everyone's story and comment constructively (and a hell of a lot more than most people commented on mine, I'll tell ya that), and I put in a substantial amount of effort into my stories. I never wrote them last-minute (as I know a lot of people did) and I even agonized over most of them, because I didn't want to turn in a crap story for everyone to read. I wrote four, and THEN revised two of them to re-turn in with my portfolio. So I'm thinking that, while I may not get an A on my daybook portion of the class, the meat of the class is where I put in the most effort.
So he gives me it all back and tells me my grade. B on the daybook. Okay, I thought I'd done about 90% of the work (A-), but whatever. Fair enough. A- on participation (also fair enough). BIG FREAKING C on my stories. A C! The freak?? He said "Well, you didn't turn in a revision." No, but I turned in a FOURTH story, which he has in the syllabus as well as had said MULTPILE times was okay, and THEN I went ahead and revised two of my other stories ANYWAY. He looked at them. One of them he agreed was a substantial revision that had greatly improved the story. The other he said made the story worse. That it had been a cop-out revision and didn't work. So he scratched out the C and gave me a B- on my stories. I'm so pissed.
He said from the beginning that narrative writing is very subjective, which is why one of our daybook entries was to assign ourselves a grade and back it up. I'd said I thought I deserved an A/A-, because of all the reasons I've stated above. I put in more effort into this class than most of my others. But a B, an A- and a B- add up to pretty much a straight B. Which is NOT the end of the world, I know, and it's a 100-level class not in my major, so it really won't effect anything, but how could he give me a B-/C on stories I obviously put a lot of effort into? I don't CARE if he didn't like them, that shouldn't have been the point. There's a lot of "classic" literature I think is crap, personally. HATED The Scarlet Letter. But I recognize its worth as literature. And even if he thought my stories were crap, that's HIS opinion. He should be grading on effort and improvement, not on how much he enjoyed what he read. Grrr.
Okay, end bitch session. Just aggrevates me. Blah.