“How are your grades?” My father asked me, nearly 43 years ago, when I was home from college for the Thanksgiving holiday. In many ways, Thanksgiving is the first in-person report that many parents get from their college-student offspring. Thanksgiving is a check-in with headquarters, the first quarterly report to nervous (and close to broke) investors.
The truth was, my grades were not so great. My first semester at college was, um, distracting. The freedom to stay out all night, skip classes, bluff my way through seminars — it was all too intoxicating. After I found myself napping through my art history lecture class at 11:30 a.m., I decided that the smart thing was to just skip the class altogether and sleep in. A decision that led, unsurprisingly, to a failed midterm exam and a wobbly set of grades across the board.
MAGAZINE: THE SECRET OF GETTING GOOD GRADES
I did eventually pull myself together and graduate cum laude four years later, but to be brutally honest, I didn’t learn much that first year at college. My father, who in many ways was my hero, died seven years ago, which is why I can write the following sentence without worrying if he’ll read it: that first year was a waste of his money.
I’m pretty sure he knew that anyway. My mumbling evasions about my grades — “Oh, you know, it’s college, so it’s all sort of about the final papers and stuff” — must have given me away. And the ostentatious way I sat at the kitchen table reading Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene for my “Major English Poets, Chaucer to Milton” survey class probably underscored it all. I was never much of a scholar, so pretending to be must have been a major red flag.
“So how are your grades?” my nephew asked me last year, when we all got together for Thanksgiving. He was midway through his freshman year in college, and I was midway through my own first year in the Master of Divinity program at Princeton Theological Seminary. My nephew is a scholar, and I knew that he was feeling competitive and eager to outdo his ancient, creaky uncle. “The brain atrophies at around 50,” he told me once. “I hope you’re ready for that.”
His grades, he told me with matter-of-fact bluntness, were entirely in the A and A-plus range, at which point I made a nasty remark about how grade inflation was rampant everywhere these days. My grades, I told him, were also in that range, but I also said that it was different for me because my classes are harder and my fellow seminarians wouldn’t put up with the kind of snowflake coddling his freshman classmates no doubt expected.
“What did you get on your last paper?” He demanded.
“A 97,” I said. “What did you get on yours?”
“I got a 97 too,” he said, “and I’m not just saying that because that’s what you got. I mean, because that’s what you said you got. I really did get a 97.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, smiling because I had clearly won that round.
But what I didn’t tell him — what I will never tell him — is that it was clear from the early part of the semester that my performance in my Biblical Greek class wasn’t going to do much for my overall GPA. It wasn’t going to be a freshman year-style disaster (for one thing, I actually went to my Greek class), but I would be lucky to eke out a flat B, and a C+ was definitely a possibility.
What I had discovered during my first semester is that the brain does indeed atrophy — or at least, mine had — and that I was not ready for the diminished capacity of my tired, sad little neurons as they tried to memorize the way Ancient Greek nouns changed their spellings depending on who was doing what to whom with the noun in question… or something.
MAGAZINE: LOSING TOUCH IS HARD TO DO
The brain may get rickety after 50, but my judgment is still razor-sharp. Sharper, even, than it was 40 years ago. I knew that my Greek grade would be a blot on my transcript, so I cleverly switched it from a letter-grade class to a simpler, more forgiving pass-fail class. You can do that these days, I learned, just by sending an email to the registrar.
I didn’t tell my nephew that. He would have smiled smugly and said something like, “Pass-fail? Now who’s the snowflake?” But my advice to parents everywhere this Thanksgiving holiday is to make sure that when you ask, “How are your grades?” You make sure your little money-pits are actually getting grades — letter grades — and not taking the lazy way out.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the cofounder of Ricochet.com.