failing

I went to the University of Washington, where giant class sizes are the norm.  For all classes outside of my major, I went through college with the following philosophy:  you can either go to class or do the readings.  It is a waste of time to do both.

This was, by and large, a massively successful philosophy.  In fact, it only let me down twice.  In the first case, I ended up with a 1.7.  I had been turning in my homework religiously, but since I never went to class, I didn’t know until I showed up for the midterm that I’d been using the wrong textbook.  All of my homework was wrong, since it was all for completely different questions.

That was also the quarter I barely made it through Latin 102 in spite of the fact that I was meeting with the professor every week before the test and the passages he would hand me to go over WERE THE SAME PASSAGES ON THE TEST THE NEXT DAY.

Also that quarter?  I had started dating a handsome young distraction named Nicolas.  😉

The second failure of my otherwise brilliant philosophy was in my final quarter of college.  I had mono, was in charge of the “Joint Service Review”–the big annual event for all three ROTCs on campus (Air Force, Army, and Navy), and was getting married in a month.  It was for some basic appreciation of architecture course, and there were something like 800 people in the class.  It was crazy easy.  I knew the material well and I was 4.0-ing the class.  All I had to do was look at my book for about an hour every few weeks, show up for the test the next day, get 100% and carry on.  It was a perfect arrangement.  Five tests, all evenly weighted.

Until one day I had a feeling that it had been a little too long since the last test.  I ran to my syllabus and sure enough…the last test had been a week and a half before.

SHIT.

I spent about an hour with my heart in my throat.  A week and a half?!  How on earth was I supposed to pass that off as anything innocent?!  And getting a zero was totally not an option–it would destroy my GPA (which, after Nic graduated, I suddenly cared about again).

I went to class the next day, waited until after the lecture, and approached the professor, who would have been a complete stranger even if I had been going to class for the last few weeks.  I told her that I was completely mortified, but I hadn’t been to class in a few weeks and had just realized that I’d missed the last test.  That I knew I didn’t deserve anything but that zero, but I knew the material and if I could just do the make-up assignment (she didn’t allow make-up tests–if you were ill and had a doctors note you had to do a make-up project) I would love to accept some kind of modified grading so that 100% on the project would equal 50% on the missed test.  She gave me the make-up assignment.

And at the end of the year when I looked up my grades do you know what it said?  Architecture 120 – 4.0.

(This story still makes Nic super mad.  And it is still one of my greatest college triumphs.)

I thought of that today while I was driving because I am at my most over-extended.  It’s making those college days look like a cake walk.  And even as I beg clients for forgiveness over their missed deadlines or skipped emails, the tests I will most want to make-up are the ones no one can repeat.  As I look back on this fall, there’s no forgiving professor to fudge a little and write:  Mothering – 4.0.