ABCs

I've recently been struggling academically - not in the sense that I'm not learning things, or that I'm failing any classes or anything like that. It's just that I don't get the whole process, and another thing altogether.

The whole process: in conversations with my dad and a couple other friends, we have found that none of us really like writing papers. Not that there isn't value to it, both academically and in the training of the mind. But it doesn't really make me feel like I've learned all that much. I learn a ton through reading and the research process, but then I have to put my thoughts down on paper, and I have to footnote sources and use / credit other people's ideas, and so far it never seems that my own ideas and the connections that I have made independently as a cause of that reading ever come out. It's like in my IS, where I have learned a ton of theology and grown so much, but only a tiny fraction of that is ever expressed in the papers that I write. To put a letter grade on that one effort doesn't really seem to accurately show how much I've learned and changed.

That's the thing that I have come to hate about grading. If you do poorly on one test, it screws your whole grade for the semester (at least it usually does at Houghton). The way that grading and weighting work, you have to be solid in your information the whole semester to get a "good" grade. If you work hard at something all semester, and move from a D level to finally getting an A at the end of the semester, the only way that is reflected is that you'll probably get a C in the class. That doesn't seem fair to me. It doesn't really reflect the whole process in terms of what you achieve at the end.
Hmm. Maybe that is more fair than I thought. It just seems like writing an 8-10 page paper in response to very specific and detailed prompts doesn't really allow for the personal growth and opinion to come out.

The other thing I have been struggling with is the concept of the grade itself. I remember a conversation last semester where we got our papers back in class, and the people sitting around me were stymied (almost to the point of being angry about it) that I didn't automatically flip to the back of the paper to see what my grade was.
What does that reflect? It says that all you care about is the grade. It doesn't matter what you wrote, or what the grader had to say about it, it only matters what grade you got. As a friend has been reminding me for about a year: "who cares? It's not about the grade, it's about what you learned."

In spite of that, I've still struggled to really put that idea into practice. What does it mean to let my work stand for itself, and not expect that because I've done well in other classes I should automatically do well now? And then when I get a grade that I feel doesn't reflect the work I've done, what should my response be? Do I go and talk with my lecturer about it, or do I jusgt let it slide and hope to do better next time? That's particularly challenging here, where it's often the case (or at least in one class) that I didn't receive a single grade until right before everything was due. I found out 60% of my grade today, and the last assignment is due tomorrow.

I often find that I can't argue with the grades that I've received. But I want to receive something higher. How do I reconcile that? When I get a B that I feel that I probably deserved, but I'm still upset that I didn't pull an A, what do I do?
I don't even know.

For now, my response is to let go and entrust that as much as my grades matter for anything in the future, God will take care of it. That doesn't mean that I plan to slack off and not care, but I'm seriously considering not looking at my grades when they come out online at the end of the semester. I will have done my work, and it will be over. Why do I need to focus and worry about how it was graded by someone else? Wouldn't it be more positive to say that how I did was a matter between God and myself, because it was between He and I how closely to my best I performed?