Off the Recommended Path

Grades posted. Another semester finished. Done and dusted.

Another graduating senior failed. Sigh. She's no longer graduating, I'm afraid.

Before I became a professor, I thought that teachers/instructors/professors probably got a kick out of failing students. All that power, you know. The flick of the whip. The assertion of authority. But it's not like that. Listen, you slackers, we agonize; we really do. Why, I'm not sure. You don't show up for class for weeks on end, you blow off most of the reading response assignments, you don't hand in the major paper, you never come to my office hours,  you score a 43/100 on your final exam. Did you really think you were going to pass this course? Why? GoodGodinHeaven, WHY? Because you're a graduating senior? Because you figured. . . what?  See, here I am asking these questions, whereas you, well, you're not, are you? Although honestly, why should you? Success or failure in "20th-Century European History" won't determine your life's course, tho' it probably does mean that your mom will insist you send back those graduation checks. (Even if she doesn't, you should. Really.)

It amazes me that students can and do fail with monotonous regularity, given the incredible resources that the university pours into making sure that doesn't happen--counselors and special coaching sessions and free tutoring and vigilant R.A.s and streams of emails and legions of support services and a downright fascist approach to course scheduling that involves "Recommended Paths" ("Recommended" is a euphemism for "Absolutely Mandatory") and "critical courses" (woe betide the student who fails to take the "critical courses" demanded by the Recommended Path at the "recommended" times: such a failure results in [quoting from the catalog here] "mandatory removal from the program"). Nope, no chance for the aimless or curious or misguided or just plain independent student to fuck up without the university knowing about it and marshalling its resources to rope said student back on the Recommended Path. And yet, even with all these guideposts and Big Brother accommodations, students somehow fail.

A remarkable triumph of the will, when you think about it.

OK, hats off to you, you slackers. Go for it. Diverge from the Recommended Path; choose (dare one say it) the Road Less Traveled. Maybe by failing you're succeeding.

Just don't you dare complain to me about your grade.