Final Exams Rant

What is the world coming to when I have to worry about finals?

So it's finally come to this. I walk out of the classroom, errant pen in hand, a dazed look on my face, feeling like I just stepped under a city bus. Behind me, the professor clutches a stack of exams, cackling madly as s/he dashes up to their solitary prison cell to mark my paper up with Slavic runes for death and decay, and thus determine my academic reputation for the next three weeks.

Mick strolls out of the classroom, a confident look on his face. "I nailed that one where he asked for your name," he said breezily. "Did you?"

Wiggo storms up and down the hall, hands in the air in the demeanor of a prizefighter, chanting: "I came, I saw, I fled, I cried, I drank, I took the class again."

I stand in the hallway, still clutching my pen as if it were Excalibur or something, trying to remember whether I managed to convey, in my first essay, whether or not rhetoric was something you had to use words with, or whether you could just do it in mime. Behind me, the desk I was sitting at is standing in a puddle I fervently wish were water...but it isn't.

Andrew walked by, clapping me on the shoulder. "Well, there's always next year," he said philosophically, and as he said those words, I realized that I'd spent the past four months denying the possibility of a next year. For me, there is no next year, or next weekend, or even next half-hour, that won't contain the memory of opening up that exam, reading the first question, and feeling an overpowering urge to raise my hand and ask if "I'm a Rhetorical Dolt" t-shirts will be provided by the professor, or whether we'll all have to pool our money and buy them together.

To use a more appropriate metaphor, you're not thinking about the next dive off the diving board when you're plummeting towards an empty pool filled with broken beer bottles and rusty nails. Consequently, the thought of returning to a Schmetoric class, or any class a year from now, simply isn't a viable factor in my discourse model.

How funny. All these wonderful higher-level summations of the situation, and yet I still managed to turn in an exam my cat probably wouldn't even pee on, much less read.

I never thought the day would come where I would enter a classroom, take an exam, and find everybody outside after it was all over, comparing war wounds or something. It was putrid. It was absolutely atrocious. It was scratching and clawing to get main points out of those puppies. I did fine on the schmetorical definitions, but that first essay felt more like a freshman composition on modern-day advertising than a graduate-level essay on modern trends in rhetorical thought.

My Tuesday final wasn't much better (though I suppose it was a little better, at least, marginally so). Since half of it was multiple choice, even the worst student in the world can guess, and I didn't find it necessary to guess at most of them (95% of them, I'd say). Later questions I hedged on a bit--I kept directly addressing the professor who wrote the questions rather than the questions themselves:

Question: You meet me in the hallway and I tell you you got half of the exam questions right. Later on, you find you got all of them right. Explain the implications of my comment to you in terms of Allan's conventional implicatures.
Answer: You know damn well I didn't get all of these right. I can tell by the look on your face that you're going to whip out "Old Red" and go to town on this puppy with glee.
Question: How would you write the term "It's a wonderful life" with the language of predicate logic?
Answer: Why are you doing this to me? Is this why you grew your hair long--to hide the 666? This is all about that bag of flaming dung I left on your porch step, isn't it? You can't prove that was me, damn it. Lots of paper bags are marked "Gregg Long" these days.

The only redeeming factor left is that a) I am now done with final exams (the first exams I've taken since 1997, come to think of it), and b) I can now unleash all this repressed outrage and insubordination onto my freshmen:

Student: Like, I don't have my final exam paper ready yet. I got in a car accident and lost a leg--
Me: Well you've still got your arms, don't you? This is college, damn it!
Student: But the massive loss of blood has resulted in a loss of perspicacity.
Me: Well, there's always next year.

Oh, but the hits keep on coming. I keep envisioning my future job interview, where the prospective employer looks over my resume steadily: "Yes, very nice...teaching experience, uh-huh...Master's Degree, right...Wait a minute, what's this Rhetoric exam your professor attached to your transcript?...You mean, you actually thought the central message behind Giambattista Vico's "Study Methods" was 'I never said anything about rhetoric leading to a Cartesian sense of truth--this is all about being able to pick up broads!'?"