My vindictiveness might require therapy

Anti-gamers,

I just submitted four graduate applications--two containing an extremely embarrassing misspelling of an historian's name and who knows what other errors that I didn't have time to check because they are due next week. And there are still four more to go, plus the nerve-wracking process of extorting timely recs from the endearingly absent-minded professor types who have unendearingly absented their minds from completing my recs by the deadline even though they agreed to do this months ago and I even asked them to please tell me if they were planning not to do it on time, so that I could just resign myself to their lateness and stop worrying. They also didn't do that. So I have a lot of feelings about systems right now and gaming them, and most of them are negative.

High school is absurd, I think we can all agree. It serves an important social and academic function, and it's not irredeemably evil like middle school, but it's still absurd. I don't know much about the experience to be had at schools like Julia's, but I have some faith that they are better than public schools, and that I should send my hypothetical children to them instead of Niles West. But I guess gaming the system is a kind of useful skill too, and it's probably learned best at big public schools, where everything is both absurd and incredibly complex and impersonal. You have to wear your gym uniform every day and the rule is that you can't cover it with other clothes or wear street clothes with it, for example. About 90 percent of your grade is just showing up in the stupid thing, but because gym is also required every semester that you're enrolled, you have to go outside in November to "play soccer" when it's 40 degrees and all you're allowed to wear is a t-shirt and shorts ("you'll warm up when you start moving around"). What to do when freezing is a compulsory school activity? Put on your XL gym shirt, lay down on the field, and tuck yourself completely into the shirt so that you are a warmth-conserving, gym-shirted egg. Possibly roll around on the field in this position for emphasis. Forgo "participation points" in favor of earning more "appropriate appearance" points, and get a B in gym. Also, attendance policies? Let's not even start. I've blogged a lot about the absurdity of high school though, so I'm sure you all know these stories.

Although by the end of high school, I probably didn't have a moral leg to stand on in terms of shirking, manipulating, lying, and outright cheating in order to circumvent the system, I still managed to cultivate an intense sense of self-righteousness about other people's doing it. I did pretty much stop playing these kinds of games when I realized that college--at least the coursework part of college--was not absurd and arbitrary like high school, and dedicating my time to creating elaborate ways to undermine my teachers was not going to be that productive.

I credit my hum class with demonstrating this to me, but I realize that such redemptive narratives are self-justifying and often manipulated by hindsight. Still, there was a real change in my attitude towards school during first quarter (I have blog evidence!), and I can't imagine it resulted from my really awesome calc or "neuroscience" classes (were you in that, Becky?) or my nonexistent social life. But my hum class was amazing enough to re-direct my interests, and I really did love everything about it--the books, the professor, the TA, even (most of) my classmates--so I'm going to go with that. I kept getting checks instead of check-pluses on my papers, which at the time, I took to mean that I was getting a C in the class, and since the only academic skill I had reliably cultivated by that point was the ability to write decent sophistic papers arguing that whatever the teacher said was wrong, I decided this meant that I HAD NO SKILLS and would imminently FAIL OUT OF SCHOOL, so I moved into the Reg and started taking Homer extremely seriously and writing all my papers weeks in advance. Now I realize the silly lopsidedness of the situation, which was just the TA giving everyone perfunctory low-ish "grades" that didn't even count for the course so that we could figure out how to write a college paper, and me re-arranging my life in response. But that wouldn't be the first time my freaking out was completely out of proportion to events.

In any case, after that, I decided I was a sincere student (plus or minus a few relapses into cynicism), and people who were gaming the system deserved my scorn. The mockery of class fuckers was one facet of this, but it also has much less socially acceptable consequences, like my burning hatred for grade inflation that makes it possible for everyone who remains alive during the quarter to get at least a B-, and possibly a B if he goes to office hours once and cries about how hard his life is (or cries about how hard her math homework is, as Julia might remember). Now, I understand that we're supposed to have good will towards our classmates, and at least the decency to keep our mouths shut when they do unethical or simply lame things to get by. I mean, what are you going to do--snitch? Even to harbor animosity towards these people rather than admiration for their cleverness and luck is questionable. If you can't admire their great skill, shut up and be unconcerned with it all, since their behavior doesn't affect you. Nonetheless, I resented these people. I resented the people who always got extensions on their papers, who wheedled their way out of requirements, who stroked their beards with enough seriousness that their professors mistook them for deep thinkers, who wrote their BAs the night before and got A-'s. Generally, Julia was a good person to express these socially unacceptable sentiments to, since she often harbored them as well (especially in reference to BA shirking), though more diplomatically. In some sense, I guess this vindictiveness of mine demonstrates my own small-mindedness. A really dedicated student would probably ignore what lame people are doing to get by and focus instead on the integrity of his own work. Fair enough. I am a shallow, jealous, and competitive person. Play by the rules or incur my wrath.

Now, you guys mention going to office hours as a way of playing the game in college. I think this is a case of what Becky suggested below in the comments, where some people do this sincerely, everyone else sees how it benefits them, and it becomes systematized as the thing to do to succeed. I think a lot of people don't even know that it's the thing to do when they come to college since it's usually not the thing to do in high school. The only reason to have out of class communication with teachers in my high school was if you were flunking or you were sucking up in some egregious way, both of which marked you out immediately as a failure. I went to office hours in college because my hum TA required it, and the first time was excellent, but unfortunately set off a regrettable succession of four-hour office hours social disasters that made up my college experience. How many apology emails did I/you have to send out, Social Secretary Julia? SO MANY. Sigh. Anyway, I realized pretty soon that office hours were the gold-paved road to recommendations and other forms of external benefit, and so definitely a way to play the game (and one that was less heinous than joining a sorority or "networking" as CAPS instructed), but I still couldn't make myself go to office hours for classes in which I had no interest or nothing to say about the reading that didn't fit into normal class sessions. I know, however, that many people went "just to chat" and some who went to, uh, more than chat, and I recall discussing in Julia/Becky's dorm sometime during second year how they managed these amazing feats. I would rather have died than walked into a professor's office to ask him about his kids and hobbies.

So, to bring this all back to grad school, despite my resentment of game players, or perhaps because of it, I am fascinated by really clever or daring game plays, particularly the phenomenon of faking academic credentials, which I will one day write a profound tract about, really. Someone posted on one of the grad school message boards that one of her classmates had forged her letters of recommendation because she was too awkward to get real recs. Is this not amazing? Obviously, I am not alone in my fascination with this story, since the post has gotten tons of responses, many debating the problem that snitching poses for hyper-competitive but basically ethical students. We await the outcome of this tale.

--Rita