The second semester of my sophomore year of college I was forced into taking classes with the most notoriously hard-grader on my campus. Reviews on the website Rate My Professor dubbed him the “GPA Killer.”
The GPA Killer was an older English professor, in his mid-seventies, who only taught during the spring semesters. They say that was because it was easier to melt dreams in the spring than it was in the fall.
For the first part of my time with the slayer of grade point averages, I found the terrifying reviews absolutely 100% true. My papers would come back shattered, dripping red ink across the classroom. Comments would range from, “Did you even read this story!?!” to “You badly read one poem, misinterpreted another, and saw no meaning in the important lines of the other one.”
Words that he thought were of poor choice were circled so deeply, it looked like he wasted a gallon of ink running around it. I would sometimes receive decent grades, and then see that they had been crossed out and replaced with even lower grades. I was on the verge of giving up when I decided to stop trying to get good grades, and start trying to learn.
Then, at once, everything changed. When I started to pay attention, and I mean really pay attention, I found out grades were not everything, contrary to what I’d been taught my entire life up to that point. The professor reminded me that, “Doctors who got straight C’s in school are still called “doctor”. And once I started seeing less value in grades, I saw more in learning. The lessons he taught me were worth such more than an A on a paper.
He showed me the value of books. The importance of teaching. After reading James Joyce’s Dubliners, I remember him making me feel like a book mattered, completely mattered, to me. After one story when a fleeing girl freezes before she can run away from her home country, he said, “Isn’t that so accurate? Haven’t we all felt stuck while everything else around you moved?” And I had. And the fact that a book, what had previously been a bunch of words on a paper written by some old guy, could relate to me was incredible. Knowing that a book could capture a feeling like that was enlightening, and it was thanks to the GPA killer himself.
I remember when we read Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia. There were times when he was so moved by the text, he was brought to tears. He once spoke about the importance that a single moment can have. He said that each person when they get old can look back on a specific moment, and remember it as the exact moment their lives changed forever. For better or worse. Ironically, that speech ended up being one of my moments. I was amazed at how a book could show something that special, and how he helped me see it. I looked up at him from the back row of the classroom and thought, “I want to do that. I could really do that.” To this day, I live for moments like that. Moments where you are so moved by a text—where something so human can be translated into words. And ever since then, I’ve had no doubt that I want to be a teacher.
I stopped trying to get good grades and started learning just in time to get an A in his class, but that is not the story here. The truth is, I am forever grateful to that professor who always holds his red inked pen like a weapon. He showed me the value in writing. And I only hope that one day, when I become a teacher; I can pass on the message as effectively as he did to me.
