Error
I can’t remember the exact wording of the email I received from my poetry professor in May of my sophomore year of college, but the meaning was clear: She could not find any way, without violating academic and professional ethics, to give me a passing grade. In “Intro to Poetry.” A class I had not attended since sometime in March.
My 19-year-old brain knew precisely what to do. I must call my mother in a rage to fix the problem. As an academic dean, my mother had dealt with such situations before. She informed me that I could research the school’s grievance process. However, she asked, “Do you really think you should pass?” I had the right to complain, of course, but it was pretty clear I had put in the hard work to earn my “F.”
For the first and thankfully only time in my life, I had failed a class. It was poetry, literally and conceptually.
I often think about that class I hadn’t gone to. I teach in a college English department. I failed poetry. It’s weird.
After my failure, I dropped out of college, moved to the big city of Saint Paul, MN, and taught preschoolers for about 6 months. I was a good preschool teacher. I didn’t fail at that, except for the one time I lost a kid in the life-sized ant farm at the Children’s Museum for 10 minutes. That probably counts as a failure. But mostly I passed.
When I returned to (a different) college, I would not accept failure. I tacked an English major on top of my music major, despite—but, honestly, because of—that poetic stain on my transcript.
It really isn’t a great metaphor for writing because the stakes of a misplaced modifier are a bit lower, but I use it anyway. Writing is a revision process. It isn’t just a revision of words but of perspective, objective, and presentation. Write something today and look at it tomorrow. It will look different. Look at it in 5 years. It will look different.
Writing failures, like failures of young adulthood, are frustrating, but they also prompt changes.
My first-year college writing students tend to be results-oriented. They demand parameters and rubrics and the answers to the questions and for me to precisely lay out exactly what an “A” looks like. It takes a semester for me to even start dissolving that worldview. Over the course of their writing lives and lives in general, they will begin to understand that “errors” are just words or choices written or made at a particular moment, that the writing and the choosing are the point, and that writing, oddly enough, does not end with a period. You are never done, and that’s why it’s fun.