This morning when I got to my communications class, I had just enough time to put my stuff down and get seated before I looked up at my teacher. She was signaling to me to come up, and when she caught my eye, she pointed down at a paper lying on the desk in front of her.

Oh, right. It's my test.

So I went up front, recalling that out of the 29 people in the class that had already gotten their tests back, only one had recieved an A. (I found out today who that was .. a very quiet, older woman from Idaho or some such that rarely speaks up during discussions. When she does, though, it's very good input. I would've never thought of her as the one student to have gotten an A -- to be honest, I never really would have thought of her when I'm not actually looking at her. (She sits in the same row as I do, which is the last row, and there are always at least three or four people between us, so I have to do some maneuvering to actually see her, thus it's easy to forget she and the student that sits on the other side of her are there.) But when I was told that she was indeed the A student and when I reflected on the contributions she has made to the discussion and the presentation she made in class, I can certainly believe she'd get an A.)

Of the rest of the class, there were a few B's, a few C's, and about a 75% failure rate for this particular test. That's not normal for our class -- no, no, no. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, this test included questions that were taken from elsewhere in the text other than the chapters we were being tested on .. indeed, most of the questions that weren't from these chapters weren't even from past chapters, either. They were questions we had no way of knowing the answers to. I do, by the way, plan on talking to my teacher about this. The chapter two test also included some similarly interesting questions.

With all these thoughts in mind, I went to the front of the classroom and picked up my paper, which had been lying face-down on the desk. Every little delay in seeing my grade increased the nervousness .. it's been a while since I've been so nervous about test grades. 75% failure is a lot, though, and the dread I felt while taking the test increased my thoughts of joining that number.

Turning the page over in some bizarre mix of slow aprehension and quick need to end the suspense, a little red number jumped out at me.

93 = A

!!!!

I took my test back to my seat and showed the woman that sits next to me and the guy/boy/man that sits on the other side -- who had both been almost as nervous as I was about my own grade, since I was the only one to have to wait. "Oh, I don't believe it!" quoth she. Alex didn't say anything, which is his usual way of communicating. But having commented to me on Monday about how his test paper was going to feed the fireplace (he was one of the unfortunate 75%), he didn't really need to say anything. It was a bittersweet moment, perhaps. I flipped through to see what I'd gotten wrong (I had gotten the bonus question right, which is the only thing that kept me three points away from the precarious edge of the grade margin) and to laugh over which of the questions weren't in the chapters. I was in no mood today to talk to our teacher about this, but I will -- perhaps on Friday right before we all leave for Spring Break.

Victory is mine, in some odd measure. I do have to wonder, though, how teachers can grade essays unbiasedly. All I know is I'm glad I'm on my teacher's good side.