Welcome back to another week of the Mirror, Dartmouth.
It’s no secret that we’re all caught in the iron grasp of a work-heavy Week 5 — just take a lap around the library, and you’ll see plenty of students clutching Novack coffees. So, rather than rehash the frantic chaos of midterms season, I thought I’d exercise my editorial privilege to tell a little story. One about how everything works out, even if it might not seem that way at the time — the story of my magnum opus.
Let me set the scene. It was my junior year of high school, and AP Lang with Mrs. McGinn was my last class of the week. I spent that Friday afternoon shivering in the air-conditioned classroom, dreaming of the warm sunshine just outside the windows. Mrs. McGinn was ready to work us — a bunch of juniors with rapidly declining motivation — into seasoned writers ready for the College Board’s spring exam.
Her method of choice? Weekly rhetorical analysis essays, due first thing in class on Monday. We would sweat every weekend, hands cramping over our keyboards, trying desperately to get our assignments done in time. To make it worse, Mrs. McGinn handed back last week’s papers as we left on Friday afternoon — you know, for maximum fear heading into the weekend.
These essays were graded out of 45 points, an irregular number that was somehow uniquely poised to inflict maximum trauma. You see, even as she handed out those papers with a benevolent smile, Mrs. McGinn could nonetheless be damning you to a weekend of working toward redemption. Everyone wanted to be in the mid-40s — 41 or 42 was a good enough score to rest a little. If you got 36 out of 45, it was basically the end of the world.
The papers were an endless cycle of fear-motivated rhetorical analysis. To make it worse, every student had to lead the in-class discussion for a designated week — during which they were expected to have the best essay, since they had presumably read the piece multiple times.
My week arrived, and I was quaking in my proverbial boots — or in this case, a uniform polo and dirty white sneakers. Most students got an easy speech, one where the author’s rhetorical choices were obvious, but I had been assigned the big kahuna: a 30-page whopper on free speech and censorship on college campuses.
The week leading up to my Monday discussion was hellish. For once, I did not procrastinate. I read the piece over and over, spending the whole weekend bent over my desk. In between cycles of writer’s block-induced panic, I watched my dad and sister fly kites outside like I was some sort of twisted Rapunzel, locked in my upstairs chamber.
But you know what, dear readers of my editor’s note/personal diary? I pulled through. I led a great discussion, and I got a 45 out of 45 on that essay — maybe the only perfect score I ever got in that class. In fact, I think it was probably the greatest work of writing I have ever and will ever produce. Even after three years of writing countless essays and articles at Dartmouth, I don’t think any of my work could hold a candle to that one censorship essay.
Tragically, I will never again lay eyes on that exquisite work of intellectualism. My high school deleted my Google Drive, sending my paper to digital purgatory, and Mrs. McGinn has since retired, rescuing successive generations from the trauma of the 45-point rhetorical analysis papers.
I don’t know what the moral of this story is. Perhaps it’s just a nostalgic memory, or maybe midterms season has reminded me of previous academic stressors. Maybe it’s a lesson — despite the heartaches of high school English, I nonetheless became an insufferable English major who writes too much in his editor’s notes. Everything works out in the end.
So to distract from midterms, or maybe your own haunting memories of high school, this week we’re straying away from the academic. One writer talks to students hosting “prospies” through the Dimensions program, one interviews students from Australia and New Zealand and another ladles herself a bowl of Foco soup.
Here at the Mirror, we know the term might be rough. But if my random and overly personal anecdote from high school means anything, maybe it’s this — power through, and you might surprise yourself with what waits on the other side.
