Read the following quotation from the first guide to grade abatement. Consider its message about the impact of the choices you make every day, and then use the comment section to ask questions and start discussions about the kind of person you are building through your choices. Are you developing resilience and self-awareness? Are you becoming cynical or hopeful? Are you learning how to game the system? What are you becoming?
The Stuff that Sticks with You
When you blow off your responsibility, you are likely to fail; and without traditional grades attached, the word “fail” takes on a much more troubling connotation. You’ve heard (or said yourself) the excuses for failure: This assignment doesn’t count; this won’t be on an exam; you’re really busy right now; it’s too cold outside; it’s too nice outside; you’re a senior; you will be a senior; you’re not going to use this in your real life; your teacher is a soulless monster; who cares if other students are doing this; none of this really matters, anyway.
The simplest response to all these excuses is to point out what you’re ostensibly here to do. You are here to think, read, and write more effectively, and you are here to be exposed to good thinkers, readers, and writers. Perhaps you don’t want that, but it’s likely that learning to think, read, and write will be useful in whatever field you plan on entering. These skills make up the machinery of thought. They are the skills of life, and that makes this course fundamental to you. It doesn’t matter what kind of identity you’ve carved for yourself so far; it doesn’t matter how you’ve fared in English before now; it doesn’t even matter to this initial discussion what you hope to become in the future. Only by becoming a hermit could you hope to avoid the benefits of this course… and even as a hermit, you’d likely end up wanting to articulate your experience in some way. Henry David Thoreau, Miyamoto Musashi, and Ted Kaczynski, for instance, are all famous (or infamous) recluses who became famous only after what they wrote while secluded was published.
But the real warning isn’t about what you’ll end up lacking. It’s about what you’ll create in yourself. The ugly parts of us don’t operate on a switch. Apathy, disrespect, entitlement—these aren’t sweaters or jackets you can shrug off and cast aside when you’re tired of wearing them. That stuff will stick to you, stay with you, for a long time. When you choose not to work, you are breeding future selves, developing right now the habits that will poison or empower you in every aspect of your life. Your daily life is inculcation in its purest form: the linking together of a chain of decisions that will protect you or drag you down.
This is not some dire jeremiad, either, about your generation. You are probably—hopefully—never going to experience the effects of a sudden and obliterating choice. You should be much more concerned with the small, insidious, and irrevocable ones that you make each day, each period, and each moment. In fact, we could sum this up with a borrowed Orwellian metaphor:
Do you truly believe that disrespect, disengagement, or failure now will pass through you like a grain of corn through the body of a bird, undigested and harmless?