One of the best things that happened to me in college was getting a D-minus on my first English paper.
I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect from Professor of English John Somerville, the man who gave it to me. One of the first things I remember learning in class was that, in college, he lived in the same residence hall as Mark David Chapman, the typically three-named assassin who murdered John Lennon. “Well,” I thought at the time, “this might very well be a ‘strange, lonely, evil man,”— as Bill Buford described Andrew Cross in ‘Among the Thugs,’ — “but at least his class will be interesting.”
To reach into even one’s own memories can become a form of self-affirming hearsay, but my freshman self probably anticipated that this college English class would differ little in difficulty from those I took in high school. There, I had coasted somewhat through teachers who considered me a “gifted” writer, who noted but tolerated my tendency toward “bombastic,” ‘“awyeresque” prose. But Somerville had a different idea.
When my first paper — a descriptive essay — was due, I proudly turned it in, satisfied with the work I had put in and expecting a commensurate grade. It was an account of a run I had gone on during the summer, during which I stopped briefly to take in the beautiful sunset before me. A few weeks later, though, when Somerville returned the papers, I followed marginalia of critical green ink to the final page, where a big fat D-minus stared me in the face.
I was shocked. With the benefit of hindsight, I realize now I shouldn’t have been. It was a bad paper. The passive voice abounded. Bombast clouded my narrative rather than clarifying it. At one point, I referred to my car as “red, like the tomatoes I cannot eat” because I still had to run. I had also described beams of light as “tangible” — beams of light! They weren’t lightsabers, for goodness’ sake!
But at the time, of course, I was indignant. This green pen-wielding monster was wrong; he had called a budding literary genius a failure! How dare he!
I could have given up right then and there and switched to another professor. It probably would have helped my GPA. Instead, some insanity in me elected to learn from the failure and to improve. So I took another look at the paper, carefully examining the critical marginalia, to apply all of Dr. Somerville’s advice to my next effort. It wasn’t easy. I had to slough off the old skin of some of my most deeply-ingrained habits as a writer — some of which this reflection may still display — and I didn’t even achieve the success I wanted on the first subsequent attempt. But by semester’s end, I had gone from a D-minus paper to an A-minus paper, and I’m a better writer and a better person for it.
As for Dr. Somerville, I hold no grudges. He has become my favorite professor on campus. No trip of mine to Delp Hall is complete without a stop by his office to see if he’s around to tell me about his jar of soil or his North Korean tongue cleaner. No perusal of my Facebook feed is complete without checking to see what he — or his ‘friend’ Chuck Hinkley, the North Carolinian leper — has to say about the world (by the way, Old Fort IS a real place). Without the man who first suggested to me that there was a Hillsdale Bubble that needed to be popped, the Gadfly Group, the campus organization I founded to pop the Hillsdale Bubble, would not exist. Without the man who told me the story of Harold Hess, the former Hillsdale police officer who had a direct encounter with the 1966 Hillsdale UFO, the world would have never known about Hess.
Above all, Dr. Somerville illustrates one of the best aspects of our campus: At a place this small, our professors are not just accessible, but personable. They want to be our friends. Take advantage of it. Don’t leave Hillsdale without the true friendship of a professor — even if it’s not John Somerville (after all, there are only so many diseased monkeys to go around). It’s a lesson I would never have learned without that D-minus.