When I was in undergrad I would often take on projects that were above what was asked of me because I was preparing for grad school and felt that a lot of the assignments were more aimed at folks who were just meeting their humanities requirement. For one of my classes I chose this really difficult topic that I was totally unprepared for. I talked to my professor several times about it, explaining what I was reading and how I wanted to tie it into the topic of the course even though it was sort of beyond the boundaries of the subject. In the end I turned probably over a hundred hours of research into this absolute trash paper--the conclusion was basically "this paper seems like it was supposed to be about X, but I didn't think of that when I started writing it." It was well written and probably 75% of it had some semblance of structure, but overall it wasn't a coherent argument.

The day he was handing back the papers, as I was walking into class, he said "I read that thing you vomited on the page". Scared the hell out of me. I needed As in all of my major courses in order to get into the grad school programs I was planning on applying to, and this paper was a big part of my grade. I'd had a course with him the year before and he was really impressed by my work. All though the semester he and I were having great discussions in and out of class, and all the other students told me I was his favorite, but this only made me all the more nervous because I knew his expectations were high. I was terrified not only that I was going to get a bad grade, but that I was going to let him down.

Then he handed it back. The paper was full of marks and corrections and question marks in the margins. I'd known it was shitty, but he absolutely tore it apart. Stomach sinking, I hesitantly get to the last page, and there's the grade: a perfect A. I didn't understand how this could be. Other people had papers with almost no markings on them, but not all of them had As. Mine was torn to shreds, yet this hadn't affected my grade?

It wasn't until after the class was over that I saw what had happened. I remembered stuff he'd said throughout the course and realized he'd been subtly directing me the whole time. He'd been mentioning ideas or namedropping authors during his lectures, knowing I would write it down and look it up later, but never really telling me what to do. Although I hadn't noticed it at the time, looking back on the semester overall it became clear that he already knew everything I was writing about, he'd read everything I was reading (for the most part), and he'd studied all the theories I was struggling to understand. Turns out it had been one of his focuses in college. From the very start he could have said "here are the essential works you need to read first, then you can start on these other works", but he didn't. I think he wanted to see what I could do, how far I'd go, how much I'd understand, and that's why he gave me a perfect A on a paper that was so flawed.

What a great professor. A lot of students disliked him, some hated him, but to me that's the sign of a good professor. I'm now going to grad school to study a field he taught me about, on a fellowship that I was given at least in part due to the research I did for his classes and the high GPA I was able to maintain because my professors encouraged me to challenge myself and didn't dock my grade for it.