Extra Credit

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Last week, I received an email from a student. This particular student is doing VERY poorly in the class. Even if she scores 100% on everything left, she might not manage to get a 'C' in the course. She never talks in terms of participating, although she often talks and laughs with the girl next to her, with whom she is ostensibly a close friend. Often disruptive, they don't seem to want to be there. In her email, she had the gall to ask for extra credit.

What she wants me to do in essence is do more work. While I understand that I work for her, there is also a reciprocal responsibility on the part of the student to learn. I am disinclined to acquiesce to her request, in part because I refuse to teach people who refuse to learn. She wants me to do more work so that she can do more work that forces me to do even more work as I grade it. To be fair, I also have to offer it to everyone, which creates even more work.

The story is told of Hal Eyring. He intended many years ago to be a Chemist like his father. One night, he asked his father for help with some problems, and they went down into the basement. His father turned at one point and asked, "Didn't we do some of these before?" Hal sheepishly admitted that they had, whereupon his dad asked, "In your free time, do you think about Chemistry, because if you don't, maybe you should rethink your career".

People tend to arrive at the place on which they set their sights. I can tell from the performance and behavior of this girl that although her rhetoric claims she hopes to arrive at a certain place, her ego is writing checks her body is unwilling to back with hard currency. In essence, she wants to arrive in Oregon without having to cross the plains. It doesn't work that way.

Students routinely ask for extra credit. Extra credit is for work above and beyond the course content. What most students actually want is remedial credit as if it's simply a matter of doing enough work, however poor their performance on the basic elements may be. They have this misbegotten notion that success is simply a matter of doing enough work, even if it's crappy work, late, and subpar. They want to be treated equal regardless of inferior output. It is an expectation that does not hold water in the real world, and their attitude evinces that they would like to spend their time doing something else.

I am not sure these are the type of students we want to be in health care or as college graduates. If they do not want to be in college, why are they there? If they do not want to be in class, why are they disrupting the experience for those who do? They want to be paid, but they want to be paid what others are paid even if they do subpar work. What would you say to a Doctor who, if you went in to have a hernia repaired, removed your lung instead. Even if he did a fantastic job, you still have a hernia. It is not about doing enough work or about doing something other than the standard rubric well. Yet, people want credit for this.

At the end of my first semester teaching in Las Vegas, a very nice young lady came to see me. It was perhaps two weeks before the final, and there was no way that I could do anything to help her pass. Instead, I told her to let this be the lesson and do better the next time she took the class. Rather than ask what more they can do, the students should be asking what they can be doing better. Study harder. Be better next time.

Contrast that with this semester. Just before the first exam, a young lady came to me in tears. After I outlined the course in a mathematical manner, she left feeling better. When she turned in her exam, I followed up with her. Her analysis of her performance was well summarized with a quote: "I have learned that I need to reprioritize how I use my time and study more for the course." She learned something. She is on her way to becoming successful, wherever she goes.

We have this misbegotten notion that doing equates with being. We think that if we practice enough we'll be very good. Only perfect practice makes perfect. We think that if we give enough gifts, even if they are junk or given grudgingly, that it will be accounted with us as if we had been Charitable. We think that it's simply a matter of balancing our bad deeds with enough good ones. God is not fooled by what we do. He sees what we are. In the end, only doing that begets becoming counts.

Life is not about what we do. It is not about accumulating enough points to get a particular grade. After you graduate college, few people give a flying pinwheel what your grades were. They are interested in what you know, what you can do, and who you are. I think that may be why, when Jesus turned to the thieves crucified adjacent to Him, He felt inclined to say they were headed to paradise with Him. There were Pharisees and Sadducees and Gentiles and Samaritans who did great deeds. Some of them hated His very existence. I think it possible that Christ looked into the souls of the thieves and saw that, although some things they did were bad, they were at heart good people.

We talk a lot about inheritance. You do not get to earn a place as a son or daughter of a person in order to inherit what they have to bequeath upon you. You qualify, not by virtue of what you do, but by the very nature or what you are. Otherwise, it is simply a matter of doing enough stuff. God is not deceived. He knows His sons.

It is not enough to do more. We must be better. We must do more than we think we can under the circumstances. We must be valiant. Qualifying to be a Son of God is more than doing the right things, irregardless of our reasons for doign them. We must do them because we have an eye single to His glory because we have become like Him. In the end, all credit is His.