Hypothetically.

I have a completely hypothetical situation I’d like to get some opinions on, so that I might know how to feel if it ever happened to me.

So the story starts with a student, let’s call him Matt, who was studying at a large, well-known public university in his home state. One of Matt’s classes, Geography with Professor M. Goldman (a hypothetical teacher, of course. Not to be confused with Geography professor Mara Goldman, of the University of Colorado), always bored him. He tried desperately at the beginning of the semester to attend lecture, only to fall asleep. Let’s also suppose that Matt had a resurgence of sorts after missing some very important material one day while napping. He attended class more often, studied, and did very well on all the tests and quizzes. Now, this hypothetical class also had a hypothetical recitation. Let’s say that Matt enjoyed the recitation even less than the lecture because his TA was very obviously sexist and would take offense to almost any opinion in opposition to hers, especially one that was expressed by a male in the class. Matt, being an opinionated and knowledgeable male in the class, butted heads with the female TA on many occasions and she hypothetically tended to grade his work much more strictly than was necessary. None of this really ever concerned Matt, after all, he was doing fine on all the tests and quizzes and was keeping up in lecture. “Recitation is just supposed to help you solidify your information if you don’t understand it in lecture, right?” Matt hypothetically reasoned with himself. Then on the third to last week of class, Matt discovered something that could hypothetically ruin his hypothetical grade. He reread the syllabus and found that recitation was worth 50% of his overall class grade, while the quizzes were only 10% (total) and the midterm and final were 20% each. Matt was, needless to say, hypothetically pissed. His grade now almost completely rested on the red pen of a flighty grad student with an inflated ego and a feminist agenda instead of on his own work. Quickly tallying up his hypothetical grades, Matt discovered that an A was no longer possible. Something in the situation didn’t sit well with Matt. Perhaps it was that he had taken 2 quizzes and a Midterm and received grades of 90, 100, and 95 on them, respectively, but could not pull out an A in the class. That’s right, even a hypothetical grade of 100 on the final meant he would only receive an 84 for the overall class grade.

I feel it is always useful to go over realistic hypothetical life-situations in my head before they happen so that in the event that they one day occur, I can react appropriately. So I ask you know, how should Matt react to this hypothetical situation. I have to tell you, if this ever did happen to me, I would be completely, undoubtedly, and justifiably ticked. Hypothetically, of course.