So, I just now looked up my grade for the Shakespeare class I took during the summer term. I looked on AIM, which just displays the grade. Then I had to go onto Blackboard to see the breakdown of the assignments. My brow is still moderately furrowed.

My progressing reactions:
What.
Wait . . . what?
Really?
Huh.
What?
Wow.
Huh.

Then, I raised my hands and sort of pumped my fists. I was prepared for worse.

Those who have heard me talk about the class know what my issues were. I loved reading the plays. Shakespeare is a genius, and I know our babies will be beautiful geniuses. The class discussions were fun and I often whispered amusing things to myself about the plays and about certain classmates.

I had pretty much procrastinated the last three assignments:
-2-3 page performance review of Midsummer: this was mostly about the comic timing and physicality of the performance. I commented on how it felt as if Shakespeare and I Love Lucy had collaborated, and it was funny and wonderful and yada yada yada. I skipped class on Friday, August 5, to work on this, and even though it wasn’t a dense or demanding paper, I was kicking myself for putting it off for so long.
–2-page article summary about Macbeth: so I found this article about Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy asking to be unsexed to prepare herself mentally and emotionally for murder. And the author proposed that she was really asking for her menstrual period to stop; the more she was like a man, the more capable of evil she could be.  She connected medical terms with motive and the sciency part totally drew me in. I wrote this Sunday night, after finishing my final paper. The article was fun to read, and I enjoyed summarizing it and giving my opinion on the author’s stance.
-8-10 page final paper on King Lear: I basically tried poking holes in the idea that this is a purely pagan play. Not groundbreaking, and it has been done a trillion times before. In my opinion, one of the crappiest pieces of crap I have ever written. I sat on my bed on a Sunday (with the paper due Monday at noon), with textbooks and journal articles stacked/strewn next to/around me, and I shook my head with every paragraph that appeared on the laptop screen, with every completed page. It finished close to nine pages, and I checked the works cited page, and I proofed the paper itself to check for typos and incomplete thoughts and bad transitions and other instances of crappery.

So, I turned all three assignments in on Monday, August 8, and those papers didn’t leave my hands with the feeling that I did a good job, but only that I had finished them. Which is good; I was grateful not to worry about them anymore.

Then I took the final Wednesday morning, August 10. I worked through it in about 2 hours and 15 minutes, and we had a 3-hour time limit. It seemed to go smoothly for the first hour and forty-five minutes, and then all of a sudden I was all, “Aw, man, there goes my attention span,” and I didn’t try to focus for too much longer. Also, I was going to St. George that day, which was clearly more important than some old final exam.

So, the grades were submitted Friday, and I’m going to talk with my professor so that I can understand exactly what happened. And if I’m dong some things right, I need to know what they are and keep doing those things.

Also, I don’t know if I’m fundamentally okay with being rewarded for procrastinating. Do I just chalk that up to part of the overall college experience?