Word: grades
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This, of course, is a defense mechanism. If you tell everyone you aren't pleased with your own work and still receive a good grade the following week, you not only get to enjoy the fact that someone else has validated your worth, but you also have the opportunity to be pleasantly surprised. If you say you did a poor job on your paper and then receive a corresponding grade, you still "win," because you can then tell yourself that you were right. As long as the final determination of your paper's worth is out of your hands...
...after 20-plus years of school, those of us who suffer from the syndrome might find it genuinely impossible to distinguish whether we are really any good or not at what we do. Unless someone else hands over the good grade or the pay-raise or the thumbs up, we cannot honestly evaluate ourselves. After years of MCAT-like experiences, that ability is now, as the saying goes, out of our hands...
...couldn't tell you a single thing I learned inside my first-grade classroom. But I can tell you that no one wants to play with someone who hogs all the sand in the sandbox. That it takes two to see-saw. And that if you win by cheating, you're still a loser...
...group of kids whose dress and language evoke a sort of archetypal, semi-mythical 1980s Experience, are unwillingly pressed into service as actors by a terrifying bag lady (Gower, the play's narrator, here played with an alarming intensity by Jessamyn Conrad '00). Since they retain their eighth-grade personalities, the romancing and sexual innuendo of the first half of the play is spiced up with impromptu fist fights, Fritos breaks and such literary and urbane interpolations as "Oh, shit," "Get him, dude!" and "You the man"--a brand of humor whose effectiveness, unfortunately, cannot be adequately conveyed in transcription...
Nonetheless, it comes as a relief when, in the play's second half, the performance style swiftly sobers up, allowing us to reconnect with the story's plot line and characters--elements that have been largely drowned out during the first half in the loud static of eighth-grade toilet humor. But the bizarrely goofy comedy of the production becomes all the more surreal in contrast with the newly straight-faced drama, providing some startlingly memorable moments: Kirk Hanson '99 as the apothecary Cerimon, hamming it up as he restores the drowned queen Thaisa to life ("She's ALIIIIVE!"); Michael...