Episode Report Card Pamie: A- | 119 USERS: C+ YOU GRADE IT Math Is Hard
By Pamie | Season 4 | Episode 14 | Aired on 2004.02.17
Rory sports a Texas shirt here that I need to own. The Professor knows what Rory's doing the second she enters, and fetches her paper while Rory goes on about Charlize Theron and how "pretty girls like to get fat" and win Oscars. Rory doesn't get an earful of love. What she gets is a suggestion that she drop the class. He can tell that she's using knowledge she got from other classes to use as research into this paper. Wait, they know when we do that? And we're not supposed to do it? Where else would I ever apply the things I learn in Art History if not in Latin American Playwrights? This professor went so far as to look up her schedule and talk to her advisor. Everybody thinks Rory needs to drop a class. This is unacceptable to Rory, as it would have been for me. Only once did I drop a class, and it was a dance class I had to drop due to an injury. I didn't even change stuff to pass/fail. And I took fifteen to eighteen hours a semester. I would have been as devastated as Rory here at the very notion that I couldn't handle the schoolwork. And the worst thing in the world is a professor suggesting you do it, that you aren't good enough, that you're a failure. I am so with Rory for the rest of the episode, as this scenario was one of my biggest fears in college. ["Me too. In my second year I had to ask for special permission to take an extra half-course in my first semester, which was one of the dumbest things I ever did. I was taking all English or Comparative Literature classes so I had between 1000 and 1500 pages of reading to do every weekend. Basically, I spent those four months in bed, reading. And even with that insane courseload, I was still the only person in my Women Writers class who finished Middlemarch." -- Wing Chun] It's when he tells Rory she works at a "slower pace" than others. Whoa, that would have sent me into a terrible panic. Rory's face when she finds out that she got a D on the paper is absolutely perfect. Girls like Rory don't get Ds. This isn't how things are supposed to go. This is all wrong. She exhales, deflated, and stands up to leave. The professor tells her that this happens to a lot of students. "Okay," Rory says. "Glad to be fitting in." She leaves. ["If that had happened to me in my first year of university, I would have never stopped crying." -- Wing Chun]