I have been spending a couple of days at GrannyBear's house this week, and among the things I have been doing has been sorting through piles and boxes and heaps of paperwork. Some of this is her paperwork (for example scraps of paper recording the mileage per year of every car she'd owned for the past twenty-something years...) And some of the paperwork is mine, covering everything from my Year 5 history books to my university exams.
Some of these old records contain modest surprises - my handwriting was very neat when I was ten, and has been going down hill ever since; I remember absolutely nothing of my GCSE maths coursework; my GCSE English teacher had very high expectations of me.
Others contain even more startling surprises. Information that not only don't I remember the content of, but I don't remember receiving. One notable example of this is a letter from my Director of Studies* that I received at the end of my second year at University.
My second year was not one that ended well. While my first year wasn't great, featuring the death of my father; my second year was more academically disastrous. I arrived at my first exam, prepared for, and expecting, three hours of Quantum Mechanics. It was a Thermodynamics exam. it would be fair to say I didn't write a great deal in that exam. I did, however, shed a lot of tears, and I also chewed my index finger. I chewed it so much I suffered severe nerve damage in the finger. It recovered. Eventually. With five 3-hour exams spread over only three days, I didn't exactly psychologically recover before the remaining exams. The miracle was that I finished the year with a third. And only missed a 2(ii) by a whisker.
Which brings us to the very kind letter my Director of Studies sent me, letting me know my mark breakdown, and also giving me some feedback on my Supervisor's reports. And what gems they contained...
"Some of her supervision work was excellent and witnessed independent thinking as well as sufficient ability. At other times she gave up rather quickly."
"She is bright and able, but seems a little unconfident of her abilities as a physicist. In fact, she's much better than she thinks she is! Hopefully as she continues to work independently at the courses she'll acquire a greater confidence in herself: if she does she could do quite well."
"She continues to try hard and participates fully in supervisions, questioning almost everything. She tries to understand things at a very high level, and by and large succeeds, only occasionally missing the point. She could do very well."
Obviously, it's in my nature to notice the negative more than the positive, but I'm genuinely entertained by the fact that I have sufficient ability, occasionally miss the point, but could do quite well. There's an epitaph...
* Some of the details of this post will make more sense to those who also studied at Cambridge. A Director of Studies is someone who oversees all of your academic progress. A Supervisor is someone who provides small-group tuition. In the physical sciences, this would be with only two students at a time, for an hour, once a week. You would have one Supervisor per specialist subject. To add confusion, we also had a Tutor, who did no teaching, but was responsible for our pastoral care.
