Hello, everyone.
A little background: I’m a senior in high school. I got a 35 on the English ACT (top 1%), a 25 on the writing ACT (top 10%), and went through three years of Honors English with virtually all A’s and B’s on essays, with my last teacher (often notorious for being strict) going out of her way to tell me that I’m a good writer. This year, I decided to relax on English a little bit, opting for regular English IV. I thought it would be a relatively easy A, leveling out my AP classes, and giving my schedule a a little more breathing room. Wrong. Despite putting in the same amount of effort, I have been doing significantly worse on writing assignments in regular English than I did in Honors.
The story: After putting in maximum effort on the final essay of the quarter and thinking, “There’s no way she’ll find a way to not give me an A on this,” I was unpleasantly surprised to learn that I had received an 82% B-. The rubric was separated into six different categories, worth five points each. I received a “4” on five of the categories and a “3” on the last one. This would equate to a 23/30 (77%), but she instead wrote that the actual essay got a 92% and that I received a 10% penalty for having five MLA checklist errors, giving me that final score of 82%. The 10% markdown is only imposed once you reach five errors. For example, if I had only made four mistakes, I would have had no deduction. Five is the magic number, and I had made exactly five. One of the MLA errors that she pinpointed said “2 Quotes.” I actually had FOUR quotes because the main essay rubric that she gave us said that we needed 4-6.
Therefore, today, I came in and told her that I had more than two quotes and that I wasn’t sure why she had checked this as an error. She told me that you needed two quotes PER PARAGRAPH. I asked her how I was supposed to know that because the rubric only said “2 quotes” and she said that it should be “assumed.” I then informed her that there was another sheet that said the essay required 4-6 paragraphs. However, because I hadn’t looked at the main rubric for a couple of weeks, it took me a minute to find. In that time, she gave me a bit of attitude, asking me “Where in that rubric does it say 4-6? You’re holding the rubric in your hand.” She then even tried convincing me that I was mistaking it for the 4-7 PARAGRAPH requirement. Much to my delight, I found the spot where it said “4-6 quotes.” I told her that based on the two rubrics we were given, I had no idea how I was supposed to interpret that she wanted two per paragraph. She then asked why I didn’t bring this up before turning the essay in. I responded that I had absolutely no reason to believe that her rubric was wrong. This is when she got angry.
She yelled at me to take out my calculator in a tone no teacher has ever used on me before. She then brought up how, according to her rubric, I was supposed to get a 77%. However, when grading it, she said that “this was a pretty darn good essay” and she gave me a 92. I told her that while I appreciated her generosity, I still did not understand why I got the 10% checklist error deduction and why the rubric was so unclear. She replied that I got -10% because I had five checklist errors. I then said, “But, according to the rubric, I don’t have five checklist errors” and she screamed to either take my 82% or 77%. She also added that it was her first year teaching the course, basically ignoring me when I told her that that wasn’t my fault. She then stormed out of her desk, implying that the conversation was over.
What do you guys make of the situation? Did my teacher handle herself professionally? Should I continue to fight for that summative 10%?