“An F? This paper did not warrant an F.” Her cheeks were still flushed as she spoke, and I found it difficult to take my eyes off of them.
“Miss Marshall, your paper most certainly did. I took a considerable amount of time justifying your grade before putting it on the paper. I don’t intend to justify it further. You are capable of much better work than this.”
She smacked the paper on the desk—the large “F” scrawled across the top half.
“Mr. Fitzgerald.” She took a deep breath. I suppose to calm herself, which seemed to be necessary. “Number one. You gave exactly no feedback. There is not a single mark in this paper. Nothing to indicate what is right or wrong. Simply a grade. Number two,” she took another breath and her voice was much more even, “I very carefully met every single requirement of the assignment. You required a comparison of Debussy’s compositions from early in his career and late. You required an analysis of the technical aspects of at least two of those compositions. You required that I address the differences in tempo, meter, pitch, harmony. I addressed each of those.”
I frowned. Her tone rang with unattractive self-importance. She’d done the things I’d asked, true. But she’d also included nearly five pages of completely irrelevant material. “Hardly. Miss Marshall, the assignment was a comparison of the music and its elements. Not a biography. You have more than three pages in this paper about his wife. What possible relevance does she have to the assignment?”
Savannah shouted, her brown eyes nearly popping out of their sockets. “She shot herself in the chest days after he announced he was divorcing her! How could that not be relevant? How could that not affect his music?” The color in her cheeks deepened the louder her voice got.
I sat forward in my chair and against my better judgment, found myself arguing back, “It’s completely irrelevant! The assignment was to compare the musical composition, not delve into the composer’s personal life!”
She flipped the pages of the report and stabbed it with her index finger, leaning over my desk as she did so. “I did do that, if you’d actually bothered to read the paper. Yes, the music was changed, and I illustrated that in the paper. But his music was changed by his life. His music was changed by his experiences. But, this isn’t about me at all, is it? This is about my mother! Are you simply punishing me because of her?”
At that, I stood. Her chain of logic made no sense at all. What did her mother have to do with anything? Of course, Savannah came from good musical stock, and that had to be respected on some level. But punishing her? No, I was pushing her. Pushing her to do better than the paper she’d turned in.
I did something I have never done in my entire career as an instructor. I shouted at a student, leaning forward over my desk, which had the effect of bringing us nearly face to face. “Miss Marshall, I don’t care if your mother is a harlot selling herself in the street! This isn’t about that. It’s about you and your talent. You are too good for this!”
Her face went slack, reflecting shock at my words. I continued, inching closer to her face until we were almost nose-to-nose. “You have the ability to be one of the premier musicians this school has ever graduated. And yet you waste it. You waste it on your pointless musical experiments. You waste it on your weekends spent … dancing ... and drinking ... when you should be perfecting your craft. You waste it on the time you spend with that boyfriend of yours.”
Her face scrunched up, a mixture of confusion and amusement on her face, and an oddly formed laugh forced itself out. “Who are you talking about? Nathan? Not that it’s any of your business, Mr. Fitzgerald, but Nathan is not my boyfriend.”
We maintained our stance inches from each other’s faces. Inches from each other’s lips. With only my desk separating us.
Not her boyfriend. What was he then? This boy who constantly had his hands on her, this boy who leaned over and whispered in her ear in class, who touched her intimately while dancing, who repeatedly made a fool of himself in my class. I’m not a sociologist, but if he wasn’t her boyfriend, he certainly wished he was. I started to reply, but then clammed up. This wasn’t about that anyway. I took a breath, attempting to calm myself.
Pulling back slightly, I spoke in calm, measured words that belied the tension roiling inside of me. “Miss Marshall, it matters to me not one bit whether or not the boy is your boyfriend. What matters to me is that you accomplish your best possible work.”
“No.” Her voice was low and bitter, if not a bit baiting. “This grade isn’t because the work isn’t good. This is because I disagree with you. You think music is this heartless engineering construct made of nothing but notes and rhythms pasted together by architects. It is not. Music is communication. It’s emotion. It’s passion and love and hate and expression.”
As she continued she leaned even closer to me, anchoring her hands on my desk as her hot breath invaded the space between us.
“Mr. Fitzgerald, music was around long before there were theorists to talk about rules. Music is what makes us alive, and I feel sorry for you for not understanding that. If all you care about is mechanics and theory, then you’re in the wrong field, no matter how talented you may be.”
I recoiled. Since I was sixteen years old, when I won my early admission to the New England Conservatory and a full scholarship, not a single person had ever suggested that I might be choosing the wrong field. That this appallingly arrogant twenty-one-year-old thought she could do such a thing was infuriating.
She stuck out her red polished index finger and poked it on my chest. The same finger I’d instinctively traced with my thumb just last week. “I’m formally appealing this grade. Please reconsider it on its merits, and not your knee jerk emotional reaction to the idea that musicians might feel something. And if you don’t change it, I intend to take it to the Dean.”
With that, she backed up and walked out of my office, leaving a gaping hole of fury in her wake.