The Designated Moron(tm) Returns

When I was working on my master’s degree, I had developed a friendly, professional relationship with one of the fairly young, untenured professors. I worked as a TA for her upper-division Elizabethan Drama course, and I helped her out a lot with her summer Shakespeare series, writing press releases and radio spots, taking tickets, and helping with other publicity. She had been quite the star in her graduate program at Princeton, and she had promised to help me get into a good PhD program. That year, I applied to 10 programs and received 10 rejections, even from the “safety” schools. I was confused and disheartened by this, so I called one of the schools to find out why. They never received one of my letters, and, since they got so many applications, a missing letter made it easy to put one in the discard pile. You see where I’m going with this, right? My mentor prof had never sent the letters, even though I alerted her when I received word from the schools that the packet was incomplete. She was embarrassed and avoided me from that point on, and I was embarrassed and angry and avoided her.

The lesson I took from that episode is that I should be especially diligent in getting letters out for students. So, imagine my distress when I messed up with Perky Girl’s letter of recommendation. Mortified is too tame a word. I felt that I had betrayed my student and my high-minded principles.

So, in abject humiliation, prostrate upon the ground, I sent an e-mail to the perky girl most likely to be Perky Girl. I wrote “Dumb Question” in the subject line and continued:

Dear Perky Girl, I have a very dumb question to ask you. [Here I briefly explained the situation.] If you did, in fact, ask me for a letter, would you still like me to write it, even though I am obviously a complete idiot? Sincerely, Dr. Hobgoblin.

She quickly responded that she was the one who asked for a letter (somewhat but not completely mitigating my idiocy) and that she was indeed still interested. Her letter was extraordinarily kind and sweet, and not at all censorious. What a relief.

One final coda: Today my phone rang as I sat in my office writing this post (otherwise known as “pretending to grade”). Another student desperately needed a letter so that she could apply for a substitute teaching position back home. Since I had already written her a letter for something else, I told her that I could quickly revise it and would have it done before she could get to my office from her dorm. I felt that I had to redeem myself, and I did, handing her the sealed envelope as she walked in my office.