Grades that you lose sleep over

Grades are an interesting part of coursework. They're used to "evaluate" how effectively a student demonstrates learning, and each professor develops their own verbage to talk about what "counts" as an A or what "counts" as a B. Example:

• "A work is excellent and goes beyond what is required in terms of thinking and insight into the material."
• "B is an honor grade, awarded for work that is thoughtful and well-written, and demonstrates a good understanding of the material."

So what's the point of this? I got a B on my first writing assignment this semester. Graduate students are particularly funny about receiving grades. Somehow a B, that is supposedly an honor grade, makes my heart sink (and I know it has done the same to other grad students, too). What did I do wrong and how can I do better next time? Well, the written comments say I didn't "engage" with the reading enough. While completing this assignment, I was concerned that I wasn't including enough content from the readings, but this particular prompt asked us to really consider our audience (which was assigned to us as incoming graduate students) and I justified the amount of the course readings I included in those terms. Apparently my professor thinks I "dumbed the subject down" too much. That's my interpretation of his comments, by the way.

All in all, I'm discovering that the hardest graders are the ones not in the graduate program I'm enrolled in. In order to teach next semester, I've been required to take two courses outside of the regular coursework I'm doing. Although I'm familiar with the discipline these two other courses are in, the fact that I struggle the most in pleasing these professors is disconcerting to me. Ultimately, I'd like to earn a position at a university to work in this discipline, and here I am earning a B.

Luckily, I have a whole semester ahead of me to try to figure this professor out, but it's become evident that it won't be easy going. Maybe this will be the class I take the most out of simply because of how much it will evidently challenge me. (Although, I have earned any grades in one of my other courses yet. Maybe that one will end up being the toughest of them all).