Credit, in academia, falls into one of three categories: credit earned, credit given, and credit received. Credit earned falls into two general camps, the credits you get for completing a course and the credit you get for completing an assignment. Sometimes, in completing an assignment, you are given extra credit for going above and beyond the bare minimum. Other times you have to give credit for other people’s words and work when you use it in your own work. Finally, when someone does use your work to complete their work, you receive your due credit and the accolades that come with it, namely a line item on your résumé.
To put it another way, we earn credits, we get extra credit, and we give credit where it’s due. Or, to put it another way, in academia, credit means currency, currency, or currency. And money, in academia, is a problem.
So. Credit equals money. We know this by the credit cards in our wallets and the loan paperwork filed away in our desk drawers. But that’s not where it started. Rather, originally, credit was all about trust. The word itself comes from the Latin verb for trust, credere. And from there…it kind of went nuts.
As the word moved from Latin to Italian to French to English, it acquired a rogues gallery of meanings related to trusting someone else with your stuff. And, as we know, stuff always comes down to money. So, by the 16th century you have derivatives like creditor (a.k.a. person trusted with your money), and by the 20th century you have enough semantic drift that credit can mean either the points you get for completing your studies and the list of names that roll at the end of movies. By the time you get to the present, credit has acquired more than a dozen cases just as a noun1.
But let’s get back to academia and its troubles. When I was an undergrad, approximately 10,000 years ago, my trusty mammoth and I transferred from a smaller community college to a state university. The single biggest headache I had was figuring out which of my credits transferred and which did not. I had taken about 75 credits worth of classes at AWC but could only transfer about 60-some. Each class I took was worth 3-credit hours and cost about $100 at the college. Classes at the university were more than triple that. For one credit. So every credit I couldn’t transfer was one more class I had to substitute or re-take. Credit, or the lack thereof, meant money.
In my classes now, I make sure that my students know exactly what will be expected of them and I grade accordingly. Most of the time. In one of my classes, which is a media studies class, i.e. the sit around and watch movies class - easily my favorite to teach, I give extra credit. When students are making their reports as part of their standard grade, they are able to get two points of extra credit: one if I haven’t seen the movie they’re reviewing, one if they’re the only person in class to review that movie. Both these extra credit points were put in place after I had eight students review La La Land in one semester. I mean, it’s a good movie, but c’mon. Anyway, these extra credit points are not currency in any real sense. I mean, the students are not giving me money and I’m sure as hell not giving them any.
But it is a kind of currency. Because, and this is the part I’m not supposed to say out loud, the kids that actually try for the extra credit will have done a better job overall. They’ll have put more time and research into their review than any kid who just does the bare minimum of getting by. And that’s why it’s extra credit instead of being part of the assignment. Because credit, even extra ones, are a kind of money.
These days I spend as much time researching as I do teaching. And, as we all learned way back in English 101, you have to give credit for every piece of information that is used in your paper. Whether that’s a quote, or some piece of data, or just someone else’s opinion, you have to give them credit. My own body of work is getting some attention in some quarters, which means that people are giving me credit. They’re citing my work in their papers2. But the most important factor to me, as a working teacher, is that that gives me a number I can attach to my C.V. Every bit of credit given to me is another bit of currency I can add to my profile, making it just a little bit more valuable, something worth just a little more…money trust.
Stay curious,
Joel
Double that if you include verb cases!
Which makes me feel like a special boy indeed.
I learned how to use the ‘like’ button. Yay! 😁