Why not?

As I've already mentioned in the previous post,when problems emerge concerning the accomplishment of a subject, most people are characterized by a search for scapegoats, pompousness, or an arbitrary linear combination of the two. I just want to picture the things I've mentioned there with a story determinant for me, so as to stick to the swampy ground of reality, not restricting to theory.

It's not even about a test, just being a tiny bit late for class. Yes, just a tiny bit, about 40 minutes. So, let us imagine that a young man with a moderately convincing face falls into class on a practical course - just to clarify, this wasn't in a computer room or such, but in a regular laboratory, with all the tubes and everything, so the experiments carried out in class are cannot really be started with a delay, as the chemical reactions would hang out of schedule, at least as far as I know.

When the professor mentioned the above facts, and also expressed his interest in the causes of the difficulties of arrival, he received the following reply: "It's been a long night."
Regardless of age, the question "Why?" could break out of anyone with the honesty of a 3-year-old, but there wasn't too much need for such inquiries, as the explanation ended in a question: "Why, you weren't there at the department party?"

Oh yes, the department party, whih means that "we go on  aday fixed in advance, to a place fixed in advance, with an intent fixed in advance to drink, but now, there's more of us than on other occasions, and if possible, we get 1 or 2 professors to join us, because on one hand, we are so cool, and on the other hand, maybe we can make pictures if they get drunk". On its own right, this is totally OK, I don't mind the whole thing, really. But of course everything should be handled according to its importance, and everyone should handle things according to his/her own taste. And that's the point, everyone handling things by his/her own taste. Because, as we know, we cannot argue about taste.


A simple, honest "No." burst out of the professor filled with disinterest, and the answer to this was another question: "Why not?".


Why not? At first glance this might seem to be nothing of importance, but if we look at this little question more carefully, we might find really disguisting stuff. Don't misunderstand me, I can be really permissive, I know, that after some parties, you simply can't get out of bed. But still, the student - one might even hear the heroic music in the backgroud - collects himself, and crawls into class with a little delay. I wouldn't care even if he slept through the whole day accompanied by that heroic music. But that is simply (and I will be using this phrase a lot) very close to being absurd, that the dear little student implicitly tells his professor what his right decision would have been the previous night.


Clearly, the right decision for him would have been to be there at the department party, and enjoy it. Because the department party is good, and you have to enjoy it. That's an axiom. But there's a little problem the poor fellow doesn't notice - if I like something, it's easy to treat it as an axiom, and spread it all over the world, as a demand, as the only possible solution, as a value that should be followed, or anything else. Oddly enough, they can't handle even the most basic rules of university courses this way, they just can't manage.

I've met people who didn't feel that it's a problem if they ask if the exam of a given subject, instead of using the memento of withered eras, the task sheet on a paper, "could be solved some other way, like on Skype?". Poor fellow didn't have the time, but yet again, that isn't a problem on its own. But what is a problem, is that they couldn't get that little bit of information to reach their own tiny, isolated and dark world, that the exams can be done on the scheduled exams, in the ways that are stated.


Actually, this is the moral of the story: in seconds, being self-conceited and self-satisfied can lead to requiring the world around you to take the shape you want it to without a word, while you can be able to take every such impact of the world inflicted on you as a personal insult. Now this is an approach I can only congratulate to, for two reasons.

One is that I cannot really do anything about it. It is not my duty to convince students that they (also) have faults, not (only) the system, and they didn't fail because of mystical reasons like
(a) the teacher is picking on him
(b) the teacher was "making a bloodbath" on the exam
(c) the teacher evaluated the exam papers by throwing them in the air, and if someone's paper landed on the desk, that counted as succesful, and whose paper fell on the floor failed - and what do you know, theirs always falls down!
(d) other brainwaves like this which one can always hear in an average dialogue in the corridors
but beacuse they simply weren't prepared, that's all.

The other is - and that's the more funny part of it - being self-satisfied leads to certainty, and certainty leads to the false sense of knowledge. So, beliefs strike root in the head of the simple student, beliefs like "There will be the same questions as last year anyway.", "Ha should ask the same tasks we did in the practical classes!", and he/she will be outraged like "But I have wasted my time enough with this already, I know it now!". But the questions won't be the same. Just almost the same. Even two numbers might be altered in them, oh the horror! And know, they don't know. And besides, you can't measure the understanding of things on a kitchen scale.

And so, committing the test will result in sentences like "But last night I knew.", "At home it was OK.", and "I just don't understand.". And in a fraction of a second, these will turn into the savage hunt for scapegoats, which, yet again, has its own classic statements. First, just poor Chronos gets it, "There wasn't enough time.", "If only I've had five more minutes..." and so on, and then suddenly, they end up at "We didn't even go over this material.", and my personal favourite, the "These are not the tasks from the practical classes!".


To sum it up, self-satisfied students often labour under the delusion that
(a) no thinking is needed for the appropriate solving o the test
(b) they've managed to acquire the thinking needed to solve the test appropriately
and because these are only delusions, in due course, they get themselves to fail.