Daytime observations

March 30th, 2007

(title inspired by Taylor & Wheeler’s Parable of the Surveyors, Spacetime Physics)

Imagine a room of students waiting for an exam to start. They talk in hushed tones about concepts and equations none of them really understand, reciting formulae like mantras. The room is cold with excess air conditioning and barely stifled dread.

The proctor — a graduate student — walks in carrying the exam papers and questionnaire sheets. He doesn’t look at the students; instead he goes to the blackboard and begins writing.

It’s standard procedure to write the starting time, the finish time, and the duration on the board, but this is ridiculous.

My first reaction was: “There’s something wrong here. That’s not a well-defined sequence and its limits don’t make sense. And the integral is really ugly. I don’t even think you can do that.”

And then I paused and thought, “No, really, there’s something wrong here; he shouldn’t be doing that.”

It wasn’t just the math that was off; it was his writing it in the first place. I found it terribly arrogant; sure, intimidate the undergraduates (most of whom have only limited knowledge of derivatives, much less sequences and limits) with unnecessarily arcane symbols. Be inconsiderate and obnoxious and rub it into their faces that they are worth so much less than you are.

Showing off is self-destructive because, of course, intellectual humility is always, always fundamental. You should never lose sight of that, never flaunt what you know — if you do so, you’re just displaying your ignorance (of the fact that there’s so much more you don’t know, for one thing). Once you get to the point where you feel you can start showing off your mastery of your field, you hit a wall and learn less and less every day. Or worse — lose everything you have.

The proctor collected our answer sheets ten minutes early. I didn’t bother correcting him; he didn’t look amenable to corrections anyway.

–

So this semester is over and I have one summer and two semesters left before I graduate. I’m starting to find some sort of grounding in economics: interesting problems, situations I’d like to explore. It’s like being given a whole new playground in which to wreak havoc…! There’s much to be said about being different; as an economics major who can read (and understand, and work on) physics papers, I straddle two worlds.

And there are so many things to learn!

Entry Filed under: academics