Fugato

I’m in a University exam right now. Spending my exam time browsing and blogging and watching the others. Not doing the exam.

This is only partly because I don’t know the material worth a damn. It is mostly because I am the teacher.

This is fun. Watching others in an exam. A privilege only afforded to those who (a) teach or proctor, (b) kick way too much ass in their classes, or (c) kick way too little ass in their classes. It offers interesting sights.

On many faces, a look of intense concentration. On some, intense consternation. And then there’s this one guy, Poker Face Dude, who, just like in all the lectures, looks consistently placid, indifferent and slightly bored as if to say “so when do things start to get challenging?” I’m expecting him to back that expression up with his exam performance; people usually wear that look for a reason. Or maybe he just finds my class boring.

The exam is long, time is short, but one guy spends his time painstakingly unwrapping a lollipop, very slowly, trying not to be noisy (and inevitably failing, in the curious kind of silence you get in an exam room, where the hum of radiators and the collective sighs of the students stand out clearly along with the occasional paper shuffle).

Half the girls in the room forget to turn their cellphone off and it rings. (That’s not misogynism: just one cellphone ring because just two girls. This is an electrical engineering class. And yeah, I’d prefer different gender ratios. We all would.)

Eight-minute warning. Sighs of stress. I don’t enjoy stressing people out, but I do enjoy seeing the determination, the ambition that gets manifested in exams — and that is related to stress. And conversely, it breaks my heart when someone turns in the exam half-way through and leaves, and they’ve only done half the exam. It’s like the perfectly decent-looking people who walk around with greasy hair and blubbery waists and a sour pity-me expression, not because they can’t do anything about their appearance, but because they gave up midway or didn’t even try in the first place. Keep at it, dammit! Roll it around in your head. You can figure it out. This fatalistic “I’ve already lost” mentality is horrifying to me — and almost universally it’s simply false.

Ok, I have to yank off their exams now. Thoughts truncated!

One student said “That was an experience.” Uh-oh.

Somebody forgot to label his exam. That’s not a problem really; he had not written anything in it either.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 26th, 2004 at 11:58 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.