Apathy Sketchpad

Today was our eighth ‘physics in review’ session this semester. Each session lasts an hour, and they are organised into pairs. We get the questions in one week, and work though a few. Then we have a week to look over the rest and go through the difficult ones in the second session. It doesn’t work that way. No, not at all.

What actually happened was that we would pointedly ignore the question sheet all week and sit in silence for an hour while the tutor went through the remaining questions. Unfortunately, the tutor is so incredibly dull that we almost can’t bring ourselves to listen to a word he says. It isn’t our fault, of course. The university decided to schedule this for 4 to 5 in the afternoon, so by the time we get there we’ve been in lab for six hours and those of us why can be bothered to turn up are too tired, bored, and drained to participate.

It wasn’t always like this. We had more energy at the start of the semester, but, according to the Heisenburg Principle, that was never going to last. (And people say I don’t pay attention in Quantum.) In fact we once paid so much attention that two of us answered a question in two very simple and very different ways, both of which were much simpler and quicker than the one the tutor was doing on the whiteboards. I made the mistake of trying to explain this to him, and discovered a lot more about psychology that physics by doing so. Instead of seeing the very obvious way my method arrived at the answer, he tried to find out how my method was related to his. It wasn’t. He was integrating things, differentiating things, and other quite superfluous mathematical verbs, while I’d used geometry and simple algebra to solve the same exact problem and arrive at the same exact answer.

This is why nobody spoke in today’s session. He went through four questions. The first one I’d solved in five minutes on half a page, whereas his method took two pages and half an hour to complete. I already knew what would happen if I tried to explain my method, so I didn’t. To be honest, I can’t understand for a second how he managed to miss my method, or why anyone would ever want to do it the more complicated way. The second question he went through nobody had even looked at, and ditto for the third. The last question was in fact rather easy. Unfortunately the wording of it was so strange it wasn’t until he explained the answer that we understood the question.

The simple fact of the matter, though, is that we still don’t have time to look through the questions. We have other things to do, like labwork, an essay, magnetohydrodynamics homework, and getting a gold medal on Nobody Rides For Free. We can’t waste time on things that aren’t assessed. Even if he tried to report us he couldn’t — he has no idea which one of us is which. We frequently skip sessions and he doesn’t seem to notice.

I missed the fifth session, in which a question sheet was given out. Also in that session, the review papers were given out so we could give anonymous feedback on the module. I didn’t realise this until I arrived at the next session. I remembered earlier in the course he told us in previous years people had asked on these forms for the question sheet to be handed out a week early. In his experience, he said, people didn’t look at the sheets so the exercise was pointless. That seemed quite plausible to me. It was obvious to me that this whole pointless exercise was going to be repeated this year, but he went through the motions anyway because as I have mentioned he is blind to the obvious unless it can be explained using calculus somehow.

Needless to say, everyone who showed up asked for the questions in advance again. In the next session he did what he always does; he picked a question, asked if anyone had looked at it, and then picked someone at random to glare at until they admitted they hadn’t. This time he also asked why we wanted the questions in advance if we weren’t going to look at them. He picked me. This was not a good idea, because if he had enough memory to recognise us, he’d have known the following facts:

Having missed the last session I hadn’t got a review sheet and therefore couldn’t possibly have asked for the questions in advance.
Having missed the last session, I hadn’t got the question sheet in order to have looked at it.
Of course there was no way he could have known that given the review sheet I would have written on it “I just want you to know that if you start giving the questions out earlier, I will compensate by starting to ignore them earlier”, but I think the other two points are sufficient. He gave out the next sheet early. He’s stopped doing that again.