I was never a fan of science and in college I took the two acknowledged Mickey Mouse classes. The first was called “Highlights to Astronomy” and I unlike probably anyone else actually read the material and realized that it was really complex and difficult stuff. When it came time for mid-terms, I was actually worried until I realized that the test only covered a slice of the most basic things in the reading. It was actually, a funny class because the professor was so disgusted with his students. He was prone to say things like, “When the Hubble telescope goes up soon it will completely revolutionize our understanding of the Universe, but none of you care about that or anything else except for drinking beer.”
That class was one of the two times I let a friend copy off my paper during a final. In both cases, they copied about half my test and decided to do their best on the rest and both got C’s. This boggled my mind. If you are going to cheat on a test why go half way?
The other Mickey Mouse class was called “Nuclear Fuel Cycle” and the professor had the opposite outlook on life. It was his contention that he had just a few things that he wanted his students to learn about nuclear power and if you were able to manage these very easy concepts you would easily get an A in his class. One time I was in a study session with a teacher’s assistant and he was asked by a student if the professor had ever caught anyone cheating. His response was that the professor considered his class so easy that if you needed to cheat to get through it that there really wasn’t much hope for you in life anyway, so cheat away.
The more typical classroom experience for me was best exemplified by yet another Economics class. They all run together in my mind so God knows what it concerned. The Professor looked exactly like George Will, and liked to describe exciting Economic issues as sexy. I think everyone in that class hated my guts, because I was the only one in there who seemed to have a clue what was going on. George Will would toss out a question every five minutes or so, and I would look around the room for a while looking for someone else to answer. Eventually I would raise my hand, and answer the question. George Will couldn’t tell you the name of a single other person, but after about the third day of class he called me by my first name for the rest of the quarter. Sometimes I just would ignore the questions, but nine times out of ten he would look over at me and say, “Brad, surely you have some thoughts on this issue?”
About two thirds of the way through the class, George Will split us into groups and assigned us all presentation topics. On the day of the presentations, he didn’t seem to be satisfied with anything anybody had to say. On this particular day I was wearing a Monkees T-shirt, maybe I was dressing down so people wouldn’t think I was such a suck up. When my group finished our presentation George Will told us that we had done a magnificent job and then went on a fifteen minute spiel about how when he was a kid the only thing he had ever really wanted was a Monkees T-shirt. Even my friends in the class wanted to kick my ass.
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My best example of mistaken integrity was the sad, sad story of Elbe and Introduction to Philosophy.
Elbe was a huge lunkheaded member of my fraternity from the glorious state of Wisconsin. He was like many of the Theta Delts of my era socially retarded, and completely inflexible to anyone’s views but his own. During that first quarter of my senior year we were both in the same philosophy class. We didn’t sit together because we weren’t really friends, but we were both in the same class.
After about a week of class, I asked Elbe what he thought of the class. His response was shocking in its stupidity, but as it turned out pure Elbe.
“This class is bullshit,” he said “ all the professor does is assign readings and then tell us what it was that we were supposed to have read, as if his opinion was more important than our own. I’m not going to class anymore. I’ll just do the readings.”
I swear, as God is my witness that dispute my ambivalence for the guy that I tried to help him. “Look Elbe”, I said, “you’ve got it all wrong. I’ve had this professor before and the readings are almost impossible to understand. They are impenetrable even to geniuses. If you go to class and take good notes, you will find out what the professor thinks is important and what he feels is the correct interpretation of the morass of words he assigns every night. The last time I had him I didn’t do a single reading after the first week of class, I spit back everything he said in class on the final, and I got an A minus, I swear that if you try to do the opposite you’ll not only be at a disadvantage, you’ll flunk.”
“Yeah, right” he responded, “no one is gonna tell me how to interpret what I read.”
“That’s very noble of you”, I said, “I understand your point of view but if you do this you are going to be retaking this class next quarter.”
Of course he didn’t listen to me. I was always a very fast test taker. At the end of the quarter, I quickly wrote my final essays, turned in my paper, and on the way out of the classroom scanned the room for Elbe. He wasn’t there. I walked back to our house and having forgotten my keys rang the bell so someone would let me in the front door. Elbe was the one that answered the door.
“Dude did you take the Philosophy Final?”
“Yeah, I went”, he uttered, “but I got there and looked at the questions and had no idea what they were asking so I tried to make some stuff up for a while, turned it in and left.”
I didn’t gloat and who knows if he had actually even done the readings, but I got an A minus and he flunked.
Now the truly honorable thing to do would be to do both the reading and go to class, and maybe even tussle with the professor about his interpretations. However, were you to do choose to do just one, I had made the correct choice.
