Safety Nets

The first exam is coming soon.  I look forward to watching their pain, seeing their feeble attempts to get those wheels spinning fast enough to exhibit some pretense of intellect.

It amuses me to see them squirm. They try everything they can to avoid actually thinking.  They are desperate to use calculators, to let a machine do the thinking for them.  They love to just mash the numbers and operands they encounter into their calculators in the hopes of getting something close to correct.

If I allow them to bring notes into the test they will copy every tiny bit of information they've encountered into their notes, until they reach a point where it would require a magnifying glass to make it all out properly.

And yet, no matter how many security blankets or safety nets you give them, if you ask them to do even the slightest amount of thinking for themselves they will panic.  I once heard of a student who was working with the basic equations of parabolic motion.  This student could plug numbers into the given formula, and get out an answer.  However, the moment they were required to solve for one of the coefficients in terms of everything else, they would shut down.  I'm not even talking about trigonometry.  This just required a basic algebraic manipulation of a quadratic equation to solve for one of the coefficients.

I sometimes wonder how these people manage to eat without stabbing themselves in the neck with their forks.  This may explain the popularity of finger food.

One way or the other, in a few days, I will see how long they can last with no safety net at all.  No notes, no calculators, and most of all no friends to do their work for them.  And I will be there standing over them when they fall spectacularly.