Easy Classes

TL;DR Do work.

Today I'm going to write about a specific pattern of thought and behavior (an ideology or a cultural convention, if I put my Ray-Bans on) I've noticed emergent in my classmates and colleagues at Berkeley. I noticed it when I was a freshman, but it's become more pronounced as I move into upper-division classes with smaller numbers of more specialized people.

The phenomenon, to put it succinctly, is something I've heard called "senioritis," although most of the people who appear to have it are not seniors in academic terms. I've also heard it described as "signature Millennial laziness" by older people who didn't know any better and "that super laid-back Berkeley atmospheeeere," by young people who didn't know anything, but I think you know what I'm referring to.

The way this pattern manifests itself is in how we think about our classes once we've stuck our toes in  and seen if they get bitten off or not. Some classes are hard, and demand the fullest extent of our attention, and other classes are "well I'm just taking it for a breadth requirement, and it's super easy, so like, yknow." A big part of the culture at Berkeley, in my experience revolves around the dichotomy of trying extremely hard with extremely visible results or conspicuously not appearing to try at all. What did I get on the midterm? A 97. Did I study? Of course I didn't; I go to Berkeley, and therefore I must appear as though things are easy for me. It exists for the same reason one gym bro pulls the bar off another after a failed rep of bench and then tells the struggling bro "it was all you, dude, you could've gotten it."

I'm going to take up the issue of what "easy" actually means for a moment, in two different ways. First of all, the simple definition of what the word "easy" means on paper, which a quick dictionary inspection reveals as "achieved without great effort; presenting few difficulties" or "free from worries or problems."

I think this definition is sufficient, but the way we use the word (at Berkeley especially) is dangerously far off what "easy" is supposed to mean.

In my opinion, what an easy activity (be it a class, a lift, a puzzle, whatever) connotes is not an activity that explicitly demands less of your effort, but one that yields better results given the same effort. As I see it, there's no good reason to take a class as a GPA booster and then get a B, for example; if the class is truly that easy, the obvious question is why you didn't completely crush it.

The topic is classes, so I'll stick with it. My classes right now are two upper-division biology and two upper-division anthropology classes, which I thought would be a nice mix of scientific snobbery and humanities pretense mixed up together. I will be honest; this semester is not the most difficult academic experience I've ever encountered. I actually did get a 97 on my midterm, and nothing below a 90 on the others so far.

For the sake of clarity, I need to point out that the midterm I got a 97 on had a mean of 76, with a great many scores under 50, and so we see the problem: the class is easy, strictly speaking, as evidenced by all the people who got A's, and yet we have a great many people failing to conquer said easy class. At a place like Berkeley, with all its pomp and circumstance, I simply refuse to believe that I'm 21% above average, and certainly not reliably 20+% above average in multiple disciplines. I'm not being modest here, really; rest assured I think I'm as fan-damn-tastic as the next delusional millennial liberal, but what I'm not is perfect and uniformly superior across all fields. That's for business majors, who are dynamic team players who are thrilled and honored about things. We all know them.

So what's the issue? We have a room full of our generation's "smartest" people approaching the height of their intellectual powers, and well over half of them missed 40% or more of a test that relied essentially on a basic grasp of the course concepts and a bit of information retention (the test consisted of fill-ins, matching, and some essay questions). I mean, honestly speaking, the mean should have been about 80%, assuming everyone had been paying attention in lecture.

Oh. Oh. I see. This lecture room has half the desks empty during lecture, and during the exam we're at capacity.

This just serves to reiterate the point I made earlier; there's no sense asking me what my super-effective study tips and tricks are if you're not accomplishing the bare minimum of what it means to be a student in the first place. It's kind of like asking me for recommendations on hairstyling products when you're bald.

There's an old Family Circus cartoon where Billy is sitting at the table, talking to his parents about school. "My teacher's real tricky," he says. "She makes the quizzes real easy when I study and saves the hard ones for when I haven't studied at all."It's an obviously ludicrous statement, but I can't help it popping up in my mind when the equally ludicrous situation of a student protesting poor results in a class they've only shown up to for the first day.

I could go on with more examples, but I'll cut it off here, with this: Berkeley students are in many ways the cream of the intellectual crop, and we've spent a long time having things be easy for us. In my opinion, one of the most constructive things we could do for ourselves as people is, in addition to applying the basic effort to be in class and the simple intellectual work of understanding course content, to learn how to try again. No one who matters is going to judge you if you appear enthusiastic about learning and applying yourself, and no one who judges you for taking your education seriously matters.

As always, show this to people if you'd like, or tell me if you didn't like, and so on. I like conversation and debate, despite all evidence to the contrary. :)