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Not Actually A Niche
Oct. 15th, 2010 04:47 pmYou know what I fucking love? I love taking tests. I'm gonna talk about that for a bit.
The first math quiz of the year, which was the first quiz of the year, I was nervous. I really wasn't sure of my grasp of the material (after the teacher explains something in that class I'm always less sure of my ability to do it, and it was his test) and when I looked at the first page I blanked. My brain shut down. I turned it over, started working on the first thing I saw that I knew how to do (somehow turning the page over helped) and then by the time I got back to the first page again I was good to go.
I'm not great at math. I don't take enough time to fully understand what's going on, so I figure out a 'good enough' strategy and run with it. I'm also absolutely impatient and not even close to being careful. Usually what happens on math quizzes is I come out at 70% or so-- all the steps right, answers half wrong because of carelessness. I don't mind that because it's an accurate representation of the work I've put in. I like getting the immediate feedback, not just the 'can I do this' feedback from homework, but the 'am I performing up to standard' that tests give me. They draw a line and say 'you should be here, are you?' and I know where I stand. Unlike every fucking other thing in life there is clarity here. I understand now especially how hard it must be to go from such a structured authoritarian setting to the real world, where people don't necessarily get rewarded for doing things well or correctly and where they can often shape the criteria they're performing under to fit their own abilities and needs. It's not a matter of finding the right way to do a thing, or the way a prof likes it, it's a matter of muddling along-- and so it's nice, even just in a few minutes of testing, to have the ground solidify.
Today was the Ecology final exam, which wrapped up the string of plant ID quizzes. Now the final exam was a work of art. The quizzes had got harder with each one, and the final plant ID test had a couple of trick questions in it-- like one plant put in twice, and a plant that we didn't have to know in there (it was juniper, and after making a guess I was unhappy with off the list I wrote in brackets 'it looks like juniper but we don't have juniper on our list!). Now I'm good at this stuff and things like the doubled-up sedge or the juniper really make me poke at that and look at just how good I am: do I know it? Do I know it out of context? Do I know it when context is actively against me? Flexing my knowledge and testing my certainty in that way is a joy. I also like knowing I can't game the system as easily as I sometimes might because the test is just not gameable-- the juniper was not 'the one remaining conifer on the list' and the sedge was not 'the third grassy-looking thing in the trio of grasses, sedges, and rushes that we were supposed to learn'.
Speaking of not being able to game the system, the written knowledge portion of the Ecology exam was a joy and a delight. In scope it covered, no lie, anything that may have been handed out or mentioned at any time over the course of the whole class, even if mentioned in passing, even if never referenced again-- and we got a lot of paper in that class. We were given misleading multiple choice questions. We were given maps with distributions and told to name the tree. We were given matching questions where, if we got the question wrong, we got negative marks. I worked hard to do that test, maybe only 30% of it was easy for me, and I had no idea I knew so much. I also had no idea there was so much to be known. I think it's the first time in my life I've been confronted by an assessment where instead of being snippy at myself about the bits I got wrong, I felt proud to have done as well as I had-- and there's no way I turned in a perfect test, and maybe only a 50-50 chance I got an A.
This is a fun environment to be in. So many years of self-directed workshops and research, so many years of work without ringing bells or even a clear goal at the end, and now school is a very different experience-- no longer a slog, but a special kind of surreal playtime as goal-oriented as a video game.
Let's see how long this excitement lasts. I can't do school forever... I think.
The first math quiz of the year, which was the first quiz of the year, I was nervous. I really wasn't sure of my grasp of the material (after the teacher explains something in that class I'm always less sure of my ability to do it, and it was his test) and when I looked at the first page I blanked. My brain shut down. I turned it over, started working on the first thing I saw that I knew how to do (somehow turning the page over helped) and then by the time I got back to the first page again I was good to go.
I'm not great at math. I don't take enough time to fully understand what's going on, so I figure out a 'good enough' strategy and run with it. I'm also absolutely impatient and not even close to being careful. Usually what happens on math quizzes is I come out at 70% or so-- all the steps right, answers half wrong because of carelessness. I don't mind that because it's an accurate representation of the work I've put in. I like getting the immediate feedback, not just the 'can I do this' feedback from homework, but the 'am I performing up to standard' that tests give me. They draw a line and say 'you should be here, are you?' and I know where I stand. Unlike every fucking other thing in life there is clarity here. I understand now especially how hard it must be to go from such a structured authoritarian setting to the real world, where people don't necessarily get rewarded for doing things well or correctly and where they can often shape the criteria they're performing under to fit their own abilities and needs. It's not a matter of finding the right way to do a thing, or the way a prof likes it, it's a matter of muddling along-- and so it's nice, even just in a few minutes of testing, to have the ground solidify.
Today was the Ecology final exam, which wrapped up the string of plant ID quizzes. Now the final exam was a work of art. The quizzes had got harder with each one, and the final plant ID test had a couple of trick questions in it-- like one plant put in twice, and a plant that we didn't have to know in there (it was juniper, and after making a guess I was unhappy with off the list I wrote in brackets 'it looks like juniper but we don't have juniper on our list!). Now I'm good at this stuff and things like the doubled-up sedge or the juniper really make me poke at that and look at just how good I am: do I know it? Do I know it out of context? Do I know it when context is actively against me? Flexing my knowledge and testing my certainty in that way is a joy. I also like knowing I can't game the system as easily as I sometimes might because the test is just not gameable-- the juniper was not 'the one remaining conifer on the list' and the sedge was not 'the third grassy-looking thing in the trio of grasses, sedges, and rushes that we were supposed to learn'.
Speaking of not being able to game the system, the written knowledge portion of the Ecology exam was a joy and a delight. In scope it covered, no lie, anything that may have been handed out or mentioned at any time over the course of the whole class, even if mentioned in passing, even if never referenced again-- and we got a lot of paper in that class. We were given misleading multiple choice questions. We were given maps with distributions and told to name the tree. We were given matching questions where, if we got the question wrong, we got negative marks. I worked hard to do that test, maybe only 30% of it was easy for me, and I had no idea I knew so much. I also had no idea there was so much to be known. I think it's the first time in my life I've been confronted by an assessment where instead of being snippy at myself about the bits I got wrong, I felt proud to have done as well as I had-- and there's no way I turned in a perfect test, and maybe only a 50-50 chance I got an A.
This is a fun environment to be in. So many years of self-directed workshops and research, so many years of work without ringing bells or even a clear goal at the end, and now school is a very different experience-- no longer a slog, but a special kind of surreal playtime as goal-oriented as a video game.
Let's see how long this excitement lasts. I can't do school forever... I think.
