Chapter Twelve: Desk (~jinghan)
Note from author: I can’t seem to help writing two posts at a time. The “writing mood” may pass and then I’ll have nothing to write for weeks, so I’ll just keep throwing them at you.
For the second time in my life I went to the Baillieu Library to study. I went all the way up to the second floor before I felt that my physics text book, which I had borrowed from the overnight reserves section, was far to heavy to carry up another set of stairs. New and unsure of the library etiquette I took the nearest carrell and hid in the safety of my textbook.
Usually, I would go to some smaller, less intimidating library, but it was the textbook that drew me here. A tome of a book, the only way I could study from it while at uni was to borrow a copy from the library temporarily. Dragging in my copy from home would have left me as enemies with my suffering spine for perhaps a lifetime.
I was supposed to be at a physics tutorial at this time. Unknowing of the lack of productivity of said physics tutorial, a friend had tried to convince me not to skip it. Part of me sided with that view and nagged at my guilty conscience, but seven week’s experience of unproductive tutorials seemed to outweigh that. I guess sitting here and reading the text book was my way to balance out my act of disrespect to my tutor. Unlike other students I was not one for skipping any sort of class lightly, but I knew what my time was better spent doing.
At the end of the chapter I let my mind relax out of its guilt-blotched study anxiety. The writing all over the desk caught my attention. “I love Pete” was crossed out and replaced with “Pete is a looser” in different handwriting. In another place “I like to smell books. Is this weird, or does anyone else like to do this?” was annotated with “bibliophile.” I couldn’t help smiling, it was like an online forum, only on a desk, where strangers united by their boredom of heavy text books exchanged passing comments. I skimmed the rest of the desk for other interesting comments – already wondering what I would contribute to the desk if I were so inclined to graffiti on it.
One comment in neat black writing caught my attention, “I thought coming to melb uni would be really awesome, but now that I’m here, I just feel like everyone else is smarter than me.” Faint orange highlighter replied with, “I Agree.” If anything could describe my physics class this was it.
Advanced physics: it sounded like bragging rights, but so far what I had learned form lectures was that classes where the teacher assumes everyone is smart, everyone feels stupid. As for the physics part of the lecture, you blink and you miss something. For a few weeks I had sat wide eyed in lectures, not even knowing what questions to ask to clarify my confusion. A topic that took five weeks and fifteen lessons to cover in high school was waved past in two (three if we were lucky) lectures. As much as I love maths, I could not keep up with the brief way the lecturer skimmed over formula derivations – actually, at the end of a lecture, I wasn’t even sure what counted as a useful formula and what was just a passing equation. It was easier with topics we had learnt before in year 12, but the moment we left the safety of the known world I was stumped by new things like “moment of inertia” and “parallel axis theorems” that we had apparently covered but had not been inserted into my memory. Did everyone else feel like this? Or was it just me?
It’s so so so easy to assume the later, no matter how much you were “top of the class” back in high school – after all there were only nine people in my high school physics class and here I was in the lecture hall full of a hundred plus students who had all done well at physics the previous year. We all resorted to different coping mechanisms. Some students hide their confusion by reasserting what they already know loudly and openly, and try and ask smart questions – they make the rest of us feel less smart. Some students let their confidence dwindle and stop engaging with the subject, like the poor student who had written on the desk, and all the students that were planning to move down to mainstream physics. At some point or other, we all assumed the teaching system was inefficient and did not cater to the students needs – this may be so, but as a general rule university professors care more about their research task than their teaching methods. (We have been sermoned on all the aspects of laser cooling throughout the physics course.) And in the end in order to really learn, you just have to accept that these are professors and not teachers, full of knowledge, but not apt at passing on this knowledge in the most student-friendly manner. The obligation of teaching somehow come down to yourself, unfortunately.
It may just be luck that everything I have experienced so far have not made me either too confident or under confident. Anyway, my coping mechanism was my textbook. It became my teacher; it’s a lot more hard work, but at least I feel like I’m learning something.
I push my text book aside to make room, and write in blue ball-point, “Everyone feels a bit like that at some time, not matter how “smart” they are, you just have to mind your own learning and get on with it. Loving what you learn will save you.”
It sounds a bit cheesy and wasn’t the best wording for what I wanted to say, but it was on the desk now.