Previous Chapter: The 121 Club
EXAMS
Semester schools are somewhat unfair in that
they expect
students to assimilate and then correctly regurgitate fifteen
weeks of learning in the five-day feat of academic
accomplishment a quarter-school student is expected to
perform after only ten. The midterm is supposed to moderate
the long fall and winter terms somewhat, but it never serves
to keep a semester campus from attaining a dead seriousness
that can often break out in hilarious but unintended faults
of character.
It was the start of May, and C T's second
winter term
was in its finals week. All about the dormitory, men who'd
usually been characterized by high absolute activity but none
in any net direction had to somehow align themselves with the
structure of the system, the one they'd negotiated a strained
peace with. As David Bowie sang, they needed to "turn and
face the strain..." Few of the men of 74-75 could make that
change. Tim was having a devilish time with his strength of
materials. A class that C T thought should have come so
easily to the man who designed and built their widely-admired
loft became more and more of a mystery to him. "C T, I don't
know. This Mohr's Circle stuff is just too much. How are
you supposed to 'see' something that isn't there?"
That was a trait unusual in C T. He
usually saw too
much that wasn't there. He was idly leafing through his
differential equations textbook. He was looking at the
complex conjugate roots of a sinusoidal steady-state equation
relating to a spring-mass system. This immersion in a prime
topic of dynamics gave him an inspiration he didn't know he
had. "The thing you have to do, Tim," he started, and at
this he knew he sounded too much like his math teacher so he
switched to a less didactic tone, "is start out with complete
faith in the drawings. Let me see what you have there..." He
walked to Tim's desk and took his typical all-encompassing
pan-academic look "It's a circular locus, right?"
"Yes, but what does it mean?"
"Well there are only certain ways that that
hunk of
metal, or whatever it is, can be. The circle describes
them." He made a quick analysis of the free-body diagram
showing torques and forces, which result in axial and shear
stresses. What usefulness there was to that banal lecture
back there in introduction to engineering!
"So you're saying that it's not so much seeing
what's
there but believing that it's true." He was waving his
mechanical pencil over the page. C T walked back to his desk
and picked up his personalized coffee mug. When Tammy bought
his favorite cup at the church bazaar to give to him for
Christmas the year before, the old woman pasting on letters
couldn't have charged much at a per letter rate.
"I think they try to teach too much blind
reliance these
days. Now I have a sense of things and I don't have to study
too much." That was the exception. He left Tim to his work
with only partial satisfaction resting in both minds. He
wandered down the corridor to Ralphson's room with his cup
and entered in the timid sense he always maintained around
that great lord. Ralphson had an 18-cup percolator running
in the corner and charged students 25 cents a cup. C T was
willing to pay for it instead of using his own humble drip
machine because of the fine Sunda Strait Javanese coffee he
used all the time. The sun never set on Ralphson's empire,
and for those who needed to stay up with that never-setting
sun to study for exams, the caffeine form and content in his
brew was particularly refreshing at 3:00.
Ralphson had his pile of books, but they were
only one
percent of the number stored in his personal library over the
desk. Could the floor loading there be over 1 MPa, he
wondered, as he stared at his Composite Collection of Modern
Thought, as Ralphson liked to call it, between sips from his
brandy snifter. He lifted his gold pen without looking up.
"I can hear the tap. Don't steal two and try to get away
with it."
C T decided to stay passive at this point.
He left and
walked back to 7504. Robinson met him at the corner. "You
don't need that firewater from old Ralphie. It takes a long
time for that pot of his to cook up and we might need some
first."
"It's good coffee, and he usually doesn't
let us have
any. Say, how are your studies going?"
"They aren't going anywhere, that's where
they're going.
Are you ready to take six exams in a row right now, or is
there some great rush you do in five minutes while you're
sitting in the classroom?"
"I study all term." That was true, for
he felt
motivated. It's funny how doing the assignments as they come
along makes final scrambling unnecessary. He had heard from
Tammy about their quarterly examinations at State. From the
deadly import he observed on their own campus, he couldn't
believe her descriptions of test mania based on 33% less
material. What could be worse than renting hotel suites if
you have the money or putting books on a hard tile floor
outside the library if you don't?
His usual scanning of the books made for good
coverage.
In depth study, corroborated by a final brief summation, made
the task of answering questions on a wide range of material a
feat no ordinary classmate or dormmate could believe. He was
aligned all along, for he knew the way the class was
inclined. A problem arises that when a student like Robinson
or Franklin tries to make too much of a shift to the
inclination of the material all at once; there is never
enough ductility. The change is never quite made without
loss of strength or brittle fracture.
Next Chapter: Spring-Summer at School