Exam I

I gave the first exam in all of my exam-oriented classes today. Overall, I'm pretty happy with them. I do recall only too well the days of being a student, faced with dozens of vocabulary words and many more concepts or people to recall, that taking exams is difficult. In many ways, I relied on my existing vocabulary, skills in logic and reason inherited from my time as a debater, and my relatively good memory, to get me by without studying.

Because I hate to study. I really enjoy learning. I love it, in fact. But (other than listening to someone who obviously doesn't know what they're talking about) nothing bores me more than studying. Partially, my gifts work against me. I learn the general idea of things quickly, and use outside knowledge to supplement it, so that if I've got a list of terms (or worse, formulas) to memorize, I feel like I know it all long before I actually do. And because I always like to be learning, once I feel like I've got the gist, I want to start learning the next thing. It is the dominant problem in my life: I have learned many things, but mastered few (or none).

And so, looking out at the ever-unreadable faces of my students as they took the exam, I did have sympathy for them. I have sympathy for the fact that many of them have no interest in Sociology, sympathy for the ones without my natural gifts, and sympathy for the ones who are too bored to memorize - be they gifted or no. I have sympathy particularly for those who grew up without a surrounding culture that prepared them for college, for using grammatically correct English, and for the expectations of college professors.

Despite all of this sympathy, however, I must evaluate their learning. And in doing so, I must force them to memorize some things, particularly the vocabulary associated with the social sciences. In the future, I hope that I will be able to devise methods for engaging in the process of evaluation but encouraging the use of sociological vocabulary and concepts, but for now, I hand them a sheet with many congruent circles and a pencil.