Old Stories...

I proctored for the first time today; the students of the class I TA for had a mid-term in lecture time. That was an interesting experience. Afterward, the other TA and I had a meeting with the prof to discuss grading procedures and stuff. I'm still a bit confused over how to assign grades because apparently we can't just do it numerically based on a rubric because then too many students would fail. I kind of fail to see the problem there. Of course there is good concern about that; a lot of these students are straight out of high school and most of them don't have much by way of sophisticated reading comprehension skills.

Which makes me think of something Dr. K said in the undergrad Ethnic Studies class I'm in right now. We were split into a couple of groups to deal with two questions. .... My group kind of split off into a couple more because we had chatty people at either end. Anyway, my group had the first question, and when no one else volunteered to answer, Dr. K said, "Jaymee? We'll always have Jaymee to rely on." (Which, lol.)

So I give my answer, right, which is long and comprehensive and I make my nods to all the people who gave input and some of my groupmates were really terrific, lots of stuff to say, and I just did the honours of re-stating stuff they all said into singular sentences. And at the end of it Dr. K laughed and said "that's a really comprehensive response... don't worry everyone, she's a grad student."

Except I know that even at grad level we don't necessarily do that either. And I'd been doing that sort of thing way before grad school.

When I was a kid, I read a story that kind of ran like this:

Once, a sultan was taking a boat ride down a river on a hot day. He was probably traveling or something. Anyway, the sun was high in the sky, and his ministers were napping. The sultan probably appeared to be napping too, and he overheard the oarsmen complaining among themselves, "look at those lazy ministers! what do they do which is better than us, that they get to sleep while we have to row?"

The sultan didn't say anything in response to that.

Later, he heard a whining coming from the rushes to the side of the river. He pretended to wake up, and asked one of the oarsmen to go see what the sound was.

So off the oarsman goes. He comes back and says, "Sire, it's a litter of puppies under the bush making the noise."

And the sultan sent the next oarsman, "how many puppies are there?"

And the next oarsman goes, and comes back. "Sire, there are five puppies."

And the sultan sends the next oarsman. "How many are male and how many are female?"

And the oarsman goes to find out. "Sire, there are three male and two female puppies."

And the sultan sends out a fourth. "What colour are they?"

And the oarsman goes to find out. "Sire, two are black, two are white, and one is brown."

Then the sultan wakes up one of his ministers. "Minister, go find out what is making that noise."

The minister goes to find out. He comes back in a bit and says, "Sire, there are five puppies under a bush. Three are male, and two are female, and two are black, two are white, and one is brown."

The sultan turned to the oarsmen and said, "This man took one trip to find out everything that it took four of you to tell me. Do you see why he is minister, and not you?"

Now, I think the moral of the story was that everybody had their appointed place or somesuch nonsense, but my takeaway from the story was that if someone's going to send you off to investigate something, you probably should come back with as satisfying an answer as possible, in case they have more questions for you. You do this because it's a giant waste of time if you don't take that time to find out more such basic facts that might answer the question even more fully. And boy, will you look dumb when someone you were bitching about goes and upstages you by being more competent than you gave them credit for!

This is one of the stories that has haunted me since childhood. I don't even remember where I read it (I know it was a book though). It's probably also what got me started on the info-gathering habit I have where I need to know All The Things... just in case someone asks. They usually never do and I just volunteer the information, but it probably makes me sound smarter than I really am in their eyes.

I HAVE wondered why the oarsmen in the story just never clued in that maybe, the sultan might ask them some next stupidfax question and it was in everybody's favour to just have only one more oarsman wading through that water and coming back with more stupidfax answers. But like I said, the moral of the story was tied to demonstrating some ridic class division reason, so.