Three post SAT-I observations

Three of the comments by Raiyan are being posted for future references.

1. Two observations about your curriculum that you just need to address. First, make a rule that no one can recline on their chairs during mocks. They just have benches in Notre Dame, and giving your exam like a hunchback is an important factor. Secondly, instead of mentally preparing your students for ten sections, make the number of sections eleven. Because that is exactly how the simple task of filling in your name and everything else seemed - an entire section by itself, that took as much time as well...


2. Well, the exam itself went fine, I presume (I'll refrain from being definitive - they always backfire). Essay topic was about whether people should adapt to a new surrounding. I gave reference from 'Return of the Native', showing how Eustacia Vye succumbed to the society when she failed to conform with its values. It was against my ethics to to bring back the horrors of Hardy, but I had to prepare for the counter discourse - which I gave through 'A Brave New World's John and 'An Enemy of the People's Dr Stockmann. ( though in the latter I had a little trouble later fitting in the 'new surrounding' criteria - which I 'fixed' by the phrase "... the doctor found himself in a new surrounding where he was no longer revered but despised..." You know, privacy, piracy...) Essay went a-full-two-page fine.

3. Oh, and the last two passages on behaviorism, were possibly some of the best in its class. The first one statistically proved the indifference of over 90% of the population aboutpolitical cause and effect, rendering the democratic system based on popular voting inherently flawed. The second one was a little more hypothetical, saying how the practice of taking individual views in a society is pointless, since everyone's political views are not innate, but rather acquired from their surroundings. So despite insistence on individuality, at the end of the day, the individual is simply one of the millions of spokesmen for a greater 'ideology' - if one can be liberal enough to apply that term. That was the gist - and it was surprisingly relevant to my appreciation of Coriolanus and Dr Stockmann. The only other passage I bothered not to flush from my head was one about softwares translating languages, simply because one computer translated "The spirit is strong, but the flesh is weak" in Russian as "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten". I laughed out aloud in class, and vowed to make 'good use' of the Google Translator in the future.