Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

How Far Have We Really Come

The last light fades in the West… the pres­sure rises… Student, cast off thy shackles… Storm clouds on the hori­zon… The Great Reckoning is almost upon us… we enter the long, dark mulling-over of the soul…

Fourteen days to go until the main body of exams begin, and the cam­pus under­goes a remark­able trans­form­a­tion. Sneaking in under a week of high tem­per­at­ures and cloud­less skies, a new ambi­ance has ingra­ti­ated itself into the stu­dent body — the sud­den and ines­cap­able spectre of revi­sion. “Some time off” is now “two weeks away” (which, with five mod­ules, boils down to an aver­age of three days max­imum spent on each sub­ject) and a fever­ish pissing-contest now grips the halls as two camps emerge — those strug­gling to slave away for as many wak­ing hours as pos­sible, and those com­mit­ted to per­petual procrastination.

It comes as some­thing of a crux for the stu­dent, who, so recently freed from the bur­dens of assign­ments and all but a hand­ful of weekly lec­tures, sud­denly has a lot of free time on his hands. Without the safety net of reg­u­lar lec­tures, how­ever, he sud­denly has to put in a lot of graft before he feels he is “work­ing”. The great fear, at this time, is of not doing enough, when one’s peers seem to be mak­ing super­hu­man advances that would make Stakhanov redouble his efforts. The short­com­ings of pre­vi­ous terms, it seems, must be atoned for by effi­cient use of every hour. It is a com­pet­it­iv­ist night­mare of massive proportions.

And with a lack of lec­tures, time dis­ap­pears. My timetable is cur­rently reduced to four reg­u­lar hours a week, giv­ing two whole days off (plus week­ends). Rising at 10 or 11am, nap­ping mid-afternoon (inten­tion­ally or oth­er­wise) and invest­ing some time in cook­ing make for days that van­ish with fright­en­ing speed, and that plague of the late starter — that con­stant feel­ing that the time should be about three hours earlier than it is.

And before exam­in­a­tions proper, the fear­ful intro­spec­tion, dog­ging your efforts to sleep, eat, con­cen­trate: did I listen enough? Are my notes suf­fi­cient? Should I be on this course? Coupled with the gradual return of assign­ment marks from the pre­vi­ous term, the rise in pres­sure is tan­gible; a slow but steady thick­en­ing in the rar­efied atmo­sphere of the cam­pus bubble.

Only time will tell. As we pre­pare to do battle with the admin­is­tra­tion one thought sticks in the mind: “thank God I didn’t come here in the hope of escap­ing the ambi­gu­ities of sec­ond­ary edu­ca­tion.” Oh, wait…