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There’s a “life hack” that floats around the internet for college students. It says that in class if about half the students get up and leave fifteen minutes early or so, the instructor will have to end class early. That life hack is not true. It will probably work for a younger, weak-willed teacher, but there’s nothing that says the teacher has to end class early because of that.
Back in the day, I was a teacher. I taught college-level lower-classman math. (Is that the right term? I’ve heard “upper-classman”, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard “lower-classman”. At any rate, this story involves a class that was for students that were typically freshman.) And I was young and probably seemed weak-willed.
I had one particular class that, for some reason or another, just had a lot of bad students attending. That was not usually the case. Most of my students were good students. There are a few stories I could tell about this particular class, but I’ll limit this one. I had two students in particular that were especially awful that I nicknamed B1 and B2. The 1 and 2 had to do with their relative positions in the classroom– B1 sat closer to the board, and B2 sat further back. It was really those two students that made that class miserable, and I can only assume that their lack of respect for me was infectious to the rest of the class. But I don’t really know for sure. I just know that while I had a few problem students elsewhere, that particular class was a whole separate category.
At any rate, they tried that famous “life hack” on me. I knew about it, but they didn’t know that I knew it. About fifteen minutes or so before class ended, about half the class got up and left. I don’t know if they orchestrated it or what, but they did it. It did not work– I just kept on lecturing. Apparently they didn’t get the hint, because later on they did it again.
The second time, while lecturing to a nearly-empty classroom, I said “Okay, write this down, put it in your cheat sheet for the test, don’t tell anybody about it, don’t forget it. This is the password.” I wrote “Hilbert” on the board.
On the test, the last question was:
(Bonus 10 pts): What is the password?
I don’t often experience schadenfreude. In fact, I think this may have been one of two times in my life that I did, and the other time was in that same classroom. But when we reviewed the exam the next session and I gave the big reveal, it was delicious.
They didn’t get up and walk out early after that again.
But that’s actually not why I’m writing this. I’m writing this because of one particular student’s response. A student that wasn’t there that day at all, so he didn’t know the password.
He wrote down the Konami code.
While grading the papers, I lost my mind laughing so hard.
He got two points for it.