classroom douchebags
Though this journal is only beginning to come into being, I don’t want to just continuously write this horribly egocentric narrative of my life. Such ramblings are for biographies of people who have made their mark on the world and changed it for the better. And for now, I am nobody.
I believe strongly in the notion that you can learn more about a person’s character in the way he writes rather than what he actually writes about. So rather than deliberately taking steps to first set down a foundation around which one can base their impressions of me, I intend to intersperse these introductory entries with thoughts, musings, rants that go on in my head. Also, I fear that if I put off writing about something for too long, I’ll forget what I want to write about.
Disclaimer: I’m really not as mean as this post makes me out to be. :)
You’d think that at an Ivy League, the majority of students would quickly be humbled at the brilliance of their peers (well, not all of them - there are definitely some dumbasses here) and learn a thing or two about exercising self-restraint when it comes to making a show of your “intelligence.” Of course, there are those exceptionally brilliant individuals to which this lesson in humility need not apply, but I find that those who are the most intelligent are keenly aware of how unintelligent they are. But alas, there are some individuals too dense to recognize this fact of life. Or perhaps, their heads are too big to fit anything else in it without bursting.
In high school, I loathed people who made a show of pedantry. The ones who argued about the most trivial of points. The ones who pointed out the obvious mistake the teacher made on the board. The ones who deliberately used the most intelligent-sounding words they could moster. The ones who explained things in the obliquest of terms, in the most esoteric way possible. Ultimately, these were the ones who felt that they were so awesome that the rest of the classroom needed to see how awesome they were and just bask in their awesomeness.
You’d think that such inane behavior would cease at a place like Princeton, or at least in such puerile forms, but I’ve still found this place to be rife with idiots who feel like they have something to prove.
In my linear algebra class, SH is probably one of the most mathematically-able of students; he switched out from the honors track like I did, even though he did well last semester (a word to the wise: if you think you are good at math, you aren’t.) But in terms of knowing how to conduct yourself socially, for him it’s a different story. It seems that SH has read the textbook already and is taking the class just for lols, and just for the hell of it, he’s going to make it his goal to make the class as unenjoyable as possible for rest of us. As if answering the teacher’s questions with abstruse theorems from the later chapters of the textbook isn’t enough, SH needs to verbally recite every calculation he makes and engage in one-on-one conversations with our teacher while the rest of the room. Constantly speaking out in class to answer the teacher’s question (often incorrectly, in spite of his alleged mathematical prowess) or point out the obviously misplaced negative sign we all see, SH’s antics never fail to elicit one of my favorite gestures:
Of course, I sit right next to this guy, so I try to perform the aforementioned gesture as obnoxiously as possible.
I’m sure that I will have many interesting anecdotes about this class to share in coming entries, but for now I suppose I have learned already learned plenty from today.
- Projections and reflections are linear transformations.
- A coefficient matrix A exists for a linear transformation if substituting a sum of two vectors or multiplying in the input by scalar still results in an image of the same transformation.
- Stupidity is everywhere. Princeton is no exception.
