Two Students: Tom won't learn, Huck won't hate

A quirky student, brilliant in some respects and challenged in others, I’ll call him Tom, was given the German Seifenoper, “soap opera,” as a vocabulary word, one among many. Probably because it appeared in a story the class was reading.

Tom refused to learn it. “I know that I will never need to know the German word for soap opera, so I refuse to learn it.” No amount of pleading or reasoning would sway him, not that the German teacher tried too hard; this situation was ultimately more amusing than annoying, and she had better uses for her own time. She could have pointed out that he would learn two potentially more valuable words--for soap and for opera--in one swell foop, but she didn't.

Wow. Think of the energy, commitment, and bent of mind it takes to examine each piece of information coming at you in school in order to determine, before you engage with it, whether or not it will be of use to you in the future. As if you could really ever know such a thing. Approaching education as if packing for a trip, and knowing you have to be ruthless in order to pack light. “I’ll learn this. I won’t learn that.” There’s an admirable, ethical stance at the core of Tom’s refusal, even if the project itself is wholly questionable.

I heard about this, and spoke to Tom. “I’m tempted to write a short story,” I told him, “in which a boy in a circumstance similar to yours loses his life because he doesn’t know the German word for soap opera. In my story, he’ll live if he knows this word, but he won’t know it, and he’ll die. It’s unlikely, of course, but you have to admit it could happen.”

(So you don’t believe I’m too harsh, I had spoken with the class about how it’s the case in literature and movies that so many people die because it’s an easy way to introduce dramatic tension. We care if the hero lives or dies. It’s harder to write a story or shoot a movie in which we care if the hero… brushes his teeth or not.)

He smiled. He understood my point. But he didn’t change his ways, not then, and, maybe, not now.

Another boy, I’ll call him Huck, was very quick to solve math problems, although he did it in a remarkable way. He would read a problem, and then attack it three, four, five, or more ways, getting sometimes the right answers, if the methods were sound, and sometimes the wrong answer. He would examine all the different answers and then decide which he believed to be correct. Trial and error. Not a perfectionist, almost an imperfectionist.

A girl in the same class, I’ll call her Becky, approached problem-solving more conventionally, working carefully step-by-step until she was certain she had the right answer. A perfectionist.

One day, I set the class a problem. Huck worked quickly to the answer and announced that he had it. Becky, working methodically, looked up and said, exasperated, “I hate you, Huck.”

Huck sat back and looked at her. “Well, Becky, I don’t hate you,” he said. “I guess you suffer from unrequited hate.”