Office Hours, donuts, and my love for them

I use to be completely terrified of office hours, because I was convinced that if I just sat quietly in class, the professors wouldn’t be able to tell whether I was a good student or not. But the minute you show up to office hours and talk to them, they can see through all the attempts to be intelligent, and they’ll know that you’re just another somewhat below-average student. But now I am older and hopefully a little wiser, and I know that they can tell whether you’re just another student whether or not you go into office hours. And office hours can only help you, because it means you’re talking with your professors, and they’re smarter than you are. (Or at least, they’re smarter than I am.)

I actually have a theory that professors have what we will call a “donut of smart” around them: an area around them described by some nebulous and probably complicated function that makes anyone who steps into it smarter. And the donut stays with you for a little while, once you’ve left the presence of the professor. It’s just like eating a real donut, because the sugary glow takes a while to metabolize, and can give you inspiration, but it can’t sustain you for long periods of time: you still have to learn the material (the commonplace “meat and potatoes,” if you will).

Actually, I’m still afraid of office hours, because I am always afraid that today is going to be the day that I slip up and show them that actually, I really don’t have any solid grasp of the material and I’m way less intelligent than the other person who came to office hours. But, while most of the time, I can go merrily along on meat and potatoes, sometimes you just really want a donut. (And, sometimes these donuts of smart are pretty big. How can professors maintain their svelte figures if we don’t help them out?)

Midterms…

I can never decide which is the worst part of taking a test: studying for it, actually taking it, or waiting for the results. Right now I’m firmly in the last camp, which is mostly because I just turned a take-home midterm in yesterday and now I get to marinate in fear for a week until they grade it.

Actually, I really like studying for tests, because I’m a complete nerd. It always seems like that’s the point when you pull everything together and start to understand it all within the context of everything you’ve learned. That’s when the aha moments come (those moments where, if you were in a bathtub, you would get out and run naked down the street), and those are the fun moments in learning.

I kind of enjoy taking tests, too. There’s a real adrenaline rush, and in smaller classes, those five minutes before the prof comes in with a big stack of recently photocopied paper is when the whole class bonds over their impending doom. And, when a test is going well there’s a real sense of success when you figure out a hard problem.

But I don’t know if there’s anything fun about waiting to get your grades back. Then you’re just sitting around, listening to what other people think they messed up and then trying to remember exactly what you wrote for that problem. Of course, if I were self-disciplined, I would do the smart thing and recognize that at this point, there’s nothing I can do about it now, and no reason to worry. But, alas, I have the self discipline of a wombat. What about you? What’s your (least) favorite part of exams? How much self discipline do you have?