First, read TFA. I have personally made many of the same observations over the years, but Kavan presents it with great coherence and eloquence, so it’s well worth the read.

All of us in school have had to endure grades, for better or for worse. Early in my academic career I used to receive very uniform grades, I was a B student, almost without exception. I guess if nothing else, my grades were consistent, so in some sense it seemed logical. It should be said that in both junior high and high school, the teachers had guidelines for grading they had to follow, and their grades were evaluated to some degree – in that statistics were compiled at the end of a year and those whose grading was way off no doubt would get a talking to. In the IB there’s even a strict regime to plot grades worldwide, where if the grades of one teacher were considered out of range the whole class would get their grades adjusted accordingly. I was quite happy with that, because it was very organized, and it deprived teachers from having absolute power.

Once I entered the mystical halls of higher education, this state of affairs was upset. My grades suddenly fluctuated a lot more. Some grades I couldn’t understand at all. With the unexpected low ones I was mad, with the high ones I was puzzled (but since it was in my interest it didn’t exactly enrage me). But one thing was clear: the grades made a lot less sense now. You would think that teachers in colleges and universities would be smart enough to grade sensibly, but you’d be wrong. Half my grades would be right on the mark, the other half would be completely out of whack with my expectations. And not surprisingly, some teachers were much more on point than others. I still think this randomness is because teachers have absolute power since no one is checking up on them. And I detest it.

As Kavan writes, the Bell Curve, which was used as the basis for grading in most of my education, is completely bogus. I recall that in high school, the guidelines said that each of the five grades should be assigned to some x% of the class, so eg. C would get 40%, B = 25% etc. Which is idiotic, because if 50% score an A, then that is what they score.

Another practice which is entirely based on a teacher’s inability to give a good test, is moving grades up or down. So if the mean is supposed to be a C and it happens to be a D, every D becomes a C, every B becomes an A etc. If the test was more relevant to what the students actually know, you would expect to get a finer granularity at the level you want to, rather than having almost no one answer the hard questions (which are supposed to distinguish students from each other) and everyone doing the easy ones (which offer no distinction).

The gravest mistake I’ve encountered is to make the test completely irrelevant to the teaching. There is no excuse for this kind of stupidity, and yet it happens. Sometimes exams have a sizable portion of problems concerning stuff that was nowhere in the syllabus at all. What on earth is the point of this? Is this a teacher’s admission to “I would like to teach the stuff, but I don’t know how, or I don’t have the courage, so I’ll just give it on the test alone”? Or maybe “this is what I wish my course to be about”?

What annoys me most is the disregard for quality grading. If you had parking attendants in the city who wrote tickets without much care as to whether your ticket is valid, or whether you were parked legally, you’d be pissed, and rightly so. Incompetence, at all levels, is grounds for complaint. Many years ago I had a teacher who graded 70+ exam papers in two days (the standard for getting grades out was 3 weeks) and the grades made absolutely no sense. So many people were pissed off that the department decided to stage an extra re-exam.

How can you possibly defend that grades in higher education are less accurate than those in middle school?

Oddly enough, this is a conundrum which seems to affect only women. Few things are so gender biased as nail care. See, for men it’s very easy. Wash and cut, you’re done. But women have a whole maze of ideas and bad advice to navigate. And for this reason they get it wrong a whole lot.

What you’re basically saying is that your nails are so ugly/dirty/disgusting that this fugly nail polish is actually nicer to look at anyway.

Shape

Let’s start with the basics. Do you know what species you are? Yes, human, correct. Here’s the thing. Men and women are both human. Their hands and fingers are exactly the same. And the rules for nail care are thus also the same. You cut the nail where the skin of your finger ends.

It’s like women sometimes want the shape of their nails to be like the nails of members of the animal kingdom. Instead of ending them where the skin ends, they want to extend them for no apparent reason.

It’s odd how controversial this rule is. See, leopards have long nails, don’t they? Yes, because it’s also a weapon. They need to have long nails, it’s an environment thing. If you lived in a really tough neighborhood, you’d need some protection too. But you’re not a leopard, are you? That’s right, and weird nails won’t make you one either. For a panther it’s pretty important to have long nails. If it wants to pierce the skin of a fruit (or peal an orange), it doesn’t have a Swiss army knife. But you have all kinds of tools in the kitchen you can use.

Color

This one’s even worse. Some women advertise their nails 3 blocks away. It’s almost like all you can see is the nails sometimes, because they’re so at odds with everything else in the environment.

See, there is something called contrast, and color balance. They teach this in art school, but we can’t all go to every single school, so it’s useful to know the most basic things anyway. The basic idea is that if the contrast of two adjacent things is high, something is wrong (it’s unpleasant to look at, it signals a conflict). Contrast is a principle present all the time, the contrast between your clothes and your skin, the skin and the hair, the skin and the shoes, the socks and the pants etc etc. In most cases people do an okay job of it. But somehow the idea is completely lost when it comes to nails, people have no good sense anymore. I mean you wouldn’t paint your hands red, would you? That just seems stupid. Well, there you go.

Even a leopard has more sense than to paint its nails red, or fluorescent yellow, or purple, or what have you.

The idea is that the nails are actually part of your hands, so you want them to appear as such. Some light color that doesn’t contrast too much with the skin is passable. As is blank polish. But what you’re actually doing is painting over the surface of a piece of wood so it won’t get damaged. But since your nails aren’t wood, the whole procedure is completely obsolete to begin with. I guess you don’t varnish your fingers for protection, do you?

The checklist

I guess that was a lot of information to take in, so here’s a short checklist to remember.

1. Are your nails longer than to comfortably play the piano? If yes, then they need trimming.
2. Are you trying to flag down a jumbo jet? If yes, your nails need a good scrubbing to reveal oh yes, the nail.

If your answer to both is no, you’re in the clear.

You hear all kinds of things about what shopping means to people. That it’s comforting, therapeutic, liberating, exciting, or just plainly makes you feel good. While some of the epithets may be true, I cannot agree with the last one.

Of course, there are different “kinds” of shopping. But I mean the very special kind, the kind of thing where you go out and buy something you’ve wanted for a long time, or needed for a long time. It’s supposed to be a relief and delight to get it. That kind of shopping.

Well, getting the item does feel good. But shopping for it doesn’t. I can’t stand that conversation with the salesman. My focus is that I want to make the best possible deal, I’m trying to concentrate hard to cover all the angles and foresee every possible scenario that may occur with the product. But that doesn’t mean I know what to say. I think of one thing to ask, then another, then I draw a blank. I stand there for a while listening, hoping the guy has more stuff to say, anticipating another question to ask. Quite often, the guy wasn’t really drawn into the conversation either (which I’m not very good at), so he answers my question and then he’s waiting for me to pick up the thread again. Which I struggle with. It’s really quite a stupid situation. I don’t enjoy it in the least.

So that’s one thing, conferring with the salesman. Then there’s actually buying stuff. I just don’t feel good about that either. I always feel guilty for spending the money. And the more it costs the more guilty I feel about it. As if anyone at the store would care enough to judge me for it, but it does make me feel uncomfortable.

Buying stuff online is actually a nice change. I don’t have to talk to anyone.

The suit is, with astonishing regularity and unbridled universality, the mode of attire for “significant” social occasions. Sorry, for males. Dare I ask what merit has granted this style of clothing the unquestioned acceptance and unique adoption? Is it the aesthetic quality? Is it the economic feasibility of acquisition compared to richer local traditions which value craft and ornamentation? Is it some kind of great compromise where disputes over our regional values have produced a lowest common denominator?

Significantly, Hollywood has given the suit an image outside weddings and funerals that represents top class fashion and coolness. More so than anything, it suggests to us that given the choice, Hollywood characters would choose to wear a suit. Why would suave characters whose plot does not dictate unto them a dress code choose to wear a suit, a style of clothing associated with private family occasions and tedious business meetings? Exactly, it doesn’t fit. And I think Hollywood, not necessarily by itself, but certainly as a medium, has helped create that image of the suit as desirable clothing. It’s mythological. Most people don’t look anything like Brad Pitt in a suit.

Why do we wear a suit? It’s not the least bit comfortable. It’s not cheap. It doesn’t make you feel liberated in any way (despite James Bond running around roof tops in it). It’s a huge hassle to clean, because you can’t just wash it. And it’s the world’s least customizable bit of clothing: every suit looks exactly the same. It leaves zero room for individuality. And we don’t even look good in it. Unless you have a tailored suit, most people look rather awkward in a suit, and far removed from their normal style of clothing and their natural unrestrained motion. Like these guys…

What about women? They are doing much better. They don’t have this narrow mindset of one outfit that must be worn. Ask yourself this, in any formal social context, who is more interesting to look at, with respect to dress, the men? Who all look the same? Or the women?

There is a time to embrace individuality, and there’s a time not to. If a hardware manufacturer decided he would only produce screwdrivers for screws 3*pi/7 cm in diameter, because that’s the “ideal size”, noone would buy them, because there aren’t any screws that size. If an airline pilot decided to land in a non standard location, because the airport is “too far away from the city”, he wouldn’t be applauded.

It important not to be a robot, but there are times when doing things in a standard way is important. Especially when *not* doing things to standard is based on whim (sometimes known as “historical reasons”). We all think the Yanks extremely silly for not using the metric system, as one of three countries worldwide (of course, the scientific community *obviously* does use the metric system, and able to communicate smoothly with the rest of the world, it’s just the rest of the population that is apparently incapable of understanding a far simpler system). Similarly, the Brits still drive on the left. This insistence is actually even more stupid, because unlike a system of measurement, it is only one single rule to be changed. In this they are admittedly not alone, but only because of those, yes, historical reasons going back to the old Empire that is no more.

But in both cases it is fighting a long lost battle. It is a lot like France trying to pretend that English is just any other foreign language by suppressing English content and culture. Well, guess what, English is the cultural language of the world. France and Britain both tried their luck at the whole colonize-the-world and Britain won. Just accept it already. France with their highly rated school system would be much wiser to shoot for bilingualism rather than censor English language movies from their cinemas. If French people were just as fluent in English as the Brits (or the Dutch, to give a practical example), don’t you think that would be a huge advantage?

I know it’s hard to believe, but it is in fact fully possible to preserve the valuable parts of your culture while changing the system of measurement (Britain), or which side of the road to drive on (Canada, Spain), or adopting a second language (Netherlands, tons of other countries).

That reminds me. Germany, German is *not* the “language of science/business/whatever crap”. Get on the ball already and stop pretending you’re unable to master English, everyone else in the world can do it just fine.