Final Exam: Hidden in Plain Sight

     With all the hullabaloo over gun control, people and politicians alike have been mostly overlooking an existing solution. While the two parties rage back and forth over fewer guns! more restrictions! second amendment!, they ignore the fact that there are already laws in place to help. As this NY Times article observed, laws concerning background checks are not being enforced. Less than half of those who falsify a background check are charged with a crime, despite the fact that it's a felony. And people who need to hide something in order to acquire a weapon are "more likely than the average person" to hurt someone with it, meaning that arresting them could seriously reduce firearm violence. So why did it take until last Wednesday for anyone at all in the government to realize this?
     Ostrich-style solution ignoring is far from a new theme in the material we've studied in the last semester. C. P. Cavafy's poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" said it well: "What's going to happen to us without barbarians? / Those people were a kind of solution." Without the barbarians, who are presented previously as the reason that officials aren't doing their jobs, someone will have to find a way to get the government to work. Likewise, Washington has been cowed by the shadows of two competing political philosophies, and as a result nothing has been accomplished.
     Another prominent example is the debate over sweatshops. On one side, you have people demanding better working conditions, and on the other you have people pointing at the bottom line and threatening that such improvements would send prices skyrocketing. Many arrived at a consensus that there was no way to resolve the dispute, and a safe and enjoyable job was "only attainable and realistic to affluent people", as Alana W wrote on her blog. Again, the simple solution was being ignored - a study cited by the New York Times showed that safe working conditions would cost a price increase of "roughly 3%", or fifteen cents on a five-dollar shirt.
     Why would the government neglect the solutions in front of their eyes? Maybe it's because it hasn't always worked out well. The story "Adams" by George Saunders, in which the title is a close anagram of Saddam, is a metaphor for the rationale behind the war in the Middle East. In the story, when a father finds his neighbor standing outside his kids' room in his underwear, he takes the obvious solution: pass out flyers about what the neighbor did, take away anything that could be used as a weapon, and "wonk him". Now, I'm not going to debate the right or wrong of the US's response, but you can't deny that it has resulted in a lot of criticism from a number of places. Perhaps it's understandable that these days, the government doesn't take the first course of action that suggests itself. But then again, perhaps not.
     Consider two analogies from the movie Glory. Firstly, despite the Union Army's need for troops, the 54th Regiment is sidelined. They are used only for parades, just as today the second amendment is paraded around without anyone paying attention to the country's actual needs. Secondly and most powerfully is the case of the quartermaster. He denies the 54th crucial supplies - including guns. He isn't doing anything to keep firearms away from the South when he does this. He only penalizes the Union. Similarly, when background check falsification is not punished, the people who would use their firearms against US citizens are not penalized. They can just go to a private seller, purchase a weapon, and continue unimpeded. While the government should always consider the effects of any action, there is no excuse for failing to utilize and enforce preexisting, pre-thought-out laws.

The Finals Myth

     Finals start tomorrow. Seniors will be looking forward to being Second Semester. All four grades will be studying under their eyeballs bleed. As soon as I finish this post, I'm going to go brush up on my calculus in preparation for tomorrow afternoon. I will also probably spend my lunch break, between tests tomorrow, with a textbook.

     My question for you all is why?

     Say that you have a 91.5% in science, an A minus  on the brink of B plusness and solid A alike. Say that finals are worth on average 12.5% of your semester grade (which they are). Do you know what grade you need on the final to keep your A minus? About seventy nine and a half percent - a C plus.
     Say your parents will ground you if you have any grades in the C range. Do you know what grade you need to maintain at least 80% in your physics class is? Negative point five percent, according to my handy-dandy calculator. You could get a zero on the final and still have a B minus average.
     Say you really want an A to impress that college you're applying to. Solid A is 93%, and to achieve that you would need to get one hundred and three point five percent on your final on Thursday. Which is possible, with curving, but if you haven't been acing your tests all semester, you're not likely to start now.

     With brings us to the dominant fact: that you're probably going to do on your final what you've been doing all year. A week or two of hiding in your room with your physics book is ridiculously unlikely to change a months-long behavior pattern. If you have an A minus now, then by golly you'll probably have an A minus on the test and an A minus for the semester. (Unless you test really badly or really well. And keep in mind that most people who 'test badly' don't drop by more than ten percent, which in this scenario still gets you your A minus.)

     So honestly, why the heck are we all so riled up?

     Well, if you're in AS it's the unpredictability - without letter or numerical grades, no one's positive what footing they're on. I have heard people say that this is the final they're "freaking out about the most" - and it's a two page paper. We wrote longer essays for the freshman year final of the analogous EH class, two years ago. And again, your writing tomorrow is gosh darn it going to be roughly what your writing has been like for the last four and a half months. (I know my blog posts don't usually take more than the final's ninety-minute time limit.)

     So where does that leave us? Do we honestly think that an extra half hour of studying crammed in on the bus will affect our grade? Is it the sheer amount of material to remember? I dislike that hypothesis - in many classes, including every math, language, and science course I've taken, each new chapter of content is built upon the last one. Try doing complex trig without knowledge of the Unit Circle. Do students simply have an irresistible need to be capable of controlling our futures, even at the last minute? Tell me what your reason for cramming is, or what you think others' might be.

     And yes, even having written this, I will still be studying at 1:59 pm tomorrow, a minute before the exam.