Partly Cloudy, 64°
Kenneth Knight '12 has been kicking himself for taking ECON0110 pass/fail ever since he got a 97 on the latest midterm. "I mean, if I get a pass with distinction, I guess it's not the end of the world, but it would be a shame to waste all that effort for nothing," he informed the Noser. If Knight doesn't get at least a B in the class, he will have failed the lazy, half-assed foundations of the New Curriculum. "With reading period just around the corner, I'm really feeling the time-crunch to make sure I'm ready to bomb the final," he announced. "If I don't do poorly, I'll just feel so stupid."
Knight claimed that things had been going well until about a month into the semester when he started going to class. "At first, I was pretty good about not going. I mean, of course I attended a class here and there, but no one's perfect. Then all of a sudden I went to a few in a row, and it just spiraled out of control from there. My bed was just so itchy and uncomfortable, it was impossible to oversleep. I even tried hitting the snooze on the alarm for an hour, but the sound was so annoying that I just had to get up after the first time. I know, I'm ridiculous."
"From there, it got worse", he continued. "I started to do the reading. I would get back to my room at night, expecting to be up until 3 a.m. watching Youtube and checking Facebook, but all of a sudden it would be 11:30 and I would be sound asleep, having just finished the week's assignment."
Knight's TA Courtney Hood '10 offered her take on the situation. "It was really disappointing to see Kenneth slip like that. I remember a couple weeks ago, I called on him to answer a question in section. He was articulate, thoughtful, and reasoned, not to mention well-sourced. It was sort of embarrassing. I mean, just compare him to my star pupil Craig Abrams '11, who is barely hanging on by a thread. That guy wouldn't know a supply-demand curve if it was the only thing we studied in this glacially-paced joke of an intro class. It's kids like Craig who keep me in this job, mostly because kids like Kenneth could probably just teach themselves the material."
Feeling desperate, Knight attempted to utilize Brown's 'Academic Coaching' program, hoping he could learn some pointers on how to be a bad student. "We went over some basic strategies, like putting old batteries in his calculator so it dies mid-test, doing a shot of Everclear every time his textbook claimed 'rational people think at the margin', or more radical strategies for being an economics failure such as taking CNBC seriously", said his tutor Glenn Pitcher '11. "I don't know how much got through to him though," he sighed. "I really tried to help Kenneth, but he's just too much of a fucking nerd."
