Good and poor learners
In fact, we are not divided into whites and blacks, men and women, or Jews and anti-Semites. We’re divided into good learners and poor learners. And there’s been a class struggle between us for centuries.
Good learners get up early, and not always because they are larks. They get up early because they have to. If they don’t get up early, they get up late. Late is ten o’clock in the morning. All right, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock, at least. And say “Stop sleeping, get up”. Good learners generally tend to ask themselves and others rhetorical questions. For example, “When if not now?”, “How long can you do nothing?” and “Don’t you understand? These are key questions for good learners. They don’t understand how it is possible not to understand.
Poor learners don’t understand.
Good learners work in systems. It’s important to them. At the same time it is important to them that they are valued in the system they are working in. If the system they’re in doesn’t value them, good learners will look for a new system. The greatest reward for a good learner is when the system didn’t value them at first, but now does. The worst punishment is to fail in the eyes of the system. If a good learner is asked “Who are you?”, he will honestly answer “I am an engineer”.
If you ask a poor learner “who are you”, he’ll say “I’m John”.
The main reason for all the actions of a good learner is the conviction that it is the right thing to do. You have to study well, you have to get good grades in exams, you have to get a good job (how else could it be?) and you have to make a career because you have to. Yes, for the same reason they wash dirty dishes.
Poor learners wash dirty dishes too. But only when they run out of clean ones.
This division can be seen in school. A good learner is easy to recognise, and not just by his glasses or his smart face. A good learner is someone who does his homework. Every day. He comes home after school, changes into his home clothes, heats up his lunch, eats it – and sits down to do his homework. One good learner is quick and easy, so he sits down to do his homework and finishes in half an hour. The other good learner is thorough and persistent, so he does his homework all evening. There are even those who do their homework for the day after tomorrow – but that is a special category of human being, and we will not talk about them now.
When a good learner has finished his homework, he smiles and stretches. If he is a really good learner, he can pack his schoolbag afterwards. But it is not obligatory – I knew one good learner whose mother packed his schoolbag for ten years.
Now raise your hand if you regularly do your homework on the windowsill near the school bathroom. You may remember that a lot of homework takes up the usual ten-minute break in middle school and a big twenty-minute break in high school. And you don’t need a break to do all your homework. All you need is the last desk and a biology or literature lesson.
The top class for a poor learner is to do his homework himself, during the lesson for which it is assigned. Preferably not at the last desk, but at the first. Do it brilliantly, imaginatively, and as soon as it is done, start answering immediately. And to answer in such a way that the teacher would be completely enchanted, to get the best grade and to finally sit down and read the second volume of Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West” again. For the sake of which it was necessary to answer, so as not to be distracted later. Only a true, profoundly poor learner is capable of such a thing. Unfortunately, the combination of ‘interesting’ and ‘no distractions’ is rare in school (and in life), so a poor learner has to work much harder than a good learner. If, of course, he works hard enough to do so.
Grades don’t tell us anything. On the school’s “board of honour” there are mixed portraits of good and poor learners. The latter have no less high grades, and victories, while among the former there are a lot of average pupils. It’s not about the grades, it’s about the approach.
A good learner always says “I have to” to every “What for?”
A poor learner always says “What for?” to every “You have to.”
* * *
After leaving school, good and poor learners go into adulthood. For good learners it is easy, their belief that “I have to” guides them.
For poor learners it is more difficult: they have to think hard about how to deal with life’s situations without compromising.
Poor learners don’t like to compromise.
This is perhaps the second major difference between the two: a good learner knows exactly what must and should be sacrificed in order to achieve what needs to be achieved.
A poor learner is absolutely sure that there is no point in compromising anything, so he only compromises what he does not care about. And actually he doesn’t care about a lot of things. In fact, he only cares about what is interesting and does not distract him. This is the last concession that the poor learner makes to society.
A good learner works like a horse: he ploughs his field evenly, leaving deep marks behind.
A poor learner works more like an explosion: no result, no result, poker.
Both good and poor learners can be talented. Both good and poor learners can be brilliant. Brilliant good learners become millionaires and company presidents, and brilliant poor learners become writers, programmers and representatives of other creative professions that don’t require excessive socialisation.
Others – not so brilliant, but gifted good learners become good professionals with high salaries.
While less brilliant, poor learners become representatives of various liberal professions; they work on a flexible schedule and can be paid a lot of money or nothing at all. Besides, in any system there are a large number of poor learners, who from time to time come up with more or less brilliant ideas, for which they are forgiven constant lateness, holidays and unexpected loss in their family at the most inopportune moment.
Unsuccessful good learners still become good professionals with normal salaries – simply because there is no such thing as a completely unsuccessful good learner. Good learners are like that: they cannot work badly.
But nobody knows what happens to unsuccessful poor learners. After all, who among proud poor learners will admit to himself that he is a failure?
Two classes feel class hatred towards each other, as it should be. Good students see poor students as lucky lazy people who get gifts for nothing. At the same time, if a certain poor learner is unsuccessful, at least in the area that seems most important to a good learner (for example, he is always out of money because he is unwilling to work in the system, or he has no private life because no one can get along with him), a good learners can treat him condescendingly. But if a poor learner lives for his own pleasure, enjoys his work, has a lot of money and builds happy relationships – any good learner will be filled with righteous anger. A good learner will like a poor learner who has become a drinker, for example. And of course a good learner will never fall that far himself.
Poor learners, for their part, are convinced that good learners are primitive nerds who can’t get up without an alarm clock or live without instructions. However, he can change his attitude if a good learner, for example, is disgusted with his own work, has a little clinical depression, or even better – a nervous breakdown. Or at least if a good learner understands that his own way seems narrow and limited compared to the free high way of a poor student. If a good learner is engaged in an important and interesting business, gets a lot of money, is healthy, and does not understand why his life is worse than the life of a mountain eagle – the poor learner will despise him. This attitude is similar to the attitude with which a freckled boy with leaky trousers and ink on his fingers looks at a neat boy with freckles and a neat haircut.
Yes, he is the one who can jump in puddles and kick tin cans. But a boy with a neat haircut is the one who is always held up as an example to him. Deep down, both classes are vaguely jealous of each other – because the other can do things they can’t.
* * *
A good learner knows that there should be food in the house, food in the fridge and the floors in the house should be cleaned at least once a week.
A poor learner thinks that there should be equality between men and women. Equality means that she marries him and he does everything else around the house.
* * *
A good learner has children because she is a woman, educates them because she is a mother, and helps her parents because she is a daughter.
A poor learner has children because she wonders what kind of faces they will have, does not educate them because they will do everything on their own, and helps her parents because they will not leave her alone.
* * *
A good learner will never let her husband come to work in a dirty shirt.
A poor learner doesn’t think it’s necessary to check whether he’s wearing a shirt or not.
* * *
A good learner would rather kill herself than serve her family sausages for dinner.
A poor learner would rather die of old age than think about dinner.
By the way, good learners also know how to iron clothes.
Poor learners tend to think that “clean” means “beautiful”, and mostly concentrate on other pleasures.
Well, good learners also know how to take pleasure but only when they have time to spare.
* * *
A good learner follows fashion, her figure, her weight and her family’s reputation.
A bad learner doesn’t know that the word “orgasms” can be singular.
It would be logical to assume that there are no marriages between classes, but this is not the case. Poor learners often love good learners – because of the order in the house and the unquestionable creative individuality of the couple. Good learners sometimes fall in love with poor learners – because washing socks is no great art, but not everyone can smile so sincerely and ask: “Honey, what are we going to have for breakfast?”
Of course, they can also make the perfect couple within their class. Two good students living together can reach unprecedented heights in their careers, earn millions, build a huge house and raise many children. And poor students in love can invent a perpetual motion machine, build an aeroplane out of it and fly somewhere far away to their mutual joy.
But two good learners are often unbearably bored with each other.
And a pair of poor learners will be covered in mud and starving to death because neither of them will agree to get up early to go and get a patent for a perpetual motion machine. One of them will oversleep. And the other will promise to wake him up, but forget.