I am laying on a reclined chair. There is a garbage bin right in front of me. There are two garbage bins, one recycling, one standard, in the corner of the room far to my right. There is a garbage bag about 45 degrees to my right and two meters away. What appears to be a garbage bin is, in fact, my backpack for the day, storing, my homework. There is a table with in front of me with papers, a calculus books, a calculator and two raw pieces of artichoke. There is Mr. Kim sitting at his desk typing up homework for one of his classes. He just looked at me. He did it again. It’s as if he knows that I just typed his name. After a year in this class, I noticed there is a plant in a basket hooked above his chair.
The pencil would move, stop, scratch a line, drop. Pinched in between the thumb and the index finger, it would perform a graceful salto around the hand, transitioning to a fervent Irish jig on paper. The tip would go up and down with a feverish pace, unsure of where it will land next. Pause. A set of teeth biting into it in a great distress, reluctant to let go. But the time is pressing and the writing must continue. Graphite meets paper again, leaving a part of itself anywhere it goes. In this manner, it keeps on going until it runs out of either time or life.
The clock shows 7 on the hour hand, 25 on the minute hand, and… never mind, it’s now 26 on the minute hand and about 30, 31, 32 I gotta race the clock, 41 seconds and it’s already not true. Oh, it’s also 27 minutes now. Give me a couple more minutes and this blog will be filled with 250 words. It just…takes some time. Something like 55 seconds, no, more like, 28 minutes and 15 seconds. Oh my, I just noticed there is another clock in Mr. Westcott’s classroom and it display an entirely different time. It also does not produce the tick tock sound – the hands seamlessly travel through time and space, without any apparent jumps. For some reason, I am starting to get annoyed by the tick the former clock makes. It is periodic, almost meditative, but it’s causing me some sort of insanity – an exponentially increasing hatred towards the clock. Tick tock tick tock tick
What’s up with that bathroom near the Chemistry lab? It has been “occupied” for nobody knows how long. Here is a theory: what if someone is just taking a really really really long poop? Perhaps they had too much orange chicken and doomed themselves to this inglorious battle, fighting it alone, without no one to support them in the time of need. Or maybe their enemy is of a different nature. Could it be that it was just another poop, not different from the rest, but they had opened TikTok and simply cannot stop scrolling. Without food, water, or rest, they have been instead consuming the never-ending supply of content, unable to interrupt this descent into hell. It’s time to break the door and set them free.
I’m sorry, Elizabeth, that you have to read this crappy blog. It’s the last block on the last Friday of the Quarter and I have 20 minutes to fill the blank excel column on your computer that says: “Bohdan Cherkai – Blog #n, missing.” Pardon me, Mr. Westcott, for not paying a blip of attention to whatever today’s Computer Science lesson is about – I have got to meet my deadlines. Taking APs, saying “Yes” to every single camping trip and trying to get your life together is like juggling people’s opinions of you. There will be a moment when you have to throw one of them out so that the rest can stay in the air, at least for another instant.
You are in the class. The all school has already taken 10 minutes off the clock; you are having a quick chat with your buddy; the teacher has to scan through their notes and wait for the class to quiet down. The majority of students is finally paying enough attention for the class to start. As your attention jumps from the lecture, to talking, to checking your email, half the period has lapsed. You know you can cut out some extra time using the Swiss Knife of your tricks, “May I use the bathroom, please?” you ask. When outside the classroom, you can kill some time on your phone, stare in the mirror for a little bit, and have a quick chat with a passerby. By the time you return, the class is almost over. You beg the teacher to let you get in the lunch-line early successfully shaving the final 5 minutes off the class.
This sort of chaos, present in almost every classroom, turns 55 minutes of alleged “studying” into, at best, 15 minutes of purposeful attention. It’s absurd how inefficient education is, and how much time is wasted.
From my experience, sacrificing quantity over quality is the most straightforward solution. Replace six 55-minutes classes with two that are triple their size. The increase in class length will account for the time necessary for the students to enter the flow state and stay in it for a meaningfully long period.
Focusing on one task for an extended amount of time is more efficient than jumping between multiple ones without putting much attention or effort into any of them.
I told Alvarez I would shave my head if he lets me join Track. He told me to spare the world from seeing that.
So I didn’t shave my head, but will still be running for OVS.
Today is my first official practice and I can’t wait. I can’t wait to nearly puke my guts out after crossing the finish line. I can’t wait to wake up from a hellish cramp in the middle of the night. I can’t wait to not be able to sit down on a toilet.
But running can give me something that volleyball couldn’t. It has been too much standing and waiting. Now is time to run
The pain will suck, but that’s some real buddhist sh*t.
First things first, if you are hungry, have a snack – I don’t want any negative reviews on my blogs.
Ate something? Let’s get started.
Robert Sapolsky. Have you heard this name yet? If you haven’t, I promise you will in the near future. A quick YouTube search reveals he has aired at TED, Andrew Huberman, and Big Think. His most viral lecture posted on Stanford’s channel has attracted over 17 millions views. The source of this attention is Sapolsky’s stance on the Free Will. For him, humans have no true control over their decisions.
This time I don’t want to go into the philosophical weeds, but instead talk about – human ignorance.
Hopefully, the stars aligned in a way that gave rise to just the right hormone configuration that made you watch the video.
Years ago, when I stumbled upon the Extraneous factors in judicial decisions(commonly known as the Hungry Judge) study, I was blown by how faulty human nature is. The fact that one person’s hunger could result in another person’s life-long sentence was astonishing and angering to me.
I was once again blown by how faulty human nature is. This time, because of my own naiveness and either foolishness or bad intentions of the 1,939 scientists that cited the notorious study.
The article proposes that the study should be dismissed simply because of the absurdity of its findings.
To quote Lakens: “If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45. Or at the very least, our society would have organized itself around this incredibly strong effect of mental depletion.”
The study has received so much criticism that the second sentence on its Wikipedia page is about its possible flaws:
“The hungry judge effect is a finding that judges were more inclined to be lenient after a meal but more severe before the break. It has been suggested that this may be an artifact of the scheduling of cases, based on their likely outcome and duration.[1]“
And yet, 1,939 scientists including respectable Robert Sapolsky cited it. Whether they did it out of ignorance or in a desperate attempt to support their own studies is not entirely clear.
However, it is clear that common people like me, putting our faith to the rigor and objectivity of the scientists, need to be wary of how foolish even the most educated of us and them are.
OVS Journalism Blog 
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