"practical classes"

The most remarkably unsurprising thing about FIITJEE starting is that it was just as monotonous as it was when it was still going on. We still have the poorly instructed officials running around in total confusion, goggling at you like goldfish whenever you ask them where your classroom is, or other such elementary questions that people in their unflattering official capacity are expected to be able to answer. We still have the same, windowless classrooms that, coupled with the poor lighting, make headaches inevitable, and are likely to turn even the most scrupulous person into a Tylenol addict. The only changes they’ve made are doing away with the lunch break altogether so that classes would end at 12.45 PM, and introducing this new joke called “Practical Classes”.

Let’s dwell on this new concept of “Practical Classes” a little longer, because it’s a joke, and jokes are meant to amuse and be dwelt on. There were some misgivings when I was in Grade 11 about there being “Practical Classes” in the 12th; some nonsense about record books, and experiments, which would account for a meager portion of our final scores in the BIE’s final attempt to prove to the world (IInd Year Boards) that it isn’t the lame excuse for an educational organization that the whole world is convinced it is. There were rumors that the dumb instructors would actually give you a full score whether you did any of the experiments or not. All you have to do is copy the text from the Telugu Akademi (notice the spelling) Practical Guide or whatever into your record book, and tada ! A full score for you – even if you were not partially aware of what force, velocity, and electrical resistance are.

When the guy with the weird hair walked into our class today, and announced with little self-assuredness that we were going to have a practical class in that period, I was convinced that I would shortly be bearing witness to one of Nature’s most unfortunate accidents. Sure enough, when I entered the physics lab, the first thing I saw was the guy in the blue shirt who had been a proctor for tests several times. And if you thought the word “proctor” connoted anything respectable, you were wrong. Proctors come in all shapes, sizes, and social statuses – the most respectable one being, in the case of our school, the common street vendor. You would then naturally appreciate my incredulity upon witnessing this guy, this insult to everything humanity has ever stood for in the tumultuous years of its history, in the role of the physics instructor. Then it struck me: Oh, right – these were “Practical Classes”.

The class was very enlightening. I learned two significant things in it. The first, you don’t have to be good at anything to do well in physics “Practical Classes”, because the guy in the blue shirt (his name is Damodar, if you can believe it) has the authority to give you a full score, even if you’ve done nothing; the second, they only made him the physics instructor because these were “Practical Classes”. You don’t need much intelligence to read the experiments out of the Telugu Akademi (notice the spelling?) Practical Guide, and copy the diagrams onto the board. Incidentally the experiments themselves are irrationally dumb, and without the relevant backstories, totally meaningless. For example, apparently this is Newton’s First Law: “P + Q = R + S + W”. Damodar didn’t tell us what P, Q, R, S, and W were. He probably didn’t know. The guys who wrote the Telugu Akademi (notice the spelling?) Practical Guide probably didn’t know, either.

So here’s a suggestion to anyone who finds himself in the unfortunate position of being obliged to attend these meaningless “Practical Classes” over the next few months: Don’t think. You obviously don’t need to. You’d only be wasting your brain cells trying to find reason in anything written in the Telugu Akademi (notice the spelling?) Practical Guide. Stop thinking before you go insane. I know you’d probably never come across something as illogical as this before, and your brain won’t rest until it manages to turn incoherence into coherence, but you have to stop trying! It’s potentially disastrous! “Practical Classes” – sheesh.