Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

We often create systems and then complain how persons act in our systems.

Many years ago, I attended college. I often heard professors complain,
You aren’t interested in learning, all you are only in search of the almighty grade!
I found that us students were guilty. We did worry about our grades. We, I led the way on this one, would ask the professors which pages of the textbook to study and which ones to skip because they wouldn’t be on the test.

I had good reasons:

• I had limited time
• Failure to achieve good-enough grades resulted in being dismissed from college

People were actually dismissed from college in those days (the 1970s). An academic standard was more important than tuition payments into the college. Funny how quaint that seems today, but that was in the day of the dinosaurs.

This confused me. The professors created the system whereby if your grades were low, you were out. Then the professors complained because we tried to keep our grades above the you-are-out threshold. If they didn’t want us to pursue the almighty grade, why did they make the grade almighty?

I have encountered many such situations since college.

• The persons in charge create a system of rules.
• The other persons in the system follow the rules.
• The persons in charge complain about the other persons’ behavior.

Oh well, such is our plight.