3. Required page lengths are a prediction. Being told to write a “five-page paper” drove me crazy in college, and then I became a professor and discovered that my students didn’t really know what that meant any more than I did at their age. So let me decode it for you. An X-page paper doesn’t mean that the teacher personally desires to read X pages of your thoughts about mitosis or Kierkegaard or cognitive development, or even that they think that’s how much you have to write in order to learn. It’s less of a requirement than it is a prediction. When a teacher assigns a page length, it’s because they know that given your depth of knowledge about the topic, and the specific requirements of the paper (research write-up, critique, compare & contrast, personal response), that’s about how much you’re going to have to say that is worthwhile. Shorter, and you’re probably not engaging with the material deeply enough; longer, and you’re probably not writing tightly enough. Every now and then, if a student would get too wrapped around the axle about the page length thing, I would say to them, “Forget the page length. Just write the paper according to the rest of the instructions, and write as well as you can.” Invariably, they’d be within a page of the original length I’d specified.
So writes Miss Conduct in her advice for new students. Here’s another of her points:
6. Dare to fail. Okay, not to fail the entire class–that would be bad. But you know how teachers always say, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question?” They’re lying. But ask the stupid questions anyway. For one thing, you don’t yet know enough to even know what questions are stupid and which ones aren’t, so stop trying to second-guess yourself. For another, either half the class wants to ask the same question you just did, in which case you’re doing everyone a favor, or else the question you’ve asked has never occurred to anyone before, in which case–dang! I mean, that’s how knowledge happens. I know a lot of scientists, and do you know who scientists love and fear being interviewed by more than anyone else in the world? Not reporters. Not other scientists.
Little kids, that’s who. Because little kids don’t yet know the rules of what questions are out-of-bounds and which ones aren’t. They’re not afraid to ask the big questions, or the really little ones. Which makes them unpredictable and fun, because in answering their questions, the scientists have to re-engage their discipline in a whole new way.
Take chances, make a few mistakes. That’s how you learn. Of course, if your teacher is a nasty bully–and of course there are some–then keep your head down and your ego safe. But if the class is a good one, and the teacher really wants you to learn, there’s nothing that will make them happier than knowing you’ve got the guts to fall on your face once in a while in the headlong pursuit of wisdom. And they won’t penalize you for it.