I’ve often heard of praise for teachers who work tirelessly to help that one student who is having trouble. The teacher puts in the hard work over a long stretch of time, and eventually reaps the rewards when the student finally catches on to the content being taught in class. This teacher is then lauded as a great person for investing all that time into a student who needed help.

I once had a mathematics teacher who would say something that bugged me: what we’re doing is easy. I am barely being hyperbolic when I say that this teacher would say this for every single concept we learned. Therefore, I couldn’t help but think that surely not everything could be this easy.

Despite people in the sciences are supposed to be rational, changing one’s mind on a topic is just as difficult (if not more difficult) as in non-scientific settings. Often, I’ll watch some sort of academic debate where the debaters will talk for over an hour on a topic, yet they still won’t listen to each other in a way that accomplishes the goal.

As a science student, I’ve taken many tests over the years. The staple of a science class is the tests that are spread out over a semester, so they are to be expected. Consequently, I’ve answered many questions on tests, and so I have a fair idea about which questions are actually good questions to ask on tests, and which ones seem like there is no point.