I try to avoid criticizing people when they are right. If they genuinely deserve criticism, I will not need to wait long for an occasion where they are wrong.
I did not criticize the protagonist. He acted entirely appropriately in his situation. Trying to derive digits of π (by using Archimedes’s method, say) would not have been an effective way to convince his teammates under those circumstances. In some cases, such as a timed exam, going with an accurately-memorized teacher-password is the best thing to do. [ETA: Furthermore, his and our frustration at his teammates was justified.]
But the fact remains that the story was one of conflicting teacher-passwords, not of deep knowledge vs. a teacher-password. Although the protagonist possessed deeper knowledge, and although he might have been able to reconstruct Archimedes’s method, he did not in fact use his deeper knowledge in the argument to make 3.1415 more probable than the first five digits of 22⁄7.
Again, I’m not saying that he should have had to do that. But it would have made for a better anti-teacher-password story.
I see what you mean. I think the confusion we’ve had on this thread is over the loaded term “teacher’s password”—yes, the question only asked for the password, but it would be less misleading to say that both the narrator and the schoolteachers had memorized the results, but the narrator did a better job of comprehending the reference material.
I did not criticize the protagonist. He acted entirely appropriately in his situation. Trying to derive digits of π (by using Archimedes’s method, say) would not have been an effective way to convince his teammates under those circumstances. In some cases, such as a timed exam, going with an accurately-memorized teacher-password is the best thing to do. [ETA: Furthermore, his and our frustration at his teammates was justified.]
But the fact remains that the story was one of conflicting teacher-passwords, not of deep knowledge vs. a teacher-password. Although the protagonist possessed deeper knowledge, and although he might have been able to reconstruct Archimedes’s method, he did not in fact use his deeper knowledge in the argument to make 3.1415 more probable than the first five digits of 22⁄7.
Again, I’m not saying that he should have had to do that. But it would have made for a better anti-teacher-password story.
I see what you mean. I think the confusion we’ve had on this thread is over the loaded term “teacher’s password”—yes, the question only asked for the password, but it would be less misleading to say that both the narrator and the schoolteachers had memorized the results, but the narrator did a better job of comprehending the reference material.