In college, 10-15% of your grade is usually based on your homework. It’s not just about submitting your homework on time though – you also have to get the answers correct. With a week to complete your homework, why would you ever submit your homework without checking it with someone else? This is a great way for you to know if you understood the concept correctly, and you can both learn from each other’s mistakes if your answers don’t match and spark a whole discussion on the concept!
It’s surprising how little some people care about checking their homework or even work in general, and to this day, I still don’t understand why. Why would you not want to get full points on your homework? Why not put in a bit more effort to do things right? Maybe it’s because I have a tendency to end up with borderline grades, so I even have a spreadsheet calculating what I need to get that “A” and doing everything I can to get there because every point makes a difference. It may sound a bit crazy to some people, but luckily, I met someone who feels the same way about checking answers.
My statics homework is due today during our discussion session. This was the very first homework assignment for this class, and I had spent so much time working on it. I walked into the lecture hall and sat down a few rows from the front and a few seats from the aisle. That’s where I like to sit – somewhere not too close to the TA, not too far from the board, and somewhere I can blend right in so that even if the TA wants to call on me to answer a question, it’ll be too much of a hassle to describe who exactly he’s trying to call on that he’ll change his mind and call on someone else.
As I was waiting for discussion to start, a girl walks into the lecture hall and sits in the same row, taking the aisle seat. I don’t know her and she doesn’t know me, but she looks at me and we make eye contact.
“Do you want to check answers?” she asks, as she points to her homework.
I had actually already checked my answers with someone who doesn’t really care too much about homework, but I guess it doesn’t hurt to check again. We compared answers, turned it in, and we were done for the week – but this is only the beginning of our story. It turns out that we are both very serious when it comes to homework, and if our calculations have a difference of 0.01, we will check every step and redo all the math to figure out why. This is probably why we got along so well.
We became Facebook friends, then real friends. For the next few years, we checked answers for every assignment in every class, ventured out to Westwood where traffic lights are your enemy, bought movie tickets without knowing what the movie is about, and crossed the dangerous Wilshire Blvd for some Persian ice cream. The most intense adventure however, was when we had to rely on a handheld 2-way radio to communicate with our team on the other side of a varying terrain, which is a story for another day.
None of this would have happened if we had never checked answers.
It’s not easy finding someone who cares about something as much as you do, but when you do, you know that there will be a whole adventure ahead of you. Who would’ve thought that our great friendship was started by checking homework?