250.10 Academic Grading Variables in Respect to Science Versus Humanities

250.101 Whether it was my thick eyeglasses and lack of other personable favors, or some other psychological factors, I often found myself to be the number-one antifavorite amongst my schoolteachers and pupils. When there were disturbances in the classroom, without looking up from his or her desk, the teacher would say, “One mark,”, or “Two marks,” or “Three marks for Fuller. ” Each mark was a fifteen-minute penalty period to be served after the school had been let out for the others. It was a sport amongst some of my classmates to arrange, through projectiles or other inventions, to have noises occur in my vicinity.

250.11 Where the teacher’s opinion of me was unfavorable, and that, in the humanities, wasin the endall that governed the marking of papers, I often found myself receiving lower grades for reasons irrelevant to the knowledge content of my worksuch as my handwriting. In science, and particularly in my mathematics, the answers were either right or wrong. Probably to prove to myself that I might not be as low-average as was indicated by the gradings I got in the humanities, I excelled in my scientific classes and consistently attained the top grades because all my answers were correct. Maybe this made me like mathematics. But my mathematics teachers in various years would say, “You seem to understand math so well, I’ll show you some more if you stay in later in the afternoon.” I entered Harvard with all As in mathematics, biology, and the sciences, having learned in school advanced mathematics, which at that time was usually taught only at the college level. Since math was so easy, and finding it optional rather than compulsory at Harvard, I took no more of its courses. I was not interested in getting grades but in learning in areas that I didn’t know anything about. For instance, in my freshman year, I took not only the compulsory English A, but Government, Musical Composition, Art Appreciation, German Literature, and Chemistry. However, I kept thinking all the time in mathematics and made progressive discoveries, ever enlarging my mathematical vistas. My elementary school work in advanced mathematics as well as in physics and biology, along with my sense of security in relating those fields, gave me great confidence that I was penetrating the unfamiliar while always employing the full gamut of rigorous formulation and treatment appropriate to testing the validity of intuitively glimpsed and tentatively assumed enlargement of the horizon of experientially demonstrable knowledge.

250.12 My spontaneous exploration of mathematics continued after I left Harvard. From 1915 to 1938that is, for more than twenty years after my days in collegeI assumed that what I had been discovering through the post college years, and was continuing to discover by myself, was well known to mathematicians and other scientists, and was only the well-known advanced knowledge to which I would have been exposed had I stayed at Harvard and majored in those subjects. Why I did not continue at Harvard is irrelevant to academics. A subsequent special course at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, and two years of private tutelage by some of America’s leading engineers of half a century ago completed my formally acknowledged “education.”