RUSSIAN DENVER / HORIZON 4 Benjamin Cook Lourie, Colorado By Ben Lourie This year during final exams at CU Boulder, something incredible happened: a whole day of finals was canceled. Compared with high school, snow days at the university are very rare. I never thought much about what would happen if a snow storm were to hit during finals, but I always assumed that even under the most extreme circumstances, finals would be rescheduled, but never canceled. And not only were some exams canceled, many students’ teachers gave everyone in the class A’s on the finals to ensure students who had been hoping to pull off a good grade on the final N02/<strong>831</strong> от 01.15.2016 e-mail: info@gorizont.com Simply the best Are Snow Days “Fair”? were not penalized. I am sure for the majority of students, however, finals were a burden rather than an opportunity to boost one’s grade in the last minute. I am sure that on that day, many students who doubt God’s existence were forced to reexamine this. A miracle that most college students only dream of had happened. Not all finals were canceled. The way finals work is that certain class times correspond with a certain set time during the week following the last week of classes to hold the final. Therefore, somebody may have two finals Monday, one on Tuesday, none on Wednesday, and two more on Thursday. Or as in my case, two on Wednesday and two on Thursday. The point is, it’s a toss-up based on chance. A pretty fair system, if you ask me. And for those who had finals on Tuesday, their exams miraculously vanished by executive decision of the university thanks to a snow storm no one saw coming. While many people benefited from the snow storm, I didn’t. But who was I to complain? It is not like it had any effect on me; it is not as though my circumstances were affected by the unbelievable luck of others. Not everyone would agree with me on this. One friend of mine and I were studying together that day, and he was not happy about the fact that none of his finals had been canceled. He and I were in the same boat, but while I was indifferent to what happened, he maintained that it was “not fair.” This friend of mine is extremely smart, and even an A- is a rare sight on his transcript. In short, he is the last person who needed to have his finals canceled, as one of the smartest students in all of his classes. Nonetheless it seemed unfair to him that others had won the lottery of higher education, yet he had won nothing. “It’s not like it affects you,” I told him. Instead of agreeing with me, he described a complex “what-if ” situation to demonstrate the injustice of the situation: “There are people who got away with not having to take really hard finals, and therefore, their grades will be higher than they would have been had they taken the final. And when employers are comparing me with those students, their grades will be artificially high. Some of the classes that had their finals canceled were the hardest finals I took in college, and students in the same major as me won’t have to take them,” and so forth. While he may have been partially right, I couldn’t help but point out to him that he already has a job lined up after graduation that most other undergrads could only dream of having. The process of working hard to prepare for those tests makes him better suited to do whatever job he is applying for than those who got lucky, no matter what the transcript says, although for him, it is probably irrelevant because he got A’s anyways. Unfortunately, the mentality of our society is results are more important than the process. We are so focused on grades that we don’t care about actually learning. And so we cram for tests, write research papers in one night, pass, forget everything we learned, and repeat. But that is a discussion for another day… “If anything freshmen are actually going to be worse off,” I tried to point out, making a stretch of an argument, as he had done. “It’s their first semester in college, and they were saved from having to take some of their finals by the weather. Now there is a set precedent in their minds that maybe finals can be avoided.” What seemed to bother him the most was the flood on social media of pictures and videos of other people out partying. Their partying had no effect on him, and if he wanted, he could be out there with them. Some of these students may have been done with finals, maybe some of them should have been studying. I was only bothered by this because I knew it was students who were out partying when they could be studying that would be complaining that the final was too hard, or that because of the snow day they couldn’t study because the library was closed (but at least the liquor store was open). “I bet finals scores will be unusually low this year because campus is closed and people have no place to study,” he said to me as we sat studying in a restaurant. Somehow he didn’t see the irony. “I didn’t realize studying at home was some sort of impossible task,” I replied. Sure, I tend to get more done when I am not home, but I still think it was a pretty sad excuse… “What if someone doesn’t have access to the internet at home?” He responded. “Well, I have never met anyone who doesn’t have access to WiFi at home in Boulder, but if such a person exists, they could always do exactly what we are doing right now and go to somewhere with WiFi.” “What if they don’t have a car?” “Public transport? Walking?” For someone who is smart and a hard-worker, I was surprised by his ability to come up with what-if excuses for hypothetical situations that didn’t apply to him. Hunting for unfair circumstances is not specific to him alone, and almost everyone is guilty of comparing themselves with others and being upset about other people being better off than us to at some time or another. I can’t pretend I am not guilty of this from time to time myself. Nonetheless, nothing is sure to make you unhappy as fast as looking at other people’s good fortune with bitterness. Snow day or not, my friend’s life, as well as mine, would have been exactly the same. As if just the knowledge that someone out there was getting a better deal was enough to create a sense that the situation is unfair. Something tells me he and I wouldn’t have been having that conversation had one of his tests been cancelled. But wouldn’t the situation still have had all the same unfair qualities as before even if one of his tests had been cancelled? Of course, but typically we only care about this perceived unfairness when we are the ones getting the worse deal, or in reality, just someone else is getting a better deal. In fact, the problem isn’t being upset when an unfair situation makes us worse off, but being upset just because someone else is better off. For example, if you are sitting in economy class on a flight, and the passenger next to you is randomly upgraded to first class, you are no worse off. It would have been nice if you had been upgraded, but you are no worse off. Let’s say that you were moved to a worse seat on a flight based on race, however, this would clearly be unfair and worthy of outrage. To call the first situation unfair is actually wrong, because you are grouping it into the second category with an actual instance of unjust discrimination. The problem is that life will never be as “fair” as we want it to be. Lazy students may have gotten away with not studying for finals thanks to an unforeseeable storm. At the same time, a student who was counting on the final exam to raise his grade may have not gotten the chance to do so. Some things in life our beyond our control – like snow storms. What we do get to choose is how we react. Someone will always have it better than us if we insist on comparing ourselves to others, although the thing we tend to do less is to focus on how many people have it worse than us. The first step towards being happier is accepting life isn’t fair. I am not saying we should accept injustice when we can do something about it; in fact, we should do our best to make life as fair as possible and by taking care of those who are worse off than us. By accepting that no matter what life will never be perfectly fair and not looking enviously at those who seem to have a perceived advantage, we do ourselves a favor and can begin to look at how to make the best of our own circumstances. Despite maybe feeling like the situation was unfair, this friend of mine got back to studying and making good grades, which is probably why he has such a good job lined up. He may like to make up hypothetical excuses for hypothetical what-if situations, but at the end of the day, his grades speak louder than his minor complaints.
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