A week-long class I experienced recently was fascinating, in part, because of the reactions of the pupils to the material being taught. We faced a jungle of apparently-arbitrary definitions to memorize and an sea of seemingly-unrelated concepts to puzzle out. Looming on the horizon was a tsunami of a final exam, rumored to be almost impossible to pass.

But I discovered an escape hatch: observation of my classmates. They moved, quite reliably, through the classic five stages defined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross:

• denial
• anger
• bargaining
• depression
• acceptance

Not all of them made it to the final phase, however ...

TopicHumor - TopicLearning - TopicPersonalHistory - 2004-12-18

(correlates: SixProjectStages, ClusteringAlgorithms, IllusionOfControl, ...)