To a heavy smoker, every second they’re in an airplane or school is a cruel, punishing time that prevents them from getting what’s an essential part of their life. But to a non-smoker sitting right next to them, not smoking doesn’t mean anything.
When I didn’t get a good test score in high school it felt like my life was about to collapse. But my friends who didn’t live with their parents, they didn’t care at all about what scores they got. It’s the same score. While it’s catastrophic for me, it’s inconsequential to my peers.
This is something I saw a lot in India as well. Korean people slowly lost their mind over not being able to have Korean food. But Indians are fine with never eating Korean food. I’m sure if they’re in Korea they would have the opposite experience.
We think the experiences that we have actually have inherent imbued meanings behind them. But that’s not the case at all; it’s our mind that attributes meanings depending on how we contextualize the experience.
One popular way to recontextualize our difficult experiences is to reframe it so that we can see it in a positive light. Yes, your blood, sweat, and tears in the training room is really tough during the time of training but it is exactly what makes for a champion at the gold medal podium.
But why not go step a further and come to realize that there is nothing difficult in the first place?
At my high school there was an eccentric math teacher by the name of Mr. Calavitta who taught calculus. So it was Mr. Cal’s Cal class. I introduced him as eccentric but that’s a bit of an understatement because he is truly a unique character. I haven’t even taken a class with him but based on all the things I’ve heard about him and all the things I’ve seen from peeking into his classes waiting for my friends, he definitely ranks high in the most unique people I’ve met in my life.
So what’s the crazy thing about this Mr. Cal? Well, he has quite a decorated past as a wrestler. To have success in wrestling you need a particular kind of determination and drive; that’s what translated into his math classes. His class is full of explosive energy and everyone has to participate in his “antics”, so to speak. His intensity and passion extends outside of class, as in his home life he has NINE children.
If he was just a crazy teacher, then I wouldn’t be writing about him. In his first year of teaching calculus in our high school, EVERYBODY minus one person got a score of 5 (AP Calculus exam’s maximum score is 5); the one person got a 4. This is an exceptional feat for an entire math class, and this tradition has continued in our high school as his calculus class is repeatedly recognized as the best in the state.
His methodology, based on how I understand it, is simple: drill. Drill, drill, drill in various different forms. Sometimes the drills are individual quizzes. Sometimes the drills are the class splitting in half and doing speed quizzes; the winner gets to leave the class and the losing team continues until everybody wins.
This meant that a lot of kids had to stay behind after class was finished. This wasn’t warmly received by many of the students and parents especially because nobody had experienced this kind of education before. But by the middle of the semester everybody was drilling so hard, and since participation was mandatory there was literally no way out of the class outside of actually understanding math and retrieving the understanding near-instantly.
In the context of today’s topic, what ended up for all the students in Mr. Cal’s class is that there was no AP exam. There was no concept of a semester, there was no concept of a final exam, there was no concept of anything traditionally important to students; there was only drills. But over time even drills became a routine muscle memory, like using the chopsticks for example. We don’t think to ourselves we’re using utensils when we’re eating; we just think we’re eating.
So my question to you today: what if there is no stress, what if there is no suffering at all? Mr. Cal achieved “no stress, no exam” through repeated voluntary humanly possible challenges of drills. What can you implement to get to a state where suffering doesn’t exist at all?
