The Necessary Vice

Mornings in Abu Dhabi were really beautiful. The morning dew would render windshields literally unusable without a strong wipe, the humidity would make little patches of condensation on the car windows where the air vents were directed, and late winter sunrises meant the sky would usually be a dull grey by the time I got to school.

As beautiful as the mornings were in Abu Dhabi, between 7.30am when most of us arrived at the Table Tennis area, and 7.55am when the first bell rang, we ignored and defiled the morning air by shamelessly copying homework.

I can positively say that I had personally never copied a letter of homework before I hit Grade 11. By the end of Grade 12, though, my class and I had homework-copying down to an art form.

By the end of Grade 12, homework copying was an every-morning occurrence. Over-burdened with largely needlessly advanced schoolwork, it was no longer the aberration and abomination it was during our earlier, more naive years when we took schoolwork seriously. It was stream-lined to a point where it didn't take much to pull off a successful copying session in the morning, and no matter what the assignment was, it never took more than 5 minutes. All you needed was a diligent student and willing friend.

"Hey, did you do the Physics homework?"
"Yeah, sure..."

Without having to ask further, the fellow would pull out his notebook, and like a swarm of flies descending upon a fetid slab of meat, we got about our business. The primary source material would usually be put in the centre of a table tennis table so that others could crowd around it in a semi-circle, their notebooks laid on the edge of the table. Hunched over and setting the supplier of the material on watch against one of the wandering "supervisors" set loose on us to weed out the copiers, we got about our business in the most professional manner such business could ever be attended to.

If a supervisor swooped in on us, and they did from time to time, the fellow who supplied us the homework and didn't have to be bent over an uncomfortable table under visual cover of other people's bags, would notify us.

"Hey, guys. Someone's coming."

Immediately, 7 or 8 guys, hunched over at the side of a table tennis table rise up and look around casually, one of them takes his copybook and walks off in a carefully plotted tangent that brings him back to the table in exactly eight steps, frowning deeply as if he were revising something, one of them flips pages and shifts his weight casually as if looking for a piece of information at the tip of his tongue he just can't find, another one with the skill of a master magician, tucks the source notebook under his own as he bites his pencil and ponders deeply over what may, in five more steps, be the Grand Unified Theory.

The problem, however, inevitably came down to sheer crunch of time. Time waited for no man, even if he was copying homework to avert the wrath of Mrs. Faysan, the terror of our school, the prime source of undoable homework, oppressive policies of weekend study sessions, and general unpleasantry. Choueifat, however, had tremendous selection pressures, and in the true spirit of Darwin, by the end of Grade 12, most of us could copy down 5 pages worth of arabic numerals, mathematical notation and greek letters in under 3 minutes. That's more than a page a minute.

Toward the end of Grade 12, with numerous external exams on the horizon that had little to do with the super-advanced rocket science we were doing in class, when the going got really rough and the crunch seemed inhuman, even the diligent smart kids stopped doing their homework. Rest assured, though, the homework was religiously allotted day after day, and we dispassionately brushed it aside night after night.

The following mornings were among the most memorable and fondly remembered copying sessions of my academic career.

We would place Shahed, a brilliantly intelligent young man on the far left end of the bench. He was the key, the only guy who could both solve to any appreciable extent the problems assigned in under 10 minutes, and have the sense of humor to not bother doing it at home. He began by drawing the diagram and writing out the basic equations with which to solve the problem.

To his right would be the rest of us. A would copy off Shahed, B would copy off A, C would copy off B, D would copy off C, and so on and so forth.

Copying homework is a lossy process. It's not as simple as one may think. Students and teachers in Choueifat underwent a sort of co-evolution, not dissimilar to the Darwinian concept of a physiological arms race between predator and prey. As students devised new ways of circumventing the outrageously oppressive system, teachers, likewise (namely Mrs. Faysan) developed keener skills on homing in on miscreants. Having an identical copy of a person's work risked detection under Mrs. Faysan's hawk-eyes.

As such, students used creativity to alter the work as they went along. A range of methods were employed: an extra equation here, scribble marks on the diagram at certain points showing we put our pen on a point several times while we were thinking hard the night before, rearranging the equations, not copying intermediate steps, using different variables and conventions.

After five guys of "skipping intermediate steps," little is left in the way of recognizable science by the end of it. By the time the information was transmitted to the poor sap sitting at the far end, the work was understandably unintelligible, a hodgepodge of greek letters, arabic numerals and mathematical notation.

We didn't mind, though. That hodgepodge was good hodgepodge, because we engineered it to look good; that was our job. The equations didn't have to work (the problems were usually impossibly difficult), they had to make the sell. In large part it wasn't dissimilar to cooking in a ship in the 15th century: it never mattered what was in the food, as long as it tasted good, and it's not like the crew had any taste left after 9 months of hard tack and gruel.