Losing Sleep

{Prompt: What was your hardest test or paper? Did you ever pull an all-nighter?}

Pulling an all-nighter may be the quintessential American experience. We fail to keep up with the homework or the assigned reading, and we try to make up for it with a last-minute all-nighter. We cram as much knowledge into our brains as possible, hoping to regurgitate the facts on a test in the morning.

It’s a terrible plan.

By one or two in the morning, learning and memorization are hard to achieve, and motivation is hard to maintain. By dawn, taking a test of any kind, after little or no sleep, is an exercise in futility. You really will not perform at your best.

I learned that in high school, after two or three attempts, and by the time I got to college, I rarely tried to take exams after pulling an all-nighter.

That’s not to say that I didn’t stay up late. I often felt it best to review the information from the course before a big test, and for some difficult courses one could scarcely review the information without studying the material until well after midnight. But learning from experience, I found that I was much better off if I reviewed the material every few weeks, and polished it off with some last-minute memorization and review the night before.

Nevertheless, this is the story of the first (and the worst) all-nighter that I ever undertook. It’s also the reason I probably scratched the liberal arts off my list of potential college majors.

Daniels Junior High

I’m not sure of the exact month, but I think my first all-nighter was in the ‘78-’79 school year — my 9th grade, back in those formative years, when I was at Josephus Daniels Junior High.

For those of you who don’t know this, Josephus Daniels was the editor for the News & Observer newspaper, from just before the turn of the 20th century, until his death in 1948.

I thought that was pretty cool.

What I didn’t know then, is that Josephus Daniels was an openly active white segregationist. And he used The News & Observer to champion the cause of white supremacy. He helped facilitate “the Wilmington insurrection of 1898, in which white mobs overthrew the legitimately elected biracial government in Wilmington”. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_Daniels]

Look it up. This guy was totally racist.

Josephus Daniels

Today, Daniels Junior High is called Oberlin Magnet Middle School. Now it is named for the historically black community — Oberlin Village — that existed nearby, in the city of Raleigh.

Oberlin Village, by the way, was named for Oberlin College in Ohio, where James H. Harris, one of the prominent black community members in Raleigh, had gone to school. He helped establish the Oberlin Village community in 1866.

James H Harris

I didn’t know any of this when I went to Daniels, way back in the ‘70s.

Shakespeare’s Contemporaries

Among my 9th grade classes, I was taking a Social Studies class, taught by Mrs. Barbara Broadwell. Early in the year, she had us set up our chairs in one big circle as a way to encourage participation and discussion… I think.

We discussed books that we liked to read, and then we discussed books we were assigned to read. Back then, we were reading things like Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler; Animal Farm, by George Orwell; Lord of the Flies, by William Golding; A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle; and Watership Down, by Richard Adams. You know… basically, all of the dystopian classics.

As another part of this class, we were expected to complete an independent project by the end of the semester. It was either a project focused on history or literature. I can’t remember which.

There were checkpoints along the way. We were supposed to self-report the progress we were making on our project, to keep us on a realistic pathway towards completion.

I must have decided on the topic of my project, but any other progress reported was purely fictional. The topic was “Shakespeare’s Contemporaries”, and essentially no progress at all was made on the project during the semester.

Well… maybe there was some “conceptual” progress. My project was about the notable people that lived in the Elizabethan Era. That was a start.

My Title Page.

And I had a couple of lovely quotes related to the role of individuals within society. I was going to bookend my report with quotations by Shakespeare at the beginning, and by John Donne at the end.

The first was from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” (Act II, Scene 7):

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players,

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts.

The second was from John Donne’s “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions”:

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe…

every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;

if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse,

as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine own were;

any man’s death deminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde;

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

Good stuff, right?

Well, somehow I managed to go the entire second semester of Mrs. Broadwell’s social studies class, not doing a lick of additional work on the topic until the night before the assignment was due.

I was up all night.

Not, just past midnight.

Not, ‘til two or three in the morning.

All. Night.

I was compiling a list of notable achievements by “Rulers, Statesmen, Writers, Playwrights, Poets, Explorers, Navigators, Popes, Painters, Sculptors, Composers, Scientists, Astronomers, and Mathematicians,” as I described them in my subtitle. Even the list of notable figures is exhausting.

Subtitle of my project, in my cursive handwriting.

In reality, I was paraphrasing and flourishing the language of the World Book Encyclopedia, in one long summary of “Shakespeare’s Contemporaries”, broken down by occupation. I was pretty much writing—paraphrasing— from start to finish, with no revision or editing of my stream of consciousness.

The entire report came to a plump 39 pages. Five pages were necessary to create an “Appendix” — an index of every person included in the report — in alphabetical order. Pretty much anyone who lived between 1533 and 1603 — the lifetime of Queen Elizabeth I — was included.

A very early Appendix.

It’s actually pretty good for a twelve hour, uninterrupted, first draft. It’s also a fine example of my single-spaced, cursive, ink penmanship.

But as an academic report, it is sorely lacking.

I was not very happy with the result. As other students were showing off real projects on poster board or in finely bound presentation folders, I was trying to act as if I hadn’t just stayed up the entire night, hastily stapling together my handwritten manuscript, and passing it off as a worthwhile piece of research. I don’t think there was a shred of analytical or critical thought in the whole thing.

Possibly the only original thought in the whole project.

I thought for many years afterwards, that I had gotten a C or a D on the project, but I pulled it out of a box of old papers not long ago, and discovered my grade was a B minus. Not a good result by my standards (but not as awful either, as I imagined). The “minus”, in particular, was a gut punch.

And Mrs. Broadwell even wrote a note — rarely a good sign. She said, “Steve, you have undertaken far too much for one paper. Your topic is too broad.” She underlined “too” four times.

A humbling teacher comment.

Other Notable Papers

I tried to stay away from literary papers and projects, after that day. I’m never happy if the assignment includes a bibliography.

But it was hard to avoid writing papers in college, particularly when I went on a nine-month student exchange and took electives like “Multiculturalism in Australian History.”

And it was hard to avoid writing papers when I went to UNC School of Public Health and studied Maternal and Child Health (instead of Epidemiology). People in Public Health just love to write papers, and they love to work in groups. I think it has something to do with grant applications and making programs operational. Just kidding.

Worst of all, I had to write a master’s thesis to complete my master’s program. Originally, my thesis was a summary of the research that had been, so far, conducted on the vulnerability of children suffering the loss or death of a parent. I went to Tempe, Arizona, to study this topic with an expert in the subject. But, I found myself so at sea in the world of cognitive psychology, that I ended up with another rendition of Shakespeare’s Contemporaries — a compiled summary of the entire ocean of research on the subject. It was unsatisfactory. Definitely not “A” level material.

So I went to my UNC School of Public Health adviser. He suggested that I give it another try, starting from scratch. So I agreed to start over, but first I had to complete my medical school degree. I finished my MD in December 1991, and then I had 6 whole months to finish my MPH master’s paper before residency began. With nothing else to work on, I managed to put together a respectable paper on “The Role of Biometric Data in the Emergency Room,” or some such nonsense.

Standardized Testing - The alternative to a well-constructed thesis.

I was always much better at doing math, and memorizing things.

I excelled at the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). I got 1260 on my first attempt.

I had no trouble in the chemistry, zoology, genetics, and ecology courses at NC State.

I scored double digits in all six portions of the Medical College Aptitude Test (MCAT), — better than even I expected.

It got harder in medical school, but I could still learn pathology, physiology, anatomy, and microbiology with relative ease.

The hardest tests I ever took were the Medical Boards, required after completion of my medical degree at Duke University, and the Family Medicine Boards required by the American Board of Family Practice at the end of residency. (The former are required to practice as a general practitioner (GP) after 4 years of medical school. The latter are required to practice as a “Family Physician” after an additional 3 years of residency.)

Both of those tests were multiple choice, but their multiple choice questions were far from ordinary. They were “complex multiple choice”, and they were sadistic.

Often, there was a paragraph describing the clinical scenario. Then there were four statements, labeled “A”, “B”, “C”, and “D”. Now for the twist. To select the correct answer, you must choose which of the statements are true:

A and C,

B and D,

A, B, and C,

Only D,

or All of the Above

It’s practically impossible to get the answer unless you really know the answer.

And it covered just about all of the material that I had learned from clinical rotations — 12 rotations in medical school, and 18 rotations in residency — five years of accumulated knowledge.

The AAFP medical boards took all day: three and a half hours in the morning, and three and a half hours in the afternoon, broken down into testing sections, each lasting for 40 or 50 minutes at a time.

I didn’t pull an all-nighter trying to prepare. I had set aside a week before the test to review. But the test itself was almost as exhausting as an all-nighter. Thankfully, it was the last one.