F2087-1 Ommatidia

He looked at his watch, and then he ran his fingers through his hair. “Are you done yet?” he asked.
“No, I’m not.”
“Jeeze! What the heck are you doing?” He stared at the windows on the opposite wall. They were near the ceiling, like windows in a prison. They were large enough to allow light to enter the room. But they were mounted too high to see out of the room. From time to time he could see clouds passing by.

Everyone else had left. He and I were the only two people still in the room. He sat slumping in his chair, with his feet on the desk, his body turned sideways, facing the windows. I sat drumming on my desk with a pencil. I turned the word over and over in my mind. I looked at my watch. I said nothing.

“You know this stuff,” he said, looking irritated. “Why are you still here?” He didn’t even bother to look at me. It was almost as if he were talking to the wall.
“I get three hours and I’m taking the three hours.” I said.
He put his hand on his forehead, exhaled a long, noisy breath, and rolled his head backwards. “Damn!”

His tests were long and complicated. Fifteen pages of multiple-choice questions, with true and false questions, or matching questions, or short-definition questions, or essay questions thrown in for good measure. It was impossible to guess with his tests: you either had to know the answers or you got them wrong. It was as simple as that. I had finished the exam, except for one short-definition question. I remembered reading the word in the text book. But I couldn’t remember what the word meant. I drummed on the desk and said the word, over and over, almost out loud, “Ommatidia. Ommatidia. Ommatidia.”

I had tried for almost two hours to remember what ommatidia meant. The worst students in the class had left after an hour and a quarter. And the best students were out of there in a mere forty-five minutes. I sat there with several minutes to go before the three-hour mark. I drummed on the desk with the pencil. To me, ommatidia had a rhythmic - almost musical - quality about it. The professor stared at the ceiling, softly whispering an endless litany of obscenities to himself. I had decided that no matter what I wrote for an answer, it would be wrong. So when the time had nearly expired, I wrote in the blank space, “Ommatidia is a Renaissance consort band, composed of glockenspiels, flugelhorns, and sackbuts.” I stood up and took my Invertebrate Zoology final examination to the professor’s desk. He looked at me, shook his head, and muttered, “Damn!”

It was some time during the Christmas break that I opened the textbook again to find out what ommatidia meant. An ommatidia was “the compound eye of a crustacean.” “Man!” I thought to myself. “How could I have forgotten that?”

When classes resumed in January, the professor entered the Vertebrate Zoology classroom walking on crutches. I asked him what happened to him.
“Ha! You son of a gun, you!” he said.
“What did I do?”
“It’s all your fault.”
“What do you mean, ‘It’s all your fault’? How could it be my fault. I haven’t even seen you in the last two weeks.”
“Well, I was at home upstairs in the loft correcting those final tests. My wife was downstairs in the kitchen. I had gone over all those tests, checking each answer. After a couple of hours I got pretty punchy. Then I came to your examination. I said, ‘He’s got that one right. And, yeah, he’s got that one right, too,’ as I checked your answers. Then I came to that definition question on ommatidia. I read your answer. It didn’t make any sense to me. I read it again, and it still didn’t make any sense. Finally, it dawned on me that you didn’t know the answer and just wrote down some nonsense instead. Well, I started laughing and couldn’t stop. My wife asked me what I was doing. And I said, ‘Hey, you’ve got to read this guy’s answer. This is great.’ She’s a high school biology teacher, so she would understand what the word ommatidia meant. I started down the stairs, still laughing. I was laughing so hard that I tripped and fell down the steps and broke my leg, thanks to you.”
“Hey, I’m sorry that happened to you,” I said.
“That’s okay,” he said, “it was a great answer. I gave you credit for it anyhow.”