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The teacher was a great guy. Stern but dedicated to his craft. The kids in that class were intelligent but weren’t strong students and that’s just as important as being able to teach; which was his entire point. Teachers are responsible for teaching. They aren’t responsible for what you learn. That of course isn’t to say there’s no such thing as a bad teacher, I’ve had several; but not every teacher can be a pedagog. Kids have an obligation to be good students. It isn’t a daycare.
Just as in professions and throughout life, when you’re in the company of those who know more than you, you have an obligation to listen. In sports as a star athlete you have an obligation to be coachable and not a showboating, egotistical hothead. It generalizes throughout life. And by learning the distinction it’s opened a lot of doors I wouldn’t have otherwise wouldn’t have had the opportunity to pass through.
I'm pretty sure that if a coach told an athlete to do a whole bunch of things and at the end said "by the way, ignore all my instructions including this one", and it was not something like a hazing ritual or April Fools Day where having ridiculous instructions was the point, the coach would lose respect, and "the coach knows more than you so you have to listen" wouldn't matter.
In our case it represents a failure to follow instructions.
It is a jerk thing to do, though I seem to have vague memories of something similar happening in further education training course I did, so clearly it was one of those management-theory fads at the time.
But to steelman it, often during school exams (when I was going to secondary school) people would lose marks because they did not read the instructions carefully and just jumped in to answer the questions, so they missed things like "choose one problem from section A and two problems from section B" and instead just started doing the problems they found easiest.
Always read the instructions. This can save your life.
Oh, I had it done to me too.
That's where the reasonable assumptions thing comes in. If "choose one problem from section A and one from section B" was at the bottom of the entire test, and it wasn't a situation like the box to write the answers in also being at the bottom next to the instruction, it would be reasonable to not have read it.
Instructions which say to ignore the test above them are the exam equivalent of a poorly designed user interface. It is not the user's fault for being tricked by the bad user interface just because he didn't read the instructions which told him how to navigate the user interface.
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At any rate, I got the point; even if others didn’t.
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