… and sometimes it isn’t. And it’s funny how, so often, it’s the not complicated parts that people can’t seem to get right.

I’ve often thought this with respect to the laws of the Church, but especially confession. I mean, seriously. Going to confession isn’t that hard. I mean, yes, sometimes there’s a particularly embarrassing thing that you don’t want to confess, and you spend awhile debating just how much specificity is really required. But basically, at the end of the day, it’s pretty tough to shock a priest. He’s heard it all before. I think, most of the time, priests (the good ones, anyway) are less interested in how little or how much you have to confess, and more just pleased that you’re coming to confession. After all, the whole reason they’re in the confessional is to help people with their sins, so presumably they want people to come. And from your angle, it basically just takes those few minutes, after which you’ve got a load off your mind, and can worry that much less about getting hit by a bus on your way home from work and ending up in hell because you were too squeamish to go to confession!

So that’s one case of people ridiculously refusing to do something that’s relatively easy, and obviously good for them. I was realizing today, though, that this is in no way an unusual or unique phenomenon. People are foolish about all kinds of things in life.

Take my students. In the end-of-semester crunch, I’ve been grading a lot of papers lately. This latest batch is, frankly, one of the worst I’ve had. A large percentage of the students just did not understand the argument they were supposed to be explicating. Now, even if you understand the argument, that doesn’t give you an easy ‘A’ in a philosophy class. You also have to explain and explicate it with clarity and precision to earn the A, and that’s not a simple task. For some students, frankly, some variety of B is probably the best they’re going to manage, no matter how much effort they put in. But if you don’t even understand the argument, your chances of explaining it clearly are not good at all. Not at all.

The relevant information is not a mystery. I go over it in class, but I also hold extra office hours the week a paper is due, just to make sure everyone has a chance to see me if they so wish. If a student really can’t come to any of those, I make it clear that I’m willing to make individual appointments. In my office, I’m very happy to go over an argument again, to answer questions, or to listen to a student’s account of of the relevant argument and make corrections. It generally takes fifteen or twenty minutes at the most for a student to get everything straight, after which their chances of writing a good paper are, beyond a doubt, dramatically improved.

A very small minority of students take advantage of this opportunity.

Why is this? Are they embarrassed to admit to me that they didn’t understand? It’s not like I won’t realize it anyway once I read their paper. Or do they just not care very much about their grades? Some of them sure seem to care, once they see their dismal grades, and come back with sad stories about how they missed the relevant class due to illness, or they couldn’t make sense of the class notes, or they asked their roommate (who took philosophy last semester) to explain the text, and the roommate explained it poorly. All these stories would be much sadder if I weren’t always armed with this obvious reply: if you were confused, you could have just asked me. I was right there, just sitting in my office, waiting to answer questions, and almost nobody came.

For a teacher who really would like to be of service to her students, this can sometimes be quite frustrating. I like them, and I’d love to reward them for doing good work, but after a certain point they do have to take some steps to help themselves.

How often does Our Lord (perhaps through the office of the priest sitting in the confessional) sit waiting for us, just wanting to help, and we don’t bother to come? For all the time we spend stressing about big and complicated problems in life, perhaps we should be more careful about not messing up the uncomplicated ones.