<p>I heard this story the other day and thought I'd share. Enjoy!</p>
<p>One day, in a college philosophy class, the students walked inside, only to see a single question on the blackboard: "What is courage?" What the students wrote in their essays would be worth 25% of their grade, so they had to do well. One student quickly scribbled something down, handed in the paper, and left the classroom. The other students stayed and wrote extremely long, philosophical essays describing what they thought the definition of courage is. Next week, many of the students came back to class, only to find out they earned C's and D's on their essays. But the one person who, seemingly ambivalent, quickly turned his essay in, got an A. The others crowed around him, demanding what he put down. He took out his paper and displayed what he wrote, as the others moaned in disbelief. His answer to the professor's question: "This is." :)</p>
<p>that reminds me of a story my AP Calc teacher told us last year, about a kid who responded "absolutely nothing" to the question, "what can you tell me about the graph of this function." hey, at least he was telling the truth!</p>
<p>There are many versions to this story. Supposedly, that question was once posed as a college application essay topic. One applicant wrote "Courage is writing a single-sentence college essay." and got in.</p>
<p>Huzzah. :p</p>
<p>btlesgirl, yesterday, in my MVC class, we were solving a problem in which the answer was zero. The teacher walked about the classroom, seeing which of us had gotten the answer correct. She came across a student who apparently had a blank page and had yet to get started on the problem. She asked, "_____, why have you got nothing?" The student responded, "Well, zero is nothing, isn't it?!"</p>
<p>There's another version of this: it was a philosophy class and the prompt was "Prove that the chair at the front of the room does not exist". The one student wrote "What chair?". :)</p>