Comprehension (A)
I passed all the other courses that I took at my University, but I could never pass botany. This was because all botany students had to spend several hours a week in a laboratory looking through a microscope at plant cells, and I could never see through a microscope. I never once saw a cell through a microscope. This used to enrage my instructor. He would wander around the laboratory pleased with the progress all the students were making in drawing the involved and, so I am told, interesting structure of flower cells, until he came to me. I would be just standing there. "I can't see anything," I would say. He would begin patiently enough, explaining how anybody can see through a microscope, but he would always end up in a fury; claiming that I could too see through a microscope but just pretended I couldn't. "It takes away the beauty of flowers anyway," I used to tell him."We are not concerned with beauty in this course," he would say, "We are concerned solely with what I may call the mechanics of flowers." "Well," I would say, "I can't see anything." "Try it just once again," he'd say, and I would put my eye to the microscope and see nothing at all, except now and again a nebulous milky substance - a phenomenon of maladjustment. You were supposed to see vivid, restless clockwork of sharply defined plant cells. "I see what looks like a lot of milk." I would tell him. This, he claimed, was the result of not having adjusted the microscope properly, so he would readjust it for me, or rather, for himself. And I would look again and see milk.
Questions:
i. Write down the summary of the passage and suggest a suitable title.
ii. Interpret the expressions "a phenomenon of maladjustment" and "vivid, restless clockwork of sharply defined plant cells" in the context of the passage.
iii. Analyze the instructor's perspective on the importance of beauty in the study of botany, and the student's perspective on the same.
iv. What thematic idea is conveyed through the contrast between the instructor's expectations of what the student should see through the microscope and the student's actual experience?
v. Analyze the impact of the student's inability to see through the microscope on the dynamics of the student-instructor relationship.
vi. How can the challenges faced by the student in the passage be applied to a broader context, such as overcoming obstacles in learning or dealing with differing perspectives?
