The Chronicle of Higher Education
August 17th, 2015
It happens like clockwork each semester. Two weeks after a course begins, I brace myself for a wave of student complaints about the daily workload of questions, reading quizzes, and recurring tasks. I never cave to their demands, for I know just as surely that the flood of protests will begin to wither and, by the fourth week of the term, will have disappeared entirely.
The unrelenting work remains, so what’s changed? Nothing. Once people develop a habit they accept it as part of a regular routine. Not only do students stop griping, they appreciate the rhythmic structure that the continuing assignments afford.
What I’ve just described is the simple phenomenon of inertia. Inertia is what carried the New Horizons space probe three billion miles to Pluto. It’s also how mission scientists knew exactly where Pluto would be when the probe was launched a decade ago. I suspect Isaac Newton was describing human nature as well as physics when he observed that a body at rest remains at rest and a body in motion remains in motion. But even though Newton’s "first law" is basic, it’s not intuitively obvious. When we notice inertia it’s typically because we are fighting rather than following it. We know inertia is a powerful force, but that knowledge alone is not enough to overcome it — or benefit from it.