I had to proctor an exam tonight.

If you’re not familiar with the idea, proctors are those people who walk around while you’re taking a test, making sure you don’t cheat.

Proctors are BORED OUT OF THEIR MINDS.

Yes, I’m supposed to be looking out for students cheating, and as far as they know, that’s what I’m doing. But actually, there’s no way I could make it through a 75-minute (or longer) test without some of these handy sanity-saving activities:

• Testing every combination on the lock to the computer cabinet. Except the right one.
• Trying to flip an eraser around its long axis. I can’t do it. I know I can’t do it, and I know why I can’t do it. But somehow, it still passes for interesting…

• Wondering why there is a balloon hanging from the roof

  

• Measuring the dimensions of the room in steps

• Making weird hand gestures to confuse people who don’t quite remember the right hand rule
• Calculating whether that irritating hum could be at the room’s resonant frequency
• Pretending I’m a Pong ball

• For the devoted: the Percolation Game. Credit goes to a friend of mine (Jason, you know who you are). While moving only between adjacent students, or possibly diagonally (that’s easy mode), can you make an unbroken chain of students wearing college-branded clothing from the front to the back?

  

  At a place like Penn State it works surprisingly often....