When Calvin is assigned to write an argument paper, he can't come up with a topic, so he turns to inventing to increase his intelligence. The resulting cerebral enhancement gives Calvin an idea but doesn't affect his self-sabotaging characteristics.
This arc includes examples of the following tropes:
- Comically Missing the Point: Calvin talks to Miss Wormwood about the project, claiming that he ran out of time. She answers that he had plenty of time but concedes that perhaps the subject was too complicated. Advising him to be more realistic and to budget his time better, she raises his grade from a "D-" to a "D". The lesson Calvin learns from this is that it's very helpful to sweet-talk the teacher.
- Girls Have Cooties: The more-intelligent Calvin is still a six-year-old boy and considers the question of girls' obnoxiousness even more complicated than a universal theory of everything.
- Informed Attribute: Calvin uses a device to enlarge his brain and increase his intelligence. While his vocabulary becomes somewhat more verbose, he never actually makes smarter decisions than normal, still believing girls are gross, forgetting what his homework even was, thinking that Rule of Cool is a viable basis for a scientific argument, wasting his dwindling homework time drawing pointless doodles, and deciding that walking around with a bedsheet wrapped around his head would "allay any suspicion" from his massively enlarged head. Hobbes even snarks that Calvin doesn't seem to know any more than him despite the massively increased brain.
- My Brain Is Big: Calvin's head swells when he invents a "thinking cap" to make himself smarter. It ends up shrinking back to normal a few hours later, to the detriment of his assignment.
- Name-Tron: Calvin invents a device called an Atomic Cerebral Enhance-O-Tron to enhance his brain when he needs to write an essay for school.
- Never My Fault: Calvin hasn't even started on his paper when his mother tells him it's bedtime. Rather than blaming his own lack of time management, he blames his mom for only giving him thirty extra minutes (half of which he spends griping). He claims that as a genius, people should hold him to different standards.
- Putting On My Thinking Cap: Calvin builds a literal thinking cap out of one of his ubiquitous cardboard boxes, some thread, and a colander. It resulted in his brain swelling in size, which (supposedly) increased his intellect greatly, although it didn't help him finish his homework at all.
- Revealing Cover Up: When he's called to dinner, Calvin makes a turban from his bedsheet to hide his swelled head. Hobbes snarks that he must not know whatever convinced Calvin's big brain that this was a good idea.
- Scavengers Are Scum: Calvin makes a report that addresses the carnivore-vs.-scavenger aspect of Tyrannosaurus rex while super-intelligent. While he intends at first to defend his theory by going into scientific detail ("to argue that tyrannosaurs were predators and not scavengers, we'll need to write a brief overview of carnosaur evolution. Then we'll delve into skeletal structure, skull design, arm strength, potential running speed, and environmental factors"), his brain shrinks, and his bedtime comes up, and he ends up going with Rule of Cool as his sole argument.Calvin: I say tyrannosaurs were predators, because it would be so bogus if they just ate things that were already dead. The end.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: When Calvin increases his intelligence, his vocabulary becomes even more complicated than usual as a side-effect.Hobbes: What happened to your head??Calvin: Evidently, an unanticipated physiological consequence of cerebral augmentation. My brain swelled.
- The Unreveal: Calvin claims that his enhanced brain has uncovered a unifying equation that covers all natural laws. However, when Hobbes asks what it is, Calvin just says such simple problems are too boring for him now.
