Question

Something I thought of in my sleep (!) — maybe it’s nonsense, but I’ll put it in writing and see whether it’s worth sending to you.
What do you say:
The paradox occurs when we tell a story that comes from a rational universe and takes place in the real world.
The paradox happens in a completely rational classroom and clashes with our familiarity with a non-rational and short-sighted world… as follows:
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that only the teacher is not fully rational (in my opinion a completely rational class doesn’t exist either, but never mind).
The exam cannot take place on the Sabbath — our teacher understands that — but that is where it stops. In his great stupidity, he assumes that he can give the exam on Friday and still surprise his rational students.
And therefore the rational students know that the exam will not take place on the Sabbath, but on Friday — who knows, with such an idiotic teacher —
And that’s where it stops.
To the best of my guess, that is indeed how it happens in reality.
In a rational world, the teacher lied, and indeed there is no surprise exam: either there is no exam, or there is no surprise.
Now let us remove our glasses, the ones through which we see a foolish world in which “non-surprising surprise exams that still somehow surprise” occur, and examine the story from a purely rational perspective:
A teacher and students learned about the paradox, and then the teacher “surprised” them by announcing a surprise exam to be given sometime in the coming week. In this case, everyone is rational. If so, the clever students should say the following: the teacher is now “not rational, and not by accident” — he is lying. Either there will be no exam, or if there is one, it will not be a surprise. The students, who care about their grades, prepare for the worst — there will be an exam this week, just not as a surprise. They fervently hope that their lying, irrational teacher will, in his great mercy, give it on Sunday and spare them six more days of unnecessary preparation, but deep down they fear that he will exploit his momentary insanity and give the exam דווקא on the Sabbath (we have already removed the element of surprise anyway; this is equivalent to a teacher who gives exams every day of the week). So through his wicked manipulation of lazy students he achieved results equivalent to a genuine surprise exam, but there was no surprise here; the exam could be held on the Sabbath without surprising anyone; the teacher lied. And if one of our premises is that the teacher does not lie, then this is just a meta-language paradox.