I found myself in an honors (?) pre-calculus class populated with the super-accelerated freshmen who could be taking the AP calculus exam as juniors. I had no idea what was going on, and suspect I was the benefit of social promotion. Once I matriculated to college, I figured out how to meet graduation requirements without ever having to take another math class, which felt like success at the time.
But school math like geometry or...shudder...trigonometry? Forget it. This is why I did not hold out great hope for my retaking of an SAT math practice test. I put the over/under at 520, at least 150-180 points below my high school score.
I asked Stephen Weber, who is both the director of Educational Endeavors and someone I lived one block over from as a child and went to school with from pre-K through high school, to debrief me on the results.
We were learning times tables up to 10x10, and to test us, my teacher, Mrs. Goldman would play a game of \u201Cmultiplication war.\u201D Two students would face off at a time, with Mrs. Goldman turning over two cards, and the first student to shout out the answer if you multiplied them capturing the pair. The student with the most pairs at the end of the deck won the match.
I only had one true rival in the whole class. For the sake of her privacy, I won\u2019t name her here, but I still remember who she was. I\u2019m pretty sure that I won more matches than I lost, but I definitely also remember losing, because I can still feel what that was like even as I type.
Anyway, because I had memorized the times tables and was quick on the draw in number recognition, I was considered good at math. This continued through grade school \u2014 with the exception of dividing by fractions \u2014 and I entered middle school and high school on an accelerated track, heading towards AP calculus by senior year.
All that aside, I still did pretty well on the math section of the SAT (high 600s), probably because at the time, the math didn\u2019t get much beyond algebra (which I could mostly do). Now, in my work for a market research company, I use math all the time, though it doesn\u2019t often go beyond multiplication, division and percentages. Most of my current math-related work is more like \u201Creasoning with numbers,\u201D looking at data and drawing analytic conclusions. I like to think I\u2019m pretty good at it.
Stephen Weber: Clearly, some math atrophy has taken place over the last 30 years, but that is to be expected. You haven\u2019t thought about some of these skills since you left Glenbrook North High School in the late \u201880s and embarked on a career as a writer. You can still add, and you remember some of the basic rules of algebra and geometry, but anything that was maybe in the second semester of algebra 1 or anything in algebra II has faded away (systems of equations, slope/intercept, functions, simplifying radicals, etc.) Amazingly, you did get a problem involving a parabola correct, but I imagine that was a lucky guess.
One of the things I say in general about any assessment is that underneath the exam is a set of values. For example, as I argue in Why They Can\u2019t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, the five-paragraph essay found favor not because it\u2019s a useful tool for learning how to write, but because it lends itself to a standardized set of assessment criteria. The rationales for the use of the form \u2014 that it\u2019s training wheels for a more sophisticated essay \u2014 were created after the fact in order to cover over its true raison d'\u00EAtre.
SW: Honestly, John, I don\u2019t think about this stuff that deeply. As someone helping students prepare for these exams, that\u2019s not my job. My role is to get kids to maximize their potential on the exam so that they have as many options for college as possible. I don\u2019t know what the College Board is thinking about when they construct these tests. I guess they are trying to hit on as many ma
