The Last Word: X+y =…28?
Whenever the classmates in our 10th grade math class would complain to the teacher about learning math formulas, Mr. Wiles always had the same response.
It was 1976, and he’d reply that someday, we’d be walking in a field and would need to know how long one side of a triangle-shaped fence was, if we knew the other two sides.
I guess that was fitting; when I was a kid, my family moved from northern Minnesota to rural north-central Arkansas, where fields and fences were aplenty. In fact, in an attempt to avoid the culture shock of the move, I took Mr. Wiles’ math class to avoid taking 10th grade agriculture with a bunch of redneck students, who, to my young mind, probably thought animal husbandry was a section in the society pages of the local newspaper.
So, Mr. Wiles talked of fence lengths and isosceles triangles, and we wondered if we would ever need to know the answer to “x+y.”
Forty-six years later, Mr. Wiles was right.
***
“You may begin,” said Brandon Lercher, a test coordinator with TLC Tutoring Co., a company that helps students prepare for college entrance.
Two teenagers and a 61-year-old began coloring in the bubbles with their No. 2 pencils in the pre-ACT test. The company hosts testing in various towns for students who are interested in taking the real ACT test. This session, a grueling four-hour exam that features questions for English, math, reading and science, was held in a small room in the Craighead County-Jonesboro Public Library on a dreary Saturday morning.
I wanted to see just how much I remembered from my high school days of yore. I was worried that, at my age, I was beginning to forget things. Sure, I could recall who won the 1972 World Series, but I noticed it was a tad more difficult to recall some people’s names. I needed to see how bad my memory actually was.
It was a Saturday, and while other guys my age were spraying their yards with fertilizers, drooling over tools and lawn mowers at the Home Depot or watching the PGA tournament on television, I decided to try and determine if I was educationally stupid.
I never tested that well. I don’t remember my ACT score, but I’m sure it wasn’t stellar. When I took entrance exams at what was then called Arkansas College (today, it’s known as Lyon), I bombed the English section and ended up in what our instructor referred to as his “Bonehead English” class.
Later, after somehow earning a master’s in communications, I took the GRE general test to enroll in a Ph.D. program at Texas Tech University. I bombed that test, too, but wrote an impassioned letter to university officials about how tests don’t prove the true grit of a person. And I bluffed my way into a graduate-assistant teaching position. Alas, the test was a true indicator, after all. Three months after being accepted, I dropped out of the program when my professor told me I wrote too “(expletive) journalistic” for him. I returned to Arkansas, took the teacher’s advice and worked at newspapers.
The four-part, pre-ACT test began with English. Simple enough. It consisted of reading passages and choosing the best edited version. I knocked out the 45 questions with seven minutes to spare.
But then came math. Sixty questions in 60 minutes. I looked for fence and angle questions. Instead, there were questions like this: In the standard (x,y) coordinate plane, what is the slope of the line through (-3,1) and (5,6)?
I felt my brain begin to flow out of my head.
And speaking of flow, I had my own math equation: If an old guy with a prostate the size of a grapefruit drank two 8-ounce bottles of water before testing, how long before he had to go to the bathroom?
A 16-year-old girl shook her head sadly after completing the math. “I never felt more stupid in my life,” she said.
“Just wait,” I told her. “That feeling becomes more frequent as you get older.”
The next test section on reading was a breeze. Testers read essays and then answered questions to determine comprehension. I scored a 34 out of a possible 36.
But then, science was the last section, and it was a doozy. I had a blinding headache and reached for my Tramadol, when I realized I had left the pain medication at home. I was going solo on this section. We had 35 minutes to answer 40 questions on seed germination studies, viscosity of fluids and the effects of multiple exposures of ultraviolet lights on polymer bottles.
When we were done, I wished the other kids good luck in their college careers, mumbled goodbyes and stumbled off home.
The test coordinator gave me the key to my test, and the following day, I scored my answers. I was worried the score would be so low that our Arkansas Money and Politics editor would no longer assign me stories, and my wife would admit me to a facility with padded walls.
Instead, bolstered by my reading test score, I ended up with a 28 on the pretest. Not bad for an old guy who can’t remember to tie his shoe.
I do think I could have scored higher, though, had there been questions about fence lengths.
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