Life at the SAT center

Life in the SAT center

Tonight one of my students responded to: "Do you think happiness is attainable ... (SAT mumbo-jumbo, blah-blah)?"

"Happiness is always out of reach. No matter how much we have, we always want more. For example, Hitler. He killed five million Jews, yet still he wasn't happy."*

* Please don't think he's anti-Semitic. He opens his mouth and it talks.

Life at the Buddhist temple.

Spent some time with the delightful Ani Aileen. The unassuming nun had created a database of awesome awesomeness, wrenching sense out of complexity, useability out of a pile of boxes containing years of Buddhist teachings on paper, audio tape, CDs, video tape, avi, and mp3s.

I stood back and admired, petting one of her well-fed cats. She beamed.

Essays at an SAT prep center.

Gandhi, when asked what he thought of western civilization, quipped, "I think it would be a good idea."

I've worked in an SAT prep center for the last 18 months. It's the antithesis of what I would call education. No one hates standardized testing more than me (I include my students in that). But I've enjoyed the teaching, and the kids.

Reading high school essays, I would say the doom of western civilization is at hand, if I didn't already agree with Gandhi.

I've found that many students can't produce an essay at all. Certainly not in the 25 minutes the SAT gives them.

Those who do know how to produce an essay often know just the five-paragraph form, and have no clue how to build an argument. They fill in the slots of the format with facts that vaguely relate to each other (one hopes), like a paint-by-numbers kit.

Those who can build an argument (and those who can't) seem to have forgotten that they've learned in a dozen years of schooling, and can't imagine any evidence to support their views. They stare blankly at a page and hope that generalizations and reasons will do.

Once they learn they must use specific evidence of some kind, the majority of those examples are a bit thin. Personal anecdotes, TV shows, video games ... they draw from the content of a teenager's life.

Godwin's law doesn't apply to SAT essays. If a teenager can use Hitler as an example, and get the general gist correct, they are well ahead of the game.

Not pointing fingers at any educational issue in particular here. Just an observation. There are hundreds of reasons for this (from No Child Left Behind to class sizes to "not everyone gets to go to a Waldorf school"). I deal with the problem, one kid at a time. I tutor students in high-level magnet programs, IB students with helicopter dragon moms, students with mild disabilities, football players who've ignored their classes since middle school, and all shades in between.

In other news, I have ants.