Thoughts of a crammer.

The SATs are coming up in May, and I'd better score well on them, if I want to have any chance whatsoever of being accepted at NYU. I've started practicing everyday after school, but I can tell that it's all going to be grueling anyhow. What's more is that three days after I take the big SAT, I have a three hour AP test for my statistics class. If I score well on that, I can gain credits for college. Needless to say, I'm a wee bit stressed.

To top it all off, this week, the state of Pennsylvania is forcing all eleventh graders to take the PSSA's (Pennsylvania State Standardized Assessment) to see if we meet the requirements for the level of intelligence a junior should be at. In reading and writing, I usually hit way above average. The same used to be for math (the test is administered to 3rd, 5th, 8th, and 11th grade), but after today, I'm not so certain. I remembered learning about the mathematical procedures that I was being asked to perform but couldn't, for the life of me, remember how to figure them out.

The funny thing about being deemed a "smart kid" at a very young age is that it sometimes has negative effects, rather than the predicted positive ones. When I was twelve, the school decided that I was advanced in math and placed me at an eighth grade level, even though I was only in sixth grade. This state of advancement continued through to high school, and now, as a junior, I'm taking precalculus, a senior math class that half the seniors don't even bother taking themselves. This has caused some unexpected problems, in actuality. On the PSSA's today, most of the material was on subjects from Algebra I and Algebra II. If you follow the regular sequence of math classes, then you had these two courses in tenth and eleventh grade respectively. But if you're "special" like I supposedly am, then you're whisked through the Algebra classes at a fast pace in eighth and ninth grade. The problem that is being posed here is that I don't remember a damn thing from math class in eighth and ninth grade.

This is what terrifies me about standardized tests and even the SATs. Here I am, going to school everyday to learn about sine and cosine, when in reality, I should be reviewing parabolas, exponential variables, and factoring polynomials. In short, you're called above average, taken through all sorts of math courses at top speed, and then given a state test on things you haven't done in years so that you can be deemed below average. What's the deal here? Being smart sounded awesome when I was twelve, but now that I'm facing the consequences, I'm not so sure that I want to be advanced. But the paradox there is that NYU only accepts kids in the top classes.

Well damn.