Teachers deliver lasting memories

I recently found myself in a somewhat unusual position — I had to take a standardized test. For the last 20 years, I have been a teacher, and while I have taken a multitude of classes both online and in person over those 20 years, I haven’t had to take a standardized test in a long, long time.

However, since retirement is looming and I might end up in another state somewhere, I want to be prepared by making sure I can be certified to teach in other states. Despite several college degrees, a host of post-graduate classes and 20-plus years of teaching experience, just about every state requires a basic knowledge test for those seeking certification, so I signed up for a three-part test covering reading, writing and math.

The test is designed for recent college graduates just entering the teaching force, so I figured it had to be pretty basic. Just for laughs, I looked at the online sample math questions. Out of the five sample questions, I got four wrong. I started to hyperventilate. Forcing myself to be calm, I printed out the complete sample test to take home with me. The practice test sat on my coffee table for several days, inducing feelings of guilt as I studiously ignored it to focus on laundry, cooking — anything but that math test. I was plagued by feelings of inadequacy I hadn’t experienced since I was in college.

The looming math test made me wonder where my anxiety had come from. When I was young, I was very good at math and it was one of my favorite subjects. I took all advanced math classes through middle school and high school, sailing through algebra and geometry with good grades and near-perfect scores on the state exams at the end of each year. Trigonometry was the first class that gave me any difficulty at all, but Mr. Woodrick was a great teacher. A former Marine, he took his job very seriously and guided his class with a firm hand, although we knew genuine affection lay beneath his gruff exterior.

He was my teacher 30 years ago, but I remember clearly the day he told us, “If you can’t finesse the problem, just beat it to death.” I took his words to heart and solved many problems in his class through the blunt-force method of mathematics. I finished trigonometry with yet another good state exam score and moved on to calculus my senior year.

Mrs. Givler could not have been more different from Mr. Woodrick. A tiny woman, she had clear, gray-blue eyes, a dazzling smile and a great sense of humor. When we all got our first tests back, a roomful of straight-A, type-A academic high school students sat in stunned silence as we realized that the highest grade on the test (earned by a student who went on to be a Westinghouse scholar later that year) was a 39 percent.

But Mrs. Givler taught us to lighten up, relax, breathe deeply and solve the problems methodically. Every so often a miracle occurred: the clouds parted, the sun shone, the angels sang and I could see the answer to a problem. Most of the time, though, I remained mired in fog, struggling along and beating my problems to death. I was proud when I finished the class with a B on the state exam. When my freshman year of college came with a calculus requirement, I wasn’t happy about it, but I survived thanks to the help of yet another good teacher and Sharon, my study buddy.

Recalling those experiences helped me tackle the sample test. I breathed deeply and worked my way through the problems, although on the first pass I barely eked out a 70 percent, which I didn’t think would be good enough for my purposes. Diligently, I looked at the problems I had gotten wrong, trying to weed out which ones were stupid mistakes and which ones required more knowledge or a review of a process.

I was incredibly nervous the day I took the test, but I remembered to lighten up and breathe deeply. I took my time, and I confess, almost every problem I beat to death, and then I beat it to death again just to be sure my answer was correct. It wasn’t pretty, but I more than exceeded the minimum score needed.

My encounter with standardized testing made me think again about what our students experience several times each year as we work to assess their knowledge and growth. Efforts to reform education have included more testing and more attempts to improve education for our students. Some of those efforts are directed at increasing the number of online classes students can take. I have both taken and taught online classes, and I’m sure I will continue to do so as my work in education continues. I believe that online classes have their place, but I can also say with certainty that 30 years from now, no student will find him- or herself in a challenging place and recall anything they learned from a computer to help get them through it.

Prudence Plunkett has been reading and recommending books to Valley students for more than 20 years.