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stefanoaltieri · 8 years ago

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The SAT Is Not A Test, It's Trickery.

Right now my kid is undergoing the torture otherwise known across America as the SAT. He has been preparing for this day for quite some time now. By the look and heft of his The Official SAT Study Guide, it seems he has been preparing for the last eleven years. I picked a bookmarked page, random to me, right about midway through the College Board-issued behemoth, page 356 to be exact, and glanced at the cryptogram on the left column. I read through it and thought to myself, “this feels like trap of sorts. This is an intellectual contraption setup to promote failure. This...this is trickery!”

I vaguely remember some chapter in the story of my life when I was somehow reluctantly convinced to undergo such torture myself. There were some figureheads, some caricatures of authority, involved. Something about college, and a test, and scores, and being punctual, and timing. And oh, yes, something involving a pencil, a very specific pencil, a No. 2. It had to be sharpened, of course, and I was instructed to "bring a pair." Apparently that's all the ordeal required. The rest, for the most part, is vague. Very vague.

Bubbles. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. The letters A, B, C, and of course the ever-elusive D, which may as well have been a hostage in an All of the above or None of the above scenario or some variation of the sort. The details escape me now, as I am certain they did then, but I do remember, almost vividly, the clock. More specifically, the minute-hand racing past the hour-hand, on the white-faced something-ix clock stuck on the painted cinder block wall, just above the classroom door. The second-hand was red, and sometimes between glances from the test to the clock, I would catch it standing frozen still for a moment too long.

And oh, yes, there is one more thing. I was never on time for school back then. I usually, almost predictably, always "came way too late," as Dean Young would tell me during one of our many confrontations in the hallway discussing my impending suspension for my failure to appear at detentions assigned to me as disciplinary measures designed to curb my tardiness. Also, I was never prepared, constantly "borrowing" loose leaf paper and a pen from well prepared classmates. And, to a fault, I always left way too early. Some would consider that "cutting class" but I didn't, I simply didn't go to the last class of the day because it was directly after my lunch period, which was technically the period I would cut out of school. So, I argued, in my defense, I did not intentionally "cut" that last period class, whatever it was it was simply an unwitting casualty of bad scheduling, or, more correctly, a matter of conflicting timelines.

As I have learned, conflicting timelines is a recurring theme in life, generally, but more specifically so in mine. But for the sake of brevity I will say for that particular place and time, there was no specific, intentional, rationale or reason for my lateness other than I just either always woke up late or left home late, and I rarely made any attempts to make up for it. In my last trip through the wringer, during my senior year, this meant missing first period, almost entirely sometimes. I think it was either Algebra or English, but it may have been Gym, as I don't recall ever breaking a sweat in that school. I spent sixth and seventh period mixing and rolling dough at Pizza Boy in the Roosevelt Mall. Suffice it to say, my SAT score was greatly affected by such behavior, et al. Needless to mention, my academic career, in general, and perpetuity, suffered tragically. Fatally. Yes, that's Fatally, with a capital F.

What I don't remember is anything about workbooks or practice tests or study guides. But Me 2.0 is all up in that. As he very well should be, I mean this kid is an honor roll staple. They could literally use his name as a staple to hold up the Roll of Honor hanging on a hall wall at his school. Like clockwork, if there is an occasional B it is always flanked by a row of A's and often transformed into one by the next marking period. An impeccable attendance record worth boasting about. No tardiness. No absence. Spotless. To a fault. I once told him he could miss a day of school to tag along with me and pick up my new motorcycle in Ohio. I worded it in such a way that it would sound like a really cool thing to do, but used a tone that connoted such concepts as "responsibly" and "thoughtfully". I pitched him something along the lines of making a once in a lifetime, memorable experience of the thing, a one-day father & son road trip. An adventure that would involve bonding, trust, brotherhood and beef jerky; miles and miles of nine-over-the-limit on the clock and lots of cruise control; Rock and Roll - or oldies, depending on which generation you hail from; a case of water for hydration; and some big empty cups for to avoid pulling over during the longer stretches between rest stops. It would have been a party on four wheels, for sixteen hours straight. I even suggested he could snapshot highlight moments of the debacle and post it to his Instagram. I wish I had done something like that with my father as a kid. Now it was my chance to turn the tables on life's mis-dealt hand and break the chain of missed-opportunities. He could tweet about it. #OneDayRoadTrip. That's what the kids do. Right? YOLO. Right?

He turned me down. He did not want to miss school and have to catch up on his work and... Well, I don't remember the rest of it. I lost him after those first few words because of the confounded mess I became once the look in his eyes hypnotized me senseless. First went sound. Then darkness took over, summoning thoughts of despair and pending doom to any nonconformist-on-the-brink-of-turning-conservative. I was in a momentary state of dumbfounding shock, while the horror of it all echoed in my head with eerie notes something to the tune of "is my son a nerd?"

His instinctive reluctance to miss out on a legit, parent-sanctioned school absence for the sake of school-related malarkey made absolutely no sense to me, a dropout. None. Not then. Not still. Doubt it ever will. So, I ventured out on my own. I did it old-school. SOLO. Because that's how I roll. Apparently. But to make sure I didn't end up in a scene from Deliverance, I had the route all planned out, and set up my outdated Android to talk me through the plot twists now and then. As rubber wore down, I occasionally lifted my G3 out of the cup holder to check for signs of life and to make sure the car charger thing kept the battery juiced up in case I got stuck somewhere. It was a couple hours of high spirits until the WaWa coffee ran its course and the radio faded to static and I eventually got bored enough to try and picture-text a few location updates to my son, back at school. He would sneak me a very delayed thumbs up (👍) emoticon now and then during school hours, surely he waited until he was in the crowded hallways, inter-class. Then I remembered I shouldn't text and drive. So I kept it to rest stop texting only, mostly. I even tried miserably to capture a few snapshots of such roadside sights as deep valanced valleys nesting rural villages, and cool old rusted-through farmland robots planted like landmarks amidst the alternating chromatic values of green and freshly-plowed dirt. These, I thought, I would rub in his face when I produced them as evidence that he totally missed out. But I ended up with blurry, skewed shots of road signs, and eighteen wheelers, and dashboard. Lots of dashboard. Once, the ever-intrusive fingertip made a cameo, photobombing what would have otherwise been a postcard-esque shot of a tunnel entrance.

Epic.

Fail.

All in all, it ended up being a trip worth taking. For me. For the obvious reasons, the most logical of which was to haul back the coolest thing on two wheels worth taking such a trip for, which is the only logical reason to ever partake in such shenanigans, solo or accompanied. But admittedly, it wasn't something worth missing school for. Those sixteen hours felt like an eternity of dreadfulness at the time, eight of which mostly spent in pitch-black darkness, on the way back, with my bike in tow, strapped down in the hollow cargo cavity directly behind my seat. Eight hours of going eighty, with eight-hundred pounds of steel and rubber and gasoline held in place, just inches from my head, with the cheapest ratcheting straps I could find. It wasn't safe and it wasn't pleasurable. No place for a kid who's gonna use his brains in life. It was forebodingly dark and loud. Road noise, mostly, echoing through the uninsulated van like a rolling tin can, deadened only by only moments of fleeting redemption as I played hide and seek with the dropouts in radio frequency on which Alice Cooper, God bless his soul, hosted late-night radio. Sipping bad coffee to keep my eyes peeled enough to avoid plot twists involving six-pointers and eighty-miles-an-hour rental vans as I made my way through the peaks and valleys of western Pennsylvania.

But I digress. My kid. My boy. The fruit of my loins. The heir to all my fault-derived understanding of this world and most of my mistake-learned wisdom, is taking the SAT. Right about now, he is fully aware that he is being tested on his aptitude, whereas I felt, at his age, in a similar setting, or generally, that I was being tested on my attitude. I still do. But not him. He's every good thing I could never be if I tried. He was up for it. Prepared for it. He's got this. I know it, and more importantly, he knows it. He gladly sharpened three brand-new Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 pencils, before going bed last night, and told me, with nary a hint of playfulness, "Dad, this is the best pencil in the world."

I concur.

I hope that his No.2 fills in only the right dots. I hope it leaves a trail of lead* that maps out nothing but the right answers, marking only the correct solutions. I hope that whatever fate had in store for him today, it also involves a handful of educated guesses, with some lucky guesses mixed in for good measure, though I doubt he would need that many. I hope he ultimately pencils this in as nothing more than what it is, a minuscule experience in an ever-evolving wheelhouse of much, much greater experiences that a life well lived should undoubtedly grant him. I hope that whatever pattern, whatever master key is used to unscramble this cryptogram of grey bubbles, I hope it mirrors the pattern that his teachers taught my boy. And I hope that my boy decides to duplicate that pattern through the fullest extent his knowledge. I hope that the system utilized to review his choices can also connect the dots of his answers to his propensity for assessing the true value of knowledge. True value. True knowledge. The kind of knowledge necessary to pursue and carry out a fulfilling life.

I hope the appointed surveyor of errors scans both the marked and the unmarked choices and recognizes them only as the result of the invisible act of choosing choices chosen over choices not chosen, and not use the weight of consequence to suppress any choices he has yet to make or coerce anyone to make a choice about him, in the future, based on his choice of an answer today. I hope this examination of his scholarship can sift through his absorption of the mindless regurgitations of expanded sophomoric academics and screen his wondrous, now-limitless potential, ripening and maturing into a future which seems more and more so uncertain to a father like me and yet so promising for a son like him. I hope that whatever computer computes his standardized Scholastic Aptitude is also programmed with the intangible sensitivity necessary to gauge his ability to use his standardized scholastic intellect to enhance his common sense and his uncommon, not-so-standard sensibilities about and towards the world around him.

I hope the College Board can look at his test score, no matter what it may end up to be, and recognize its irrefutable meaninglessness against his all-in effort, his can-do attitude, his willingness to do and be more and better, and his relentless dedication to apply both his critical thinking and the stuff they teach at school to his advantage and to that of others, especially in situations where his natural instincts may prove futile.

I hope, for the sake of our future, 'cause that's what the children are, that these standardized tests, and their score, don't mean that much to them. And by them I mean the kids.

By the way, In the color of full disclosure, due to one of my innumerable battles with my arch-nemesis Time, I missed the greater bulk of my SAT. My final score was 900-something, which, as evidenced in my writing, is largely attributable to the luck fate had in store for me on that day.

Also, Dean Young was a friendly figure in a stern setting. Sometimes we ate together at the Burger King across the street. His treat. Always.

I never, ever mentioned his toupee. Not to him, not to anyone. Until now.

*is it graphite?

#SAT

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