Standardized Tests Have Nothing to Do With Life
A brother, a sister, an infamous exam, and the strange journeys we take.
My delightful sister Annie — the Queen of Seeing Through B.S. — posted this image on Facebook today:
Leaving aside what you may or may not like about this image itself, I want to use it as a starting point for a discussion.
What do standardized tests actually tell us?
Here’s what my sister — who is now 28 — says:
Dear 16 year old Annie, you suck at standardized tests. In 10 years no one will care, and your path in life will have nothing to do with your SAT score. Get graded now, and prove them wrong later.
Go Annie. (No but seriously, Go Annie. You are the best person in the entire world.)
Annie was always the social one. I was in my room with the books; she was in hers with the clothes, in front of the mirror. When I was twelve, I thought she was vapid and shallow. What I didn’t realize is that she was systematically hypothesizing, testing and analyzing what the Italians call la bella figura — the way she would present herself to the world. Her personal brand.
She was doing this when she was eight. Younger, even.
Meanwhile, there was me. I invented imaginary continents, drew imaginary maps of them, populated them with imaginary cities full of imaginary people, whose clothes and weapons I also drew; and with elaborate ecosystems of fictional creatures whose lifecycles I documented with all the loving detail of a field biologist.
Oh, did I mention this was where we lived?
Our house was twenty miles from the nearest significant town. It was just that; what you see above. In every direction. As far as you could see or walk. I used to have nightmares about running across those flat plains, forever, getting nowhere. Sometimes I still have those dreams.
We lived in a place called Wayside, Texas — except that there was no more Wayside, Texas. People abandoned the town back in the 1970s, leaving a dried-up ruin of concrete foundations and artifacts, on which our brand-new house sat:
It doesn’t look like much — and on the surface it really isn’t — but so many old things were buried under the dirt out there. I used to go out every day and dig for weird old rusty tools, or pieces of paper scrawled with notes, or nametags and other personal effects from the people of old Wayside.
Right, so we were homeschooled.
My sister and I. Every morning I’d wake up, microwave something for breakfast, and look over the index card that my mom had prepared with my assignments for the day: “Do math lesson 34. Do exercises 171 to 175 in English workbook. Read pp. 471–503 of history book.”
Twelve-year-old me would brew a nice cup of green tea and get down to business. Three or four hours later I’d be done, and I’d spend the rest of the afternoon designing my own roleplaying games, or digging up the archaeological ruins on our property, or trying to learn to code in C++.
Or watching music videos.
Annie, on the other hand. My sister. Let’s put the cards on the table: I thought she was dumb. All day she’d sit there with Mom, talking about her schoolwork. So slow. Actually physically asking questions, when it was so much easier and faster to ask a book or the Internet — not to mention that with books and the Internet, you had direct access to the accumulated knowledge of 5,000 years of human memory. When you talked to Mom, you had access to — well, Mom. Mom was the center of all love in the universe, of course; that went without saying; but Mom was not a professional-level database. I did not understand Annie.
And Annie got very stressed when she had to take an exam. This was another reason I thought Annie was dumb. To achieve a “100” on an exam, I knew, all one had to do was create simple mnemonics, memorize the necessary information, then select the right answers on the exam. Or if it was an essay exam, just write the author’s arguments back to him or her in a slightly altered way. Simple. Like baking cookies.
Annie would cry about her exams, and I’d go up to my room, crank up the Weezer or Chopin — yeah, I definitely went through a very heavy Chopin phase for a while, in rebellion against Mom’s insistence on blasting “Barbie Girl” by Aqua or “You Spin Me Right Round (Like a Record)” by Dead or Alive in the car with the top down every time we drove into town. It was humiliating, so I made Mom buy me a Chopin box set, which I proudly displayed to guests whenever they came up to see my gallery of clay sculptures of alien beings.
But then Annie was listening to — who knew? Pop? Broadway? I took to calling it “The Damnéd Music” when I had to slam my door because the beat was too loud for me to read H.P. Lovecraft in peace. I was certain nothing of value was transpiring in that pink bookless wasteland of hers. She had so many stuffed animals they couldn’t fit on the bed. Now, everyone knows that when a kid arrays her stuffed animals on her bed and conducts a parliament with them, this is more than just play. This is the development of an important technology: the ability to infuse inanimate objects with aspects of one’s own consciousness, then interact with them to talk out a problem, wage battle among conflicting thought processes, or just shoot the shit with oneself. This process requires physical objects to which the consciousness-aspects can be assigned — it can’t be achieved within one’s own mind. Thus: stuffed animals, dolls, action figures, fetishes, graven images and idols — all essential tools for a person trying to work something out. Clothes can work that way too; the trying-on of different personas. But I just didn’t see it that way.
One time, on vacation, we were all in the car — Mom, Dad, Annie and me. Annie was trying to sing a little song, but I was imagining a great battle in my head. I started making laser sounds. She tried to sing. I made laser sounds louder. I could see I was getting a reaction, so I ptchoo-ptchoo-ptchoo-ed with all the power in my twelve-year-old lungs. Annie started crying.
I stopped making laser sounds. I was satisfied.
At some point in all this, Annie and I both took our standardized tests. In America they call ’em the SATs, but they’re basically the same everywhere: Battalions of tiny ovals on white pages, questions about “If A is to B as B is to C, then what is the relationship of C to A?” and “Would you say this passage is more perspicacious or percipient?” and “If George the intern deposits $3,750 in his account, and that’s 25 percent of his intern salary, then how much is his monthly pay?”
Monsters, is what they are.
Every kid fears them. Except for me, for some reason. I asked Mom if I could take them early. She said sure, why not. I took the SAT — which you take when you graduate high school — at age twelve, and scored high enough to get into a university right then. I asked Mom if that meant I could skip the rest of school and go straight to a university. She said no, you are not going to a university at age twelve. I was too angry to see the wisdom there.
Annie put her SAT off as long as she could.
She did not enjoy the exam, nor was she especially proud of her scores. But she scored well enough to get into a respectable university, where she studied brand communications and marketing and social dynamics and all the stuff she always played at up in her room in front of that mirror. She went to Manhattan to be an actress for a while, got a lot of roles but wasn’t into it, came back to Texas, bounced from one job to another, fell in love, bought a house, adopted a diverse cast of dogs, and found her way to a laid-back desk job where she feels at home.
As for me, I lost patience at age sixteen, and typed up a five-page proposal in which I detailed the reasons I should be allowed to skip the rest of high school and go to a university. I presented binders containing this proposal to my parents, who caved. I was the only sixteen-year-old freshman at Texas Tech University. The university paper did a feature about me. I studied Latin, and spent most of my time in the university’s five-story library, which was my favorite place in the world. Girls did not talk to me. I had no idea how to talk to girls. I had very little idea that other boys were talking to girls. One time some people in my Latin class were talking about throwing a barbecue on the weekend. I asked if I could come. They said no. I asked why they didn’t like me.
“It’s not that we don’t like you,” they said. “You’re just really young. It’s weird.”
I didn’t really have any friends. Sometimes people let me hang out with them. Mostly I hung out in the library. Or in my room at my parents’ house, after the twenty-mile drive home.
When I was seventeen, I talked my parents into letting me drop out of the Classics program at Texas Tech, and go study film in Los Angeles. I finished that program in three years, and there I was, a twenty-year-old in Los Angeles with a degree in film, a ready talent for conjugating Latin verbs, and — in my estimation — a not-too-shabby idea of how to interface with other human beings.
Mostly what I did was work as a courier, and a receptionist, and a mailroom guy, and a checkout guy, and a mailroom guy again, and a government-check-collector for a few months when medical marijuana had just become legal and holy cow did I get good at Starcraft.
Plenty of other stuff was mixed in there too, of course — girlfriends and ex-girlfriends and social groups that collided and fractured, and a whole parade of anonymous 1960s stucco apartments, and businesses launched and crashed and burned, and angry clients, and threatened lawsuits, and bouts of intense suicidal depression, and the abuse of a fairly standard litany of substances, and plunges into existential vortices, and long drives up the coast with the windows down wondering which is going to crap out first, this coughing engine or my will to keep picking myself back up and throwing myself into yet another Cool New Thing.
Somewhere in there, though, a realization was forming: What the people with money actually want is skills— like, oh my god it’s all about the actual practical ability to do useful things for other human beings.
And as for the ability to pencil in little ovals on a sheet of cardstock that correspond to accurately constructed metaphors and vocabulary definitions — I think that must be the skill that guarantees you a place filling out similar little cards behind a desk in a little red building; where, if you’re lucky, some kid might dig those cards up from under the West Texas dirt someday, and squint at the markings on them under the summer sun, and wonder just what in the hell those little slips of paper were for.
For more on growing up smart, check out my article,
My Historical Novel Is Coming Soon!
Check out some excerpts right here:
