The worst of the ’80s and the worst of school come together

Aaryn Belfer

One of the reasons I stay away from Facebook is that it forced me to think too often about high school and, well, I left it and my mortarboard way back there in 1988 for a reason. I don’t like to spend much time thinking about high school. In fact, foreclosing on brain space still occupied by East High and its stupid Leopards would be on my bucket list if I bothered to have one. Also on that list: Kiss a stranger in a ticker-tape parade. But I digress.

Despite my best efforts to block and deny, there are triggers, like when I happen to hear Dexys Midnight Runners or see neon making a sartorial comeback or accidentally smell a guy doused in Drakkar Noir. (Note to self: Remember to only breathe out when passing the 24 Hour Fitness at the Mission Valley Mall.) Any one of these and I’m shivering on the corner of 13th East and 9th South smoking clove cigarettes and angst on a gray January morning. I’m wearing blackened eyes, a mustard-colored v-neck sweater—backward—and acid-washed denim overalls with one strap unbuckled. It was a travesty then, and it is now.

I recently found myself suffering another memory I thought I’d cremated, brought on by an overwhelmingly effective trigger in the form of a multiple-choice question posed by one Gary Rubinstein on his blog. Here, do like I did, and get out a pencil and a lime-green sticky note (neon is OK for sticky notes):

A box contains 6 red pens and 4 blue pens. Cory randomly picks a pen from the box and keeps it. Then Todd randomly picks a pen from the box. What is the probability both boys will pick red pens?

A. 1/3
B. 9/25
C. 1/30
D. 1/36

While trying to work out the problem—which I was certain I could do—I was no longer a [cough] 41-year-old woman in her home office doing a brain teaser while sipping bourbon. Instead, I was a scowling 16-year-old girl sitting at a long cafeteria table with an elbow perched on the ammonia-greased surface, hand to head in utter frustration. My other hand held a No. 2 pencil and was making angry, dark circles on a Scantron sheet. Mrs. Allen and Mr. Trujillo and several other teachers I did not know were pacing baaaack and foooorth in row after row, unable to answer even the simplest of questions.

“Just do your best,” was their only permitted reply to any raised hand.

And there amid my fellow students seated in every other chair, under buzzing fluorescent lights and the ticking of multiple wall clocks, engulfed in the lingering humid scent of that day’s lunch offering—an unidentifiable meat-ish substance probably with some canned corn tossed in, I can’t be sure—I sweated and stressed and had a physiological response that might be associated with the swine flu. Or lupus. Or pancreatic cancer.

I thought I might die if I didn’t get the right answers. But not immediately. First I’d be deemed worthless by colleges. Then I’d become a bag lady and live under a viaduct for many uncomfortable, frost-bitten years. Then, after losing my fingerless gloves or all my teeth, I would die, a standardized-test-failing loser.

This loser-y sort of feeling was not at all how I felt when I easily calculated that Cory has six-tenths (I reduced to three-fifths) of a chance of drawing a red pen, and Todd has five-ninths of a chance of drawing a red pen. However, this loser-y feeling was a ruthless tsunami, my body but a helpless little town off the northeast coast of Japan, when I couldn’t get from there to the final answer.

I’m a confident, capable adult. I have a college degree and a job and a family. I can’t balance a check book, but I once got an A in calculus, which goes to show how intrinsically valuable both grades and advanced math are to everyday life. And I’m just going to say right here that I put those nattering college girls with sorority symbols stretched in too-tight T-shirts across fake boobs to utter shame in a spin class. PE and sports are not inconsequential.

I am powerful, I am smart and, doggone it, people like me (except you, you know who you are, and the feeling is mutual). Yet, the problems on a standardized test for seventh graders spin me right round baby, right round like a record, baby. And upside down. And, like the ’80s, they generally make me want to vomit.

So, yeah, that problem was from the 2010 math assessment for seventh-grade New Yorkers. Which is funny-disturbing, not funny-ha-ha, because, according to Rubinstein, the question involves a topic called conditional probability that is usually covered by advanced 10th graders. It involves determining “the probability of two things happening by multiplying the probability of the first thing happening by the probability of the second thing happening once the first thing already happened.”

Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Unless you’re 12. And then maybe it drives you to hate math and school and yourself.

Anyway, I got the correct answer given the definition, which I probably learned at one time and retained long enough to squeak by on a test. But since then—whoosh!—bye-bye useless information. You and high school are moving out. I need room in my brain to imagine that ticker-tape parade I plan to experience.

Email Aaryn Belfer. Aaryn blogs at aarynbelfer.com and you can follow her on Twitter @aarynb.