Ellen’s Choice: Adventures in Narrative Point of View – Remember that time you did that thing?

Narrative Point of View, sometimes called Narrative Perspective, describes the position of the narrator in relation to the story. Commonly-used points of view include First Person, where the narrator is a main character in the story, describing the events using “I,” and Third Person, where the narrator is a separate entity describing the events of the story using “he” or “she”. Within Third Person there are two sub-categories dealing with how much information the narrator chooses to give. Third Person Omniscient places the narrator above the story, where they can provide narration of events that the main characters are unaware of. A good example of this is the Harry Potter series, where the books sometimes show scenes of the Malfoys, Snape, or Voldemort – things that Harry and his friends would have no way of knowing about. In contrast, Third Person Limited places the narrator inside the main character’s head but not AS the main character – events are still described as “he did this” or “he thought that,” but only events or thoughts that the main character is aware of are introduced. Only the main character’s thoughts are given; everyone else’s motivations must be inferred from actions and dialogue. An example of this would be the Hunger Games trilogy, where Katniss is the lens through which we view the story. (Interestingly, the Hunger Games movies change this perspective, showing what was actually happening in the game-controllers’ room during the games, where in the books we only have Katniss’s ideas about what MIGHT be happening up there.)

These are the most common ways to tell a story, but there is one other. It’s elusive, and rarely used. I recently finished reading a book of short stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, as part of my 2015 Reading Challenge (see previous blog post). One of the stories in that volume has stayed with me particularly strongly for its use of this elusive Point of View. “Loser,” by Chuck Palahniuk, is written in Second Person.

Second Person is a narrative perspective where YOU are the protagonist of the story. The narrator describes events using “You did this” or “You thought that.” Before encountering “Loser,” I was used to only seeing Second Person in special cases like the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books of my childhood or the Game Master’s narration in a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Dungeons & Dragons, though, is more properly described as a collaboration between a second-person narrator and a group of first-person players, working together to craft a story on the spot. And the Choose Your Own Adventure books assume a level of interactivity from you as well, as you flip back and forth from page to page to craft your own story. As you might imagine, it’s difficult to craft a good non-interactive Second Person narrative without it sounding odd, with this unseen narrator ascribing motivations and actions to you, the reader. And it’s true that “Loser” has an odd effect on the reader because of its narrative perspective, but in this case it’s done intentionally to play into the story itself.

Basically, “Loser” is a description of that time you took acid and went on The Price is Right. The narrator’s description of your befuddled mental state and sensory overload from the bells and whistles and flashing lights as you attempt to get through the game without freaking out creates a very clear sense in the reader of what that experience would be like. It’s remarkably effective at portraying the loss of agency that one might feel after taking a mind-altering drug and entering an area of extreme sensory input. Thinking about it now, I get the sense that that loss of agency is exactly why Second Person generally feels strange to read – here’s some unknown guy telling you what you think about all of this. Who is he to tell you what you think and do? It’s an odd sensation to be sure. Palahniuk is simply leveraging that odd sensation to help him tell the story.

I highly recommend checking out “Loser,” by Chuck Palahniuk. And I’m interested to hear your thoughts in the comments – have you read any good Second Person narratives?

Ellen’s Choice: Why Does “Young Adult” Get A Bad Rap?

So-called “Young Adult” fiction seems to have gotten a bad rap lately among parents of teenage students. It seems as though adults tend to view YA as somehow “lesser” to other works, particularly as compared to the classics students are assigned in high school. I suspect this is because “Young Adult” as we conceptualize it today is a relatively recent invention – most bookstores and libraries didn’t even have a YA shelf until the mid-1990s. When we were teenagers, there was no “Young Adult” section at the bookstore – there was “Children’s” and there was “the rest of the store,” usually organized by genre. So as teens, too old for the Children’s section, we chose books from the rest of the store based on genre or author. I enjoyed sci-fi and fantasy, for example, so I found each next reading experience in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy aisle of the store, reading greats like Larry Niven, Neil Gaiman, and Isaac Asimov.

Young Adult, though, is a completely different animal. It’s a genre that’s not really a genre. The defining factor of a “Young Adult” novel is ill-defined, but tends to be simply “a book with a teenage main character.” Usually, although not always, a YA novel also deals with themes and concepts important to a teenage mind’s development, asking and attempting to answer big questions about life, love, identity etc. By that definition, a lot of the books we remember reading and enjoying as teens would probably be considered YA if they had been written today.

Phillip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, for example, is an alternate-universe fantasy epic seen through the eyes of a teenage girl. Its Wikipedia page lists it as YA (published in 1995), but it lives in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section of my local bookstore, not the YA shelf. Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, written in 1987, is a wilderness survival story also lumped under YA these days (though I know it wasn’t listed as such when I bought it originally in the ’80s). Lois Lowry’s classic dystopia The Giver (published in 1993) is listed as children’s, with a parenthetical clarification “generally Young Adult or older”. Clearly, this is not a well-thought-out system of classification.

The issue here is really that books fitting the above definition (“books with teenage main characters”) can be written in any genre. They can be realistic high school stories like Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns, magical boarding-school stories like Harry Potter or The Magicians, wilderness-survival stories or dystopias like the Hunger Games trilogy, or even feudal-era-Japanese-steampunk-dystopia-mythological-wilderness-survival-heroic-epics like the one I’m reading right now. (Stormdancer, by Jay Kristoff, in case you’re curious. Amazing so far.) The idea of a young person sorting out who they are and what they want out of life is not a new one, and is a timeless concept that can be transposed to any setting and trappings the author desires.

What Young Adult as a genre does have, though, is the potential to get teens really interested in reading. By definition, YA novels are written for teens. Skilled YA authors have developed a knack for writing from the perspective of a teenager, so their works resonate with teens more strongly than a classic might. YA stories also typically deal with problems that teens are dealing with themselves, at least on a conceptual level. Katniss Everdeen may live in a dystopian society where children are forced to fight to the death, but on a broader scale she is still dealing with the problems all teens are – how to take control of her own life, how to take a stand in favor of something she believes in, and in fact how to figure out what she believes in in the first place. These are questions we all struggle with, and good YA literature attempts to tackle these questions head on from a perspective that teens can understand.

Ellen’s Choice: Pros and Cons of the SAT vs. the ACT

Back in the day, where you wanted to go to college dictated which standardized test you took. Colleges in the midwest generally required the ACT, while those on the coasts wanted the SAT. These days, the score conversions are commonplace enough that most colleges will accept either one. So how do you choose which one to take? Well, there are a few differences to keep in mind.

Format

Most of the differences between the tests are matters of format. The SAT is comprised of ten sections ranging from 12 to 35 minutes each. The sections alternate between reading comprehension, math, and writing, and the whole test begins with a 25-minute timed essay. One of the ten sections is an “experimental” section, which is not scored as part of your test and is a chance for the test-makers to try out new ideas on a group of students. The ACT, in contrast, is four 75-minute sections, one for each subject. The ACT does not include an essay, but it does include a “science” section (which is actually more about reading graphs and charts than it is about science).

Because of this, a student’s ability to focus might lean them towards one or the other. A common problem for SAT students is not being able to finish each section in time or having trouble switching topics so frequently, so if that sounds like you, you might consider trying out the ACT. The ACT on average gives you less time per question, but by putting all of the questions of a given subject into a single section it gives you more time to get into the groove of the subject. This makes the ACT a better choice for students who need longer stretches of time to do good work, while students with attention problems might do better on the SAT where the constant subject-switching will keep them alert.

Another format difference is the style of the ScanTron sheet itself. The SAT’s questions have five answer choices, labeled A, B, C, D, and E, while the ACT’s questions have four answer choices that alternate between A, B, C, D, and F, G, H, J. The ACT’s system can make it easier to keep from accidentally bubbling in the wrong question number, since if you picked A as your answer and the bubble says F, you know you’re in the wrong line. However, having longer sections means there’s more chance of filling in the wrong lines in the first place, as you’ll be bouncing around the section for longer. Some books recommend figuring out your answers on scratch paper and then transferring them to the ScanTron in groups of five, which would help avoid that danger. However, it does complicate the workflow a bit. Overall, the ACT requires you to be a lot more organized in your time-management and workflow strategies, while the SAT does most of that for you by giving you shorter sections.

Material

Overall, scoring well on the SAT is less about knowing the material covered and more about knowing the strategies behind finding the correct answer. The SAT is more of a logic test than anything else, but the ACT relies a little bit more on actual knowledge of the material. The ACT also covers a bit more material – ACT math topics range up through basic trigonometry, while SAT math only covers geometry and basic algebra. This makes it a bit easier to come straight at the problems on the ACT and treat them more like you would any other test in school, but you do have to remember more material, while on the SAT you can often figure out the correct answer without even knowing the material itself.

A quick note: The SAT is undergoing a huge redesign in spring of 2016, and one of the changes that has been announced is a move towards more knowledge-oriented test questions. This would make the material on the SAT closer to that on the ACT. Stay tuned for updates as the new test is revealed!

Scoring

The SAT takes away a quarter point for each incorrect answer, while the ACT simply gives zero points for incorrect. In practice, this means that blind guesses are penalized on the SAT but are a valid last-ditch strategy on the ACT. However, this is another thing that will change in the 2016 redesign; the SAT will no longer penalize for guessing. But if you’re taking the test before then, it’s definitely something to keep in mind. Once again the ACT requires a bit more self-motivated workflow, as the best strategy here involves taking one last trip through each section in the last two minutes to bubble in all of your wild guesses. In a longer section it can be tricky to remember to save time for that.

In general the ACT leaves much more of the planning and strategy up to the student, while the SAT helps you along a bit through its format. My advice is usually to take a practice test for both and see how you do. Don’t just look at your scores, though – think about how it felt to take each test. Were you panicking at the end of each SAT section because you ran out of time? Then maybe the ACT is for you. Were you fuzzing out in the middle of the marathon ACT sections and having trouble staying focused? Then maybe you should try the SAT instead.

Also, since the point of taking these tests is to get into college, be sure to do your research. Check out the colleges you’re interested in and see what they require for test scores. Most will take either test, but it doesn’t hurt to be sure. Also, some schools will allow you to submit individual subject scores from different test dates (the math from March and the reading from October, for example), while others need one complete test score from a single date. Some schools will tell certain degree candidates up front that they don’t care about a certain part, like an engineering department not caring about the writing section or a school not looking at the essay at all. (The essay is a particularly good example of this, as most schools require an admissions essay anyway and some will only care about that one.)

I tutor both SAT and ACT prep, so if you’re in need of some assistance don’t hesitate to contact me!

Ellen’s Choice: Are You Taking the SAT this Year?

Well, the new school year has started, and that means SAT test dates are fast approaching. In fact, the first one is this coming weekend. To anyone taking the SAT on Saturday, good luck! Remember to get a good night’s sleep on Friday!

If you are thinking about applying to college in the next few years, it might be time to schedule an SAT date! Remember, you can retake the test as many times as you need to, so don’t be afraid to schedule an early date.

Also, remember that the big SAT Redesign will be kicking into effect in the Spring of 2016, so if you are in the class of 2016 you may want to start your testing early, to make sure you have time to retake the current style of test and not have to relearn everything for a completely new test the following year.

This semester’s SAT test dates and registration deadlines are as follows:

October 11th – Registration ends September 12th
November 8th – Registration ends October 9th
December 6th – Registration ends November 6th

I still have tutoring openings available this season. The SAT is not a test of the material; it’s a test of how well you take the SAT, so I highly recommend that everyone get at least a few private sessions in to discuss strategies and develop an individual game plan. Feel free to contact me if you’re in need of some help this semester!

Ellen’s Choice: From Page to Screen

This past weekend I went to see the long-awaited movie adaptation of John Green’s bestselling novel “The Fault in Our Stars.” I’m a big fan of alternate-medium depictions of various art forms (movies based on books, theater, or games, books that expand upon a movie or TV show, etc.) and I love to think about the ways in which a story is adapted for a new medium. Movies, TV, books, and live theater all have their own distinct methods of storytelling, and it’s an enlightening exercise to think about how the source material has to change to fit the new style. The Fault in Our Stars movie is one of the most faithful, and I think successful, adaptations I’ve seen in a long time. I’d like to take a moment to discuss a few of the ways in which I felt they most successfully navigated the transition from book to movie. I’ll refrain from spoilers in case any readers have not read the book or seen the movie yet.

Visual Effects

The Fault in Our Stars, in book form, contains a lot of virtual and text-based communication. Emails and texts play a major role in progressing the plot, reflecting the realism of modern-day communication. Going into the movie I had anticipated that this would be changed, possibly converting the texts to phone calls or some other form of spoken conversation. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the movie-makers had a better idea up their sleeves. During texting conversations the actors simply looked at their phones and reacted realistically, while little cartoon text bubbles popped up near their heads. The art style was cartoony and line-drawn, using minimal effect work to convey the content remarkably well. Similarly, email conversations were depicted with a hazy overlay of the email itself projected on top of the film, to let you in on what the characters were reading as they read it. Occasionally the longer emails were also voiced over by the reading character, as though they were reading it in their head. Throughout the movie these effects never felt forced or out-of-place, and I felt they accurately portrayed what it is like to have a silent conversation about something truly exciting.

Narration

Narration in a book is a very different communication method than in a movie. I went into the movie expecting a lot of voice-over narration from Hazel, both based on her narration in the trailer and based on the difficulty I foresaw in trying to maintain John Green’s distinctive voice in a visual medium. And while there is some narration from Hazel in the movie, it’s used surprisingly sparingly, and always in appropriate spots. The movie begins with Hazel’s voice-over narrating about how there are different ways to tell sad stories, and how she didn’t want to sugar-coat it because “that’s not the truth.” I began to notice that Hazel’s narration would take over whenever she got to a point in the story that was difficult for her to relive; specifically because what happened next was painful or didn’t fit into that “sugar-coated” mold. It was the truth, and so she had to tell it, but she couldn’t bear to actually relive it with dialogue and sound effects, so we get her narration over the visuals of the event, usually with musical accompaniment or blurred and muffled sounds.

Visual Storytelling – Direction

I was also struck by the subtlety of a lot of the visual storytelling and direction in the movie. Without spoilers, here are a couple of examples. Early in the story, mutual friend Isaac is slighted and gets really, really angry. Augustus tells him he needs to break something, and offers up his wall of basketball trophies. What follows, in the book, is a relatively serious conversation between Hazel and Augustus peppered with the occasional moment of Isaac breaking something thrown in. The whole sequence is very funny in the book, and I was eager to see how it would play out in the movie. I was not disappointed – the sequence is made even funnier in the movie via a classic case of upstaging. The director chose to shoot this sequence with Hazel and Augustus in the foreground, in focus, and Isaac blurry in the background, yelling and smashing things and just generally drawing focus away from the actual plot progression – in the funniest way possible. The visual nature of the movie medium allowed both occurrences to happen simultaneously, which just enhanced the comedy of the moment.

A second, more serious example, occurs later in the movie. As the story progresses, Hazel’s character arc is one of acceptance; learning that she doesn’t have to be afraid of getting close to others, and that even though she knows her days are numbered, she should still go out and live them. The movie depicts this beautifully, and so subtly that I almost didn’t notice it. Hazel carries her oxygen tank in a little rolling backpack, which she habitually drags behind her everywhere she goes. Beginning at a very important point in the story, however (no spoilers!), we start to see Hazel carrying her oxygen tank more often as a backpack, literally shouldering her burden rather than dragging it behind her. Carrying her tank on her back leaves her hands free and allows her more mobility, signifying her newfound resolve to deal with her situation practically and live her life fully. This beautiful bit of symbolism is a great example of how well the movie portrays the thoughts and philosophies of the book through its own particular medium.

If you haven’t seen the movie yet, I highly recommend it. But read the book first!

Ellen’s Choice: Tangent to the Classics

School’s almost out for the summer, and to me, summertime is a perfect excuse to try learning and growing in new, fun ways. When I tutor students over the summer, I make a concerted effort to inject some fun into our work, so that it doesn’t feel like homework. We read fun or unusual books, or we put a twist on a project. Write a creative, narrative response to a work instead of an analytical essay, or go on a little “field trip” to find learning in unexpected places. I’ve recently devised a new fun “field trip” type activity, and I’d like to share it today.

But first, some background. I participate in a monthly “Bring Your Own Book” club, where each month we are given a topic and we each choose a book that relates to the topic to read and bring in. We always end up with a really interesting mix of genres and types of stories, all revolving around a theme (such as “books with animals as main characters” or “books that have inspired music”). Since I tutor high school English, I tend to gravitate towards the classics, and I’ve brought in such books as Watership Down and Ragtime in previous meetings.

Last month, our theme was “alcoholic writers,” and after a quick search for a list of popular writers who were alcoholic, I settled on F. Scott Fitzgerald. My initial idea was to reread The Great Gatsby, a classic I hadn’t read since high school but remembered enjoying. I headed to the library and quickly found the F’s, then found about half a shelf of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Reaching for Gatsby, my eye was suddenly drawn to the book snuggled up next to it on the shelf, a volume slightly larger than Gatsby and also by Fitzgerald. I picked it up and looked at the blurb on the back, flipped through a few pages, and took it home with me instead of Gatsby. That book was “The Crack-Up,” an anthology of essays, letters, and notebook jottings from Fitzgerald’s life. It turned out to be a much more interesting and exciting experience than simply rereading an old classic.

Fitzgerald wrote essays about living in New York during the jazz age at a time when the jazz age was scarcely even over – an essay from 1931 had the same sort of wistful tone we’d expect from a period piece written today. But by far my favorite part of the collection was “the notebooks,” a sequence of random jottings, bits and pieces, collected into categories that started with each letter of the alphabet. “C” was for “Conversations and Things Overheard,” “D” was for “Descriptions,” “E” was for “Epigrams and Wisecracks.” It struck me as an intriguing glimpse into the inner workings of an author plying his craft, and my experience as a dancer and choreographer made this behind-the-scenes look into his process resonate with me even more strongly. I know the feeling of having an inspiration strike you and feeling that “I must write this down right now or I’ll forget it!” urge. Many of the little bits and pieces had Fitzgerald’s distinctive gorgeous wording, and I could almost see the reason behind putting each piece into his notebook. Lots of them were examples of “that’s a perfect way to describe this,” or just “I like that turn of phrase.” Some of my favorites were the ones completely devoid of context, such as:

Impersonating 46 presidents at once.

I absolutely loved this collection, and the experience gave me a great idea for a new “field trip” activity. I call this one “Tangent to the Classics.” The rules are simple:


  1. Head over to your nearest library and use the catalog to search for a classic novel you enjoy. It can be anything, really, so long as you enjoyed reading it.

  2. Jot down the call number and head into the stacks as if you were going to check it out.

  3. When you find the classic you searched for, don’t pick it up. Take a look at the books sitting to its immediate left and right. Read the blurbs on the back, flip through a few pages in the front, and choose one of those two books to check out.

  4. Take it home and read it. If it’s by the same author as your classic, think about how this book changes your conception of the author and his work. If it’s by a different author, think about why it was located right next to the classic. Libraries have an organizational structure that generally puts similar books near each other. Why is this book tangent to the one you searched for?

Try this one out and let me know how it goes! I’d love to see your experiences in the comments. What are your reactions to reading a book that was tangent to a classic?

Ellen’s Choice: Teach the Concept, Not the Algorithm

I hear a lot about math teachers from my students, and while every teacher is unique, some comments are repeated over and over. By far the most common one I hear is that their teacher didn’t really explain something, or was incapable of elaborating when questioned and simply repeated the same lecture again. As a tutor, my first priority is to make sure the student understands the material, and if they’re still confused, to find another way to explain it so that it makes sense. In order to do that, I need to have a thorough understanding of the concepts myself, so that I am not simply reading from a textbook but actually explaining a concept. In my years of tutoring math, I’ve developed a point of view and approach to math that I refer to as “teaching the concept, not the algorithm.”

An algorithm is a step-by-step procedure for calculation. The term is used in math and computer science, but the concept of an algorithm is universal. I could tell you that I have an algorithm which consists of 1) close the windows; 2) put on a sweater; 3) check the thermostat; 4) turn it up 3 degrees if it displays lower than 68. This is pretty obviously an algorithm to solve the problem of “I am cold right now.” We have algorithms for everything in our life, and most of the time we don’t even think about it that way. We see a problem, we work out a set of steps to solve it, and we complete those steps and observe the result.

In math class, however, students frequently encounter teachers who simply teach the algorithm; handing them a formula for solving a problem without ever really teaching them the core concepts involved or why the formula is what it is. This results in a lot of rote memorization with no understanding of why the numbers are where they are in that formula. My golden question for math teaching is always “Why?” Why does this work? Why can I do that? What am I trying to accomplish here, in the grand scheme of things? If I can explain the concept to the student so that they understand what they are doing on a macro scale and why their actions work and make sense, then it doesn’t matter if they forget the formula itself, they should be able to figure it out organically by going through the conceptual process again.

I’ll give you an example from my favorite math teacher, Mr. Lazur. (I wrote a whole blog post about Mr. Lazur’s teaching style, which heavily influences the way I tutor.) I had Mr. Lazur for Geometry, a subject notorious for the amount of formulae it throws at its students. Every single type of shape has three or four formulas associated with it, and keeping them all straight can be a nightmare for students. Mr. Lazur got around this by showing us WHY the formulas look the way they do, ensuring that his students could always reverse-engineer the formulas from the concepts if they couldn’t remember them directly.

In this example, we’re learning about the volume of a cylinder. We’ve just spent the previous few days discussing volume of cubes and rectangular prisms, so Mr. Lazur starts us off by reminding us of exactly what volume means. It’s the amount of stuff required to fill up the shape; the amount of water that would be displaced if the shape were dropped into a bucket. Then he pulls something out that nobody was expecting: one of those CD spindles that you buy with blank, recordable CDs in them. He points out that a stack of CDs is a cylinder, taking them off the spindle and setting the stack on his desk. He asks us to imagine that each CD is actually a truly 2-dimensional object, ignoring the tiny thickness of the plastic. He tells us that the process works just the same with truly 2-dimensional objects as it will with these CDs. How could we figure out the amount of stuff required to fill up this shape, he asks. Assuming it was truly 2-dimensional, we wouldn’t be talking about volume anymore; it’d be area, right? He asks for the area of a circle, and we give it to him. We know this; it’s easy stuff we’ve known for months now.

A = πr^2

So that’s how much space this single, 2-dimensional CD takes up, right? He picks up another CD and places it against the first one, flat sides together. How much space would 2 of them take up? He separates them again, holding them side by side. It’d just be twice the amount of space the first one took up, right? 2 circles’ worth of area.

He writes on the board: 2πr^2

So how much space would 5 of them take up? 5πr^2

And how much space would a stack of them that was h CD’s high take up? hπr^2

Mr. Lazur then circles that last line and turns to us. “This is the formula for volume of a cylinder. It’s just the area of the flat face, multiplied by the height of the stack of those faces. πr^2(h).”

When I started writing this blog post I wasn’t thinking about the formula πr^2(h) – I was thinking about that stack of cylinders. The formula followed organically from thinking about the concept. And that’s the key – you can derive an algorithm easily from a concept, but if you never teach the concept all the algorithms in the world are just meaningless memorization.

Ellen’s Choice: How I Feel About the SAT Redesign

A few weeks ago I posted an article about the impending SAT redesign and the changes that have been announced. I mentioned at the end of that article that I’d be posting another one soon with my thoughts on the redesign, once I’d had time to think more about them. Well, this is that article.

Overall, I think the motivation for the redesign is good – that the College Board’s heart is in the right place and they’re acknowledging some of the very real problems that the current SAT has. I’m very happy with their partnership with Khan Academy as well. I’m happy to hear that they acknowledge that students really do need some kind of prep help for the SAT, and that if they’re going to force every student who wants to apply to college to take it, they should be offering free prep help for everyone who wants it. Not everyone can afford a private tutor, and money should not be a limiting factor in every student’s ability to thoroughly prepare for the test. (That said, I am always willing to adjust my rate for a student with a special circumstance, so if you’re in need of help, don’t hesitate to contact me!)

As for the specific changes they’re making to the test itself, I have more worries there. Again, I think their intentions are good, but I suspect some of these changes will have unbalancing ramifications that the College Board is unaware of. I’ll detail a few of my biggest worries below.

Passages About School Subjects

In the current SAT, passages for the reading comprehension are deliberately selected to be obscure and deal with topics the students wouldn’t have heard about before. This is done to ensure that students are forced to draw their information exclusively from the passage, and to prevent students from having an unfair advantage due to prior knowledge of the topic. In the 2016 redesign, passages will now deal with topics from school subjects such as science, history and social studies. The College Board says that this will make the test more relevant to the information that students are learning in school – but I was under the impression that the whole point of the obscure passages was that they weren’t relevant to the information from school – you couldn’t get lucky and get a passage you knew a lot about already.

Here’s an example: suppose two students, Student A and Student B, are given the same booklet on the same test date. This booklet, by luck of the draw, contains a majority of history-based passages, including one about the Haitian Revolution. Student A loves history, and actually wrote a term paper about the Haitian Revolution the previous year. Student B, on the other hand, hates history and has an awful time reading about it – the names and dates just jumble together into a big mess in her head. Obviously, Student A has an unfair advantage overall on this test – her love for history means she will likely be better able to find the information needed in the passage. Student B will be at a disadvantage, and will probably struggle to make sense out of the information that Student A found so enthralling. On the other hand, of course, Student A’s extensive knowledge of the Haitian Revolution from her term paper might lead to her relying on information not present in the passage, which could cause her to miss some questions. Or she could still get the right answers, but not even need to use the critical reasoning skills that the test is supposed to be evaluating.

Overall, I’m reserving judgement on this topic until we hear more from the College Board about the process of creating the new test. I do see ways in which they could balance the test – make sure there are exactly the same number of passages and questions about each subject, for example, or make the topics discussed come from higher-level topics than the students would have covered. However, I would want to know that the test structure has been heavily beta-tested before it is unleashed on the general student population.

No Penalty For Guessing

The concept of “being penalized for guessing” versus “not being penalized for guessing” is actually a gross oversimplification. It’s not that the current SAT can somehow tell whether you knew that answer was right when you picked it – it’s all about probability. There are 5 answer choices for each question of the SAT, and a wrong answer gets you a ¼ – point penalty. This means that if you can narrow it down to 3 choices or less, you’re actually better off guessing, statistically-speaking. So the SAT doesn’t penalize guessing, it penalizes blind guessing. It actually rewards educated guessing. By removing the penalty for wrong answers, they are no longer offering an incentive to avoid random guessing. The College Board says this change is to encourage students to offer “the best answer they have to every question” – but that’s what I already teach my students to do with the current system! The only real difference, if taught appropriately, is that in the last minute or so of each section students should now go back through and randomly pick answers for any questions they were completely clueless on, since leaving a question blank is now, statistically, a bad idea.

So this change will have very little effect for students who are already learning smart test-taking strategies – so why am I worried? Well, it could artificially inflate the scores of students who are less prepared. Unprepared students who are guessing blindly could now conceivably get lucky and happen to pick the right answers enough of the time to raise their scores, which would give an inaccurate assessment of their abilities and knowledge. Without the discouragement of wrong-answer penalties, you just encourage blind guessing. Most of the changes in the SAT over the years have been in response to either substantially decreasing or substantially rising test scores, and I worry that eliminating the penalty for guessing will cause scores to artificially rise, possibly resulting in an increasing number of perfect scores such as the ones that prompted the 2005 redesign.

The “Great Global Conversation”

My final worry is a somewhat different one. The introduction of the new “Great Global Conversation” sounds as though it is intended to encourage students to learn about and participate in a nation-wide discussion of the principles our nation was founded on and how they have developed over time. While this is an admirable sentiment in general, I can’t help feeling it is really not the business of a standardized test to encourage it. If we want our students to participate more in the conversation about our nation and where we should be headed, that’s fine – but why is the College Board worrying about it? Shouldn’t that ball be in the court of the country’s social studies teachers? I’m not convinced that putting the Gettysburg Address or Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech on the SAT and asking questions about it would really affect the “conversation” that much. Especially since they’d be treated like any other passage on the SAT – that is, the test-taker would not be supposed to bring outside information into their process, but simply look for evidence in the text itself. It’s not as if the questions about the Gettysburg Address would be asking for the test-taker’s opinion on the topic; even a passage written by another notable figure about the Gettysburg Address would be followed with questions asking about that author’s opinion, not the student’s. It is certainly an admirable goal to have for students’ futures, but I don’t think the College Board should be trying to achieve it through a standardized test.

The SAT Redesign: What You Need To Know

The news broke recently that the College Board is once again changing the SAT. These new changes, scheduled to be implemented in spring 2016, represent a pretty large departure from the SAT of the past. The College Board states that this new SAT will “ask students to apply a deep understanding of the few things shown by current research to matter most for college readiness and success.” Here are the changes that will have the biggest effect on test preparation, as I see them:

An Increased Focus on Evidence-Based Analysis

The new SAT will place a higher priority on analysis based on evidence. In the critical reading and writing sections students will now be asked to support their answers with evidence, including citing portions of the passages. In effect, the new SAT will require students not only to know the correct answer, but to be able to explain why the answer is correct, and point to specific evidence in the passage that supports their choice. The essay will also now focus on supporting claims with evidence (which I will discuss more below in the Essay section).

An Increased Focus on the Topics that Students Will Need in College

Vocabulary, Math concepts, and Passage selections will all focus on skills and topics that students are most likely to need for college and beyond. No longer will the SAT throw obscure words at students simply because they are difficult; the new test will focus on vocabulary such as “empirical” and “synthesis,” words more likely to be found in the college and career environments. The Math section will focus more narrowly in on a smaller range of topics more likely to be encountered in life, and will now include a calculator-forbidden section where students must rely on their own abilities rather than the calculator to solve problems. The passages selected for critical reading questions, previously chosen specifically to be obscure and offer no unfair advantage to students, will now be selected to be reminiscent of classroom work assignments in social studies, science, and history.

Data Analysis and the “Great Global Conversation”

Passages will now be chosen which incorporate both text and graphs or charts, challenging students to be able to synthesize data presented in many formats and analyze with equal skill graphs as well as written paragraphs. In addition, every test will include at least one passage chosen using their new concept of “The Great Global Conversation,” meaning that they will incorporate passages from the founding fathers and/or other notable historical figures. This is meant to draw students more into the current or historical conversations that matter in our country and encourage them to participate in those conversations.

The Essay

The essay is now optional rather than mandatory. Instead of a randomly-assigned prompt, all students will know the basic prompt ahead of time. Rather than asking for a student’s opinion on a question, the student will be assigned a random source document and asked to write an essay explaining how the author of the source document builds his or her argument. This will require students to be able to cite specific parts of the text and support their claims with evidence. While the basic prompt (“write an essay explaining how the author builds his argument”) remains the same, the source material in question will be random.

The Nitty-Gritty Changes

The Writing section has been abandoned, combined into one with the verbal now called “Evidence-based Reading and Writing”. Together with the Math section, this will return the scoring system to its pre-2005 1600-point scale. The essay, if taken, will be scored separately and will now be given 50 minutes instead of the current 25.

In addition, the new SAT has abandoned the penalty for wrong answers. Entirely. You now receive zero points for a wrong answer instead of the previous quarter-point off. The College Board states this as “encourag[ing] students to give the best answer they have to every problem,” but what this effectively means is that you are no longer penalized for guessing.

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I’ll post another blog entry in a few days with my thoughts on these changes, once I’ve had time to process them a bit more. For now, I think the initiative is a good one, though there may be ramifications of these changes that the College Board is unaware of.

One other thing to mention – in addition to the changes to the actual test, the College Board is now partnering with Khan Academy in an initiative to make sure that every child gets access to the test prep help they need, even those from less-wealthy families. I definitely approve of this initiative; it’s always bothered me that the SAT really does require special prep help to score well, when many students are unable to afford such help. For my part, I am always willing to adjust my rate for a student with a special circumstance, so if you need help, don’t hesitate to contact me!

Sloppy Math on Facebook, or “Who the heck would write a function like that anyway?”

Does this look familiar?

SOLVE IF YOU ARE A GENIUS! 99% OF PEOPLE WILL GET IT WRONG!

8 = 56
7 = 42
6 = 30
5 = 20
3 = ?

No doubt every time you’ve seen this on
Facebook, it’s followed by thousands upon thousands of responses,
each indignant that other people are getting the wrong answer.
Generally there are two or three different numbers that keep coming
up, with nobody able to see how anyone else could have gotten a
different answer from their own.

I hate these things.

These things are designed to be vague. There is no answer, or rather,
there are an infinite number of answers. The crux of the issue here is
that they don’t define the rule.

So these things are basically a weird
way of presenting a function. You remember functions from my
previous blog post, right? Well, essentially what this thing is
saying is “you take 8, do some mystery function to it, and you get
56. Et cetera, et cetera, what do you get when you use 3?” The
problem is that there are multiple rules that could apply here, so
you have no idea what function they actually gave you and therefore
cannot answer the question.

Here’s our example from above, showing
two different rules that could be used to create the list:

FIRST OPTION
y = x * (x-1)

56 = 8 * (8-1) = 8 * 7
42 = 7 * (7-1) = 7 * 6
30 = 6 * (6-1) = 6 * 5
20 = 5 * (5-1) = 5 * 4

So
y = 3 * (3-1) = 3 * 2 = 6

This is the answer that a lot of people
get because it’s a bit more obvious. It’s also the first answer that
jumps out at me. But there’s a second option:

SECOND OPTION
n1 = 7
nt = n1 – (t-1)
y = x * nt

This second option is more of a
programming-type sequence, but no less legitimate. In this case, nt
means “the value of n for any given term t.” The rule given for
finding nt works out to mean that after each term, the n
value counts down by 1. n1 would be set to 7 by the
puzzle, as is common with rules of this type. This means the rule is
no longer relative, but absolute. No matter what first x value you
choose, the first n is 7. The second n is 6, the third is 5, and so
on. By this logic the beginning is still correct:

56 = 8 * 7 First Term: t = 1, nt = n1 – (1-1) = n1 – 0
42 = 7 * 6 Second Term: t = 2, nt = n1 – (2-1) = n1 – 1
30 = 6 * 5 Third Term: t = 3, nt = n1 – (3-1) = n1 – 2
20 = 5 * 4 Fourth Term: t = 4, nt = n1 – (4-1) = n1 – 3

BUT THEN

y = 3 * 3 = 9 Fifth Term: t = 5, nt = n1 – (5-1) = n1 – 4, so 7 – 4, or 3

With this version you get 9 instead of
6. Why is that, when the other terms are all the same?

Notice they left out x = 4 in the
puzzle – it jumps straight from 5 to 3. If we were using the first
rule it wouldn’t matter, since the rule is only relative to the
current x value and will work no matter where in the sequence a given
number finds itself. You could shuffle the lines around to your
heart’s delight and the answers would still be the same. But this
version is what’s known as a “recursive” sequence, where the rule
depends on where the term is in the sequence, and moving the terms
around will change the results drastically. What looks like a
logical sixth step is actually the fifth term in the sequence.

If we put 4 in for x where it looks
like it should be, it changes how you find the result of each term
thereafter. Then we’d have:

20 = 5 * 4
12 = 4 * 3
6 = 3 * 2

So we’d get the same answer as the
first option. But that’s assuming they’ve left out a term, which you
can’t be sure of since they didn’t tell you that explicitly. To
assume that is simply to be a sloppy mathematician, and sloppy math
leads to incorrect math. Here is what they would have had to show
you for that to be the case:

n1 : 8 = 56
n2 : 7 = 42
n3 : 6 = 30
n4 : 5 = 20
n6 : 3 = ?

By showing you that it jumps straight
from the fourth term to the sixth, they’re letting you know the
counter should have ticked down one additional time, and at that
point you will be able to solve the problem. But not without that
additional piece of information.

So here I’ve shown two legitimate ways
to solve this badly-written problem, getting two completely different
answers. Since the issue is that the problem is not specific enough,
the only prudent answer to these questions is always “There is not
enough information given.”

I hate these things because they are
intentionally vague. The people who make these problems (or at the
very least the people who post them on Facebook) likely don’t realize
just how complicated the problem is. Most people will only see one
solution, so it will appear easy and they won’t be able to understand
how someone else got 9 when it’s “obviously” 6. This leads to
arguing futilely over something which, to any mathematician, is just
a problem that’s so badly-written it’s useless. No mathematician
worth her salt would ever write a sequence that way anyway, so why
argue about it?