Re-learning, Un-learning...
The other day I picked up a copy of the 2019 ACT test booklet, one of several "prep" guides to help graduating high school students prepare for college entrance exams.* No real reason other than I was curious on just how much I had retained or how much I had forgotten from my school years some eons ago. I admittedly surprised myself at figuring out many of the algebraic and geometry questions, although trig (trigonometry) had become a nebulous dust cloud, the words secant and cotangent stirred something but I couldn't remember what (all this coming as the guide emphasized "remember the following Pythagorean Identities: sin2(θ) + cos2(θ) = 1; 1 + tan2(θ) = sec2(θ); 1 + cot2(θ) = csc2(θ). Yeah right...but that caveat was followed with this: There are typically only four trigonometry questions on the ACT Mathematics Test...(Even if you NEVER learn trigonometry, don't worry; four questions are not likely to seriously affect your score). If only I knew that back then. And there were the reading and science and writing sections, areas I somehow managed to pass albeit taking my time and realizing that there would be no penalties if I got an answer wrong (the prep books tell you that wrong answers no longer count "against" you anyway, only the correct ones being graded). Okay, some of those brain cells were still working in my head; but here was the interesting thing...I discovered many things I thought I had learned but in reality had little idea about.
Here's but one example on the world's religions, this from the AP World History Exam (yes, I picked that one up as well, history being my weakest subject and apparently still holding steady as such): Zoroastrianism is a dualistic faith, which means that Zoroastrians believed in two gods representing good and evil (this was believed to have originated some 600 years before Christianity); Shiite (Shia) Islam holds that Muhammad's son-in-law, Ali, was the rightful heir to the empire based on Muhammed's comments to Ali. Sunnis, in contrast, though they hold Ali in high esteem, do not believe that he and his hereditary line are the chosen successors; rather, they contend that the leaders of the empire should be drawn from a broad base of the people (Islam is thought to have begun some 600 years after Christianity); Compare Them: Confucianism, Hinduism, and Judaism...At first glance, these three belief systems seem very different from one another. After all, Confucianism isn't a religion; Hinduism is polytheistic; and Judaism is monotheistic. However, they are similar in that they are all closely tied to the culture in which they are practiced, and therefore are not part of the sweeping, evangelical movements that seek to convert the rest of the world. Each not only arose out of a specific culture, but was also used to sustain that culture by providing guidelines and moral authority. Such pre-test books have to summarized topics in just a matter of a few hundred pages; imagine coherently explaining the principles of English grammar or algebra or civilizations quickly and in about a dozen pages (these are meant as reviews and not as teaching guides, but still...).
A book review in The Atlantic began this way: Are you a good reader, reader? Patient, curious, broadly cultured, and so on? I’m not—not anymore. Decades of email-checking have splintered my concentration; more recently and speedily, I’ve rotted out my attention span with Netflix and end-of-the-republic updates. Of the new mind, the prodigious and fluently networking postdigital mind, I am not in possession; I have only the perishing old mind, bleaching in chunks like the Great Barrier Reef. To sit in a chair, in a pool of educated light, and turn the pages of a novel…No chance. I twitch, I bounce. I start reaching for things. Then I get groggy. So why would anyone (that is, who wasn't actively trying to pass the college entrance exams) reach for a book that takes you back to school? When you read about Mexican lettuce workers only earning about $220 per week after "room and board," or some Medicaid recipients discovering that the fine print allows it to take your home in order to be paid back (said another piece in The Atlantic); or the same magazine asking what would happen if black athletes left white colleges;** or James Fallows positing "Why the decline of the federal government might not be such a bad thing;" or Paul Theroux adding his observation that Mexico made him feel young again: Mexico was for me a world of struggle, of incident, of questioning, of people under threat and prevailing over their humble circumstances, which was a lesson to me, of venerating the past and being true, being determined to live. I kept thinking, with pleasure, I'm still here!
Beyond encapsulating entire subjects, the answer for me was that peeking at these books brought out a few new ways of looking at life in general. Said the AP World Exam: In a nutshell: Can you make connections between different societies over different periods of time?...How did what they were doing affect history? What changed about the society during this period of time? (On writing an essay): In conversations with those who grade AP (Admissions Plus) World History Exams, it is clear that what they want above all else is for you to address the question. In some of your classes, you may have gotten into the habit of throwing everything but the kitchen sink into an essay without truly addressing the question at hand. Do not try to fudge your way through the essay. the graders are all experts in history, and you will not be able to fool them into thinking you know more than you actually do. (In sum): Make Three Good Points...Make a Chronological Argument...Identify Similarities and Differences...Remember that that proving your opposition wrong does not mean that you have proved that you yourself are correct...Quality matters more than quantity...
So a good start to testing yourself might be with National Geographic Kids and clicking a few pictures in their fun quiz; it's a light-hearted way to "discover" your personality type but it also raises a few areas where you have to pause and think about what choice or subject you would really prefer. The ACT booklet said this as part of their advice in taking the test: Listen to your brain...In other words, if it sounds right to you, it probably is. But a piece in the London Review of Books seemed to wonder if this was correct, and asked just exactly who decides what's the right answer: Where orthodox economists explain behaviour on the basis of rational choice, assuming that each of us is a finely tuned calculator weighing the costs and benefits of every decision, the ‘nudgers’ are always on the look-out for anomalies, situations in which we habitually do things with harmful consequences: eating badly, neglecting to recycle, or failing to save for retirement. The job of policymakers, as nudgers see it, is to make minor adjustments to ‘choice architectures’ (how the various options are presented to us), which discreetly steer us towards the path of rationality. In areas such as personal finance and nutrition, employers and businesses are encouraged to change the default option to the ‘good’ one. Pension schemes are made opt-out, rather than opt-in, so that people end up with a better retirement pot by default. The touchscreen menu ordering system at McDonald’s is now so determined to steer customers towards its range of salads and sugar-free drinks that choosing to sabotage one’s own health with a burger, chips and Coke requires considerable perseverance. These are efforts to protect us from our own irrationality, but some may feel a sense of unease that the powers that be are treating citizens like children.
The ACT prep guide talked a bit about this: Cognitive psychologists, the ones who study learning and thinking, use the letters KSA to refer to the basic components of human performance in any activity, from academics to athletics to music to video games. The letters stand for Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities...Knowledge can be learned fairly quickly and is fairly durable, even under stress. Skills, on the other hand, require repetition in order to perfect...You could have the best teacher in the world, possess spectacular learning tools, and pay attention very carefully so that you take in all of the information that is imparted. You might understand everything perfectly, but the first few times that you actually attempt the skill, you will probably execute that skill less than perfectly. In fact, the odds are that you will experience some frustration at that point because of the lag between your understanding of the skill and your actual ability to perform the skill. Perfecting skills take practice...So don't be satisfied with merely reading through this book and saying to yourself, "I get it." You will not reach your full ACT potential unless you put in sufficient time practicing as well as understanding and learning. The AP World History Exam booklet put it a bit more succinctly when it said: Overall, keep in mind the Big Picture.
The "big picture" was pretty much the end result I took away after reading Paul Theroux's book on his travel's through Mexico (at age 76, and driving no less). In the heart of the country and while at a Spanish language immersion class (he was already relatively fluent but wanted to pick up the slang and nuances of the Mexican Spanish language), he was asked to name his favorite book and then what he liked about his work, an easy task for some but for a prolific writer and reader, it proved quite difficult. He wrote: And at once I became conscious of being elderly and conspicuous, because my hesitation seemed like the doddering of an old buffer. But it wasn't that at all; I was fully alert, my head surveying shelves of books, authors and titles on their spines. Choose one is a diabolical demand...(What did he like most about his work): I began, and thought hard, because no on in fifty years had ever asked me this question. And what was it that I most liked about my work? That I had no boss, no employees, no rivals, no competitors -- the freedom of being a writer? That it was a way of dealing with my life, transforming my experiences, finding ways to understand it -- recording life's joys, making its tribulations bearable, and also, in writing, easing the passage of time?...But at the bottom of it all was the spell at my desk...saying something new, often surprising myself by what emerged from my unconscious; then afterward, rewriting, improving, polishing, mulling it and making it whole, and so on, for days or years -- a page, a story, a book. In the silence of the classroom, my fellow students waiting for me to reveal what I liked most about my work, the answer came to me, easy enough to translate from English to Spanish, since the words were so similar. "El acto de la creación," I said. The act of creation.
*Back in my day no such pre-test guides existed (nor could we use calculators) but today the shelves are lined with them. The other major privatized test is the SAT although the Princeton Review says that both are considered of equal value when colleges consider the resulting scores. Once mired in controversy (said Wikipedia), the SAT along with other such entrance exams are big business, often charging $50+ per exam and having a total of 3 million+ users all while the tests struggle to keep up with the changing times. One example is that of the category of analogy questions being removed due to the appearance of cultural bias; such questions would ask you to complete the comparisons such as "apple is to lemon" as "red is to yellow" or something similar; but here is how some of the actual questions appeared: "runner is to marathon" as...(the correct answer was "oarsman to regatta"). What??? Nonetheless, independent reviews apparently show that the 7x per year tests (both the ACT and the SAT) have indeed helped to raise overall scores; in the case of the ACT, 74 takers got top scores in 1997 but by 2017 that figure had jumped to 2700. One should note that while the ACT stands for American College Testing and the SAT is short for Scholastic Aptitude Test, there are many other preparation tests, including the GED (General Education Developent) for completing high school and the AP World Exam among others.
**Hmm, something similar happened in my high school which was 99.99% white; during my years there the school rarely if ever won any sort of sports title and certainly not in football or basketball or track. Then busing arrived. Within a few years, and to my surprise when I went back to visit it during a reunion, the school's racial mix had nearly reversed and with it, the awards and championships. The question the article proposes thus becomes an interesting one in asking just how much loyalty those fans rooting for their colleges would have if such athletes and championships began departing at an accelerated rate.
Here's but one example on the world's religions, this from the AP World History Exam (yes, I picked that one up as well, history being my weakest subject and apparently still holding steady as such): Zoroastrianism is a dualistic faith, which means that Zoroastrians believed in two gods representing good and evil (this was believed to have originated some 600 years before Christianity); Shiite (Shia) Islam holds that Muhammad's son-in-law, Ali, was the rightful heir to the empire based on Muhammed's comments to Ali. Sunnis, in contrast, though they hold Ali in high esteem, do not believe that he and his hereditary line are the chosen successors; rather, they contend that the leaders of the empire should be drawn from a broad base of the people (Islam is thought to have begun some 600 years after Christianity); Compare Them: Confucianism, Hinduism, and Judaism...At first glance, these three belief systems seem very different from one another. After all, Confucianism isn't a religion; Hinduism is polytheistic; and Judaism is monotheistic. However, they are similar in that they are all closely tied to the culture in which they are practiced, and therefore are not part of the sweeping, evangelical movements that seek to convert the rest of the world. Each not only arose out of a specific culture, but was also used to sustain that culture by providing guidelines and moral authority. Such pre-test books have to summarized topics in just a matter of a few hundred pages; imagine coherently explaining the principles of English grammar or algebra or civilizations quickly and in about a dozen pages (these are meant as reviews and not as teaching guides, but still...).
A book review in The Atlantic began this way: Are you a good reader, reader? Patient, curious, broadly cultured, and so on? I’m not—not anymore. Decades of email-checking have splintered my concentration; more recently and speedily, I’ve rotted out my attention span with Netflix and end-of-the-republic updates. Of the new mind, the prodigious and fluently networking postdigital mind, I am not in possession; I have only the perishing old mind, bleaching in chunks like the Great Barrier Reef. To sit in a chair, in a pool of educated light, and turn the pages of a novel…No chance. I twitch, I bounce. I start reaching for things. Then I get groggy. So why would anyone (that is, who wasn't actively trying to pass the college entrance exams) reach for a book that takes you back to school? When you read about Mexican lettuce workers only earning about $220 per week after "room and board," or some Medicaid recipients discovering that the fine print allows it to take your home in order to be paid back (said another piece in The Atlantic); or the same magazine asking what would happen if black athletes left white colleges;** or James Fallows positing "Why the decline of the federal government might not be such a bad thing;" or Paul Theroux adding his observation that Mexico made him feel young again: Mexico was for me a world of struggle, of incident, of questioning, of people under threat and prevailing over their humble circumstances, which was a lesson to me, of venerating the past and being true, being determined to live. I kept thinking, with pleasure, I'm still here!
Beyond encapsulating entire subjects, the answer for me was that peeking at these books brought out a few new ways of looking at life in general. Said the AP World Exam: In a nutshell: Can you make connections between different societies over different periods of time?...How did what they were doing affect history? What changed about the society during this period of time? (On writing an essay): In conversations with those who grade AP (Admissions Plus) World History Exams, it is clear that what they want above all else is for you to address the question. In some of your classes, you may have gotten into the habit of throwing everything but the kitchen sink into an essay without truly addressing the question at hand. Do not try to fudge your way through the essay. the graders are all experts in history, and you will not be able to fool them into thinking you know more than you actually do. (In sum): Make Three Good Points...Make a Chronological Argument...Identify Similarities and Differences...Remember that that proving your opposition wrong does not mean that you have proved that you yourself are correct...Quality matters more than quantity...
So a good start to testing yourself might be with National Geographic Kids and clicking a few pictures in their fun quiz; it's a light-hearted way to "discover" your personality type but it also raises a few areas where you have to pause and think about what choice or subject you would really prefer. The ACT booklet said this as part of their advice in taking the test: Listen to your brain...In other words, if it sounds right to you, it probably is. But a piece in the London Review of Books seemed to wonder if this was correct, and asked just exactly who decides what's the right answer: Where orthodox economists explain behaviour on the basis of rational choice, assuming that each of us is a finely tuned calculator weighing the costs and benefits of every decision, the ‘nudgers’ are always on the look-out for anomalies, situations in which we habitually do things with harmful consequences: eating badly, neglecting to recycle, or failing to save for retirement. The job of policymakers, as nudgers see it, is to make minor adjustments to ‘choice architectures’ (how the various options are presented to us), which discreetly steer us towards the path of rationality. In areas such as personal finance and nutrition, employers and businesses are encouraged to change the default option to the ‘good’ one. Pension schemes are made opt-out, rather than opt-in, so that people end up with a better retirement pot by default. The touchscreen menu ordering system at McDonald’s is now so determined to steer customers towards its range of salads and sugar-free drinks that choosing to sabotage one’s own health with a burger, chips and Coke requires considerable perseverance. These are efforts to protect us from our own irrationality, but some may feel a sense of unease that the powers that be are treating citizens like children.
The ACT prep guide talked a bit about this: Cognitive psychologists, the ones who study learning and thinking, use the letters KSA to refer to the basic components of human performance in any activity, from academics to athletics to music to video games. The letters stand for Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities...Knowledge can be learned fairly quickly and is fairly durable, even under stress. Skills, on the other hand, require repetition in order to perfect...You could have the best teacher in the world, possess spectacular learning tools, and pay attention very carefully so that you take in all of the information that is imparted. You might understand everything perfectly, but the first few times that you actually attempt the skill, you will probably execute that skill less than perfectly. In fact, the odds are that you will experience some frustration at that point because of the lag between your understanding of the skill and your actual ability to perform the skill. Perfecting skills take practice...So don't be satisfied with merely reading through this book and saying to yourself, "I get it." You will not reach your full ACT potential unless you put in sufficient time practicing as well as understanding and learning. The AP World History Exam booklet put it a bit more succinctly when it said: Overall, keep in mind the Big Picture.
The "big picture" was pretty much the end result I took away after reading Paul Theroux's book on his travel's through Mexico (at age 76, and driving no less). In the heart of the country and while at a Spanish language immersion class (he was already relatively fluent but wanted to pick up the slang and nuances of the Mexican Spanish language), he was asked to name his favorite book and then what he liked about his work, an easy task for some but for a prolific writer and reader, it proved quite difficult. He wrote: And at once I became conscious of being elderly and conspicuous, because my hesitation seemed like the doddering of an old buffer. But it wasn't that at all; I was fully alert, my head surveying shelves of books, authors and titles on their spines. Choose one is a diabolical demand...(What did he like most about his work): I began, and thought hard, because no on in fifty years had ever asked me this question. And what was it that I most liked about my work? That I had no boss, no employees, no rivals, no competitors -- the freedom of being a writer? That it was a way of dealing with my life, transforming my experiences, finding ways to understand it -- recording life's joys, making its tribulations bearable, and also, in writing, easing the passage of time?...But at the bottom of it all was the spell at my desk...saying something new, often surprising myself by what emerged from my unconscious; then afterward, rewriting, improving, polishing, mulling it and making it whole, and so on, for days or years -- a page, a story, a book. In the silence of the classroom, my fellow students waiting for me to reveal what I liked most about my work, the answer came to me, easy enough to translate from English to Spanish, since the words were so similar. "El acto de la creación," I said. The act of creation.
*Back in my day no such pre-test guides existed (nor could we use calculators) but today the shelves are lined with them. The other major privatized test is the SAT although the Princeton Review says that both are considered of equal value when colleges consider the resulting scores. Once mired in controversy (said Wikipedia), the SAT along with other such entrance exams are big business, often charging $50+ per exam and having a total of 3 million+ users all while the tests struggle to keep up with the changing times. One example is that of the category of analogy questions being removed due to the appearance of cultural bias; such questions would ask you to complete the comparisons such as "apple is to lemon" as "red is to yellow" or something similar; but here is how some of the actual questions appeared: "runner is to marathon" as...(the correct answer was "oarsman to regatta"). What??? Nonetheless, independent reviews apparently show that the 7x per year tests (both the ACT and the SAT) have indeed helped to raise overall scores; in the case of the ACT, 74 takers got top scores in 1997 but by 2017 that figure had jumped to 2700. One should note that while the ACT stands for American College Testing and the SAT is short for Scholastic Aptitude Test, there are many other preparation tests, including the GED (General Education Developent) for completing high school and the AP World Exam among others.
**Hmm, something similar happened in my high school which was 99.99% white; during my years there the school rarely if ever won any sort of sports title and certainly not in football or basketball or track. Then busing arrived. Within a few years, and to my surprise when I went back to visit it during a reunion, the school's racial mix had nearly reversed and with it, the awards and championships. The question the article proposes thus becomes an interesting one in asking just how much loyalty those fans rooting for their colleges would have if such athletes and championships began departing at an accelerated rate.
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