i knew in the 2nd grade that standardized testing was bullshit. harry potter book 4 had just come out and i was at a good part. harry had just put his name into the goblet of fire.
during the standardized test, we were allowed to keep a post-test book on our desk. i diligently got started on part 1: english. at the time, all of the answers went on the same sheet, but all of the questions were in different booklets. so i finish all my english questions, read in my extra time, and then it’s part 2: math.
i realize i have answered all of my english questions on the math portion of the answer sheet. at first, annoyed but undeterred, i’m like. okay great i gotta erase every bubble. but i get bored around question 5 of doing this because… like… harry potter is sitting on my desk and i could just give them the wrong answers. so i answer maybe 10 whole questions in the math portion, copy the english answers over to where they actually belong, and then crack open the book and call it a day.
i obviously failed. this is the real life, not a movie. my parents were called in. i had scored in the lowest percentile. i was bad at math. i was concerningly bad at math. i could have done better just guessing than how i did with the english answers.
if this was just a funny story, someone would ask me “why did you do so badly when you usually get fairly average grades” and i would have said “i wanted to read harry potter, not take this stupid test.” but it’s the real life, and nobody asked. instead, i was branded stupid and bad at math. i got placed in a lower math than i needed to be in; got bored, stopped paying attention. knew i was in the “worst at math” group, started saying “i’m bad at math” and 100% stopped trying because the further i fell behind, the worse i got. through the rest of my academic career – until senior year in high school, i never got above a c on a math test, because i was “just bad” at math.
i had undiagnosed adhd. the only reason i know now i have adhd is because at 22 years old, i finally went to a therapist, who effectively said, “are you kidding me you have the most obvious case of attention deficit i’ve ever seen.”
but nobody had been looking. my one test grade had given teachers permission to not look, because, obviously, i was bad at math. the one time i got 100% on a math test – that one time in senior year – i remember my math teacher looking at it and saying “it’s clear that if you just focused, you could do the work.”
in college i’d take a math class and i actually “just focused” for the first time in my life – meaning i treated math as a challenge, but one i could overcome with the skills i’d learned all on my own, through constant work and practice. i got the highest grade in my class. i still think i’m bad at math.
which makes me wonder: how many people got fucked over because of something stupid like “i was too preoccupied with harry potter”. who had nobody looking out for them. who slipped under the radar because – come on, aren’t some people just bad at things?
THIS IS PRETTY MUCH WHAT HAPPENED TO ME. The only difference is that I get test anxiety and I get distracted by the pattern of the stupid scantron tests (SURELY THE ANSWER CANT BE A THREE TIMES IN A ROW EVEN THO I KNOW THE ANSWERS ARE RANDOM AND SO VERY WELL COULD BE) and end up messing up my answers so that I can make the answers not form the patterns that I’m starting to see emerge (even tho I know there is no pattern because the answers are random, I still have trouble blocking that out, even if I try to cover up the answers I’ve already filled out).
They put me in the lowest math group, then when they saw I was bored, they moved me to the highest, where I had missed a month’s worth of lessons, and thus did shitty on tests, so they moved me back down, then saw I was bored, rinse and repeat, for my entire elementary school math years. Math is the ONE subject where I struggle with the basics (and even though I passed the class, I feel like Calculus would’ve made a lot more sense if I’d had a better foundation) and I attribute it to the fact that my elem school teachers didn’t use their damn heads and realize that duh I’m not going to ace parts of tests where I missed the lesson because they were too busy moving me around so they could label my math ability level >_<
Astronaut bird 