Passing

I took a test this week - a thing I had not done in a long while. I wanted to extend my teaching certification and the state of Pennsylvania insisted that passing this test was the way to accomplish that.

My experiences with tests have generally been positive. I have a good memory and can reason my way out of many problems. Ironsides are generally gifted with the fine art of BS, which helps when all else fails.

But this test was different. I completed several practice tests a the pool and asked my 17 year old son to grade them for me. The amount to head shaking and face making was alarming. Why had I done so poorly? What is wrong with me? I like math and I teach kids math every day, so why is it that I can't pass this test? Why did I admit my failure to anyone?

The situation became more grave when I purchased a practice test on-line. My score was so low, I was afraid the state would take away my existing certification. 

Problem solving is what I do in life and what we do in math. So rather than sit around feeling ashamed of my performance (and the fact that my son said I wasn't a "real mathematician" - ouch!), I made a plan to solve the problem.

Practice problems and Khan Academy took me pretty far, but I was feeling really dirty about the fact that I was just reviewing algorithms and skipping over the concepts. (Hey, I was running out of time..).

Cramming, it turns out, sorta works if you had some stuff in your head to begin with. As I frantically reviewed functions, inequalities and quadratic equations, I looked for practical applications and real world examples. I took non-algebraic and slower ways to solve things. I talked it out with my son, who eventually decided I was a quasi-mathematician (there's a shorter way, mom..)

After two years of project based, conceptual math, traditional math felt weird and a little unfriendly. I did get better at evidencing my work and I made some straight up beautiful tables and number-lines. It felt good to sketch the math, try a few different ways and confirm my results - all things I want my students to want to and be able to do. It was as if my traditional math self finally made peace with my problem solving, project based math self.

Last night my son and I took a walk. After we covered the usual topics of tennis and people we know, we started talking about math. Being the mom of a mathy kid, we have these conversations a lot. But yesterday's was a little different. We talked why arabic numbers are better than Roman numerals, we talked about how triangles were huge in ancient Greece. We talked about how cool it would be to have something in math named for you and we talked about Ramanujan, because for some reason he always comes up. 

And then my son said, "At the beginning of every math test, you have to look for The Problem - the one that you will start doing and then stop, smile and know that you can solve it. After you find that problem, the rest of the test will be ok. You're gonna pass this test, mom. You don't need to get a perfect score, you just need to pass. You know a lot of math. And after this week you remember even more. You got this."

This morning I woke up, did a few more practice problems and then marched into the testing center with my four function calculator and the knowledge that I only needed to pass. There were 60 problems and it was around the 5th one that I started having fun. Sure, there was some sketchy reasoning and some straight-up guessing, but I passed.

One of the Essential Questions for the first unit of math is How can we create a community of mathematicians? I hope that when we're all together later this month, we can reflect on our own experiences with passing, with being encouraged, with feeling successful and with a willingness to grapple with problems. Because I gotta believe that just passing the test and feeling like I'm part of the mathy group in my house is greater than acing the test and acting alone.