I was recently working with a student on the ACT English section when a student said to me, “you should make a recording of these strange vocal sounds”. She was referring to a tendency I have when I am trying to teach grammar rules to vocalize and exaggerate the sounds and rhythms of a sentence to illustrate a rule. As it would be impossible to illustrate this here without providing an mp3 clip (note to self), suffice it to say that there are multiple ways of learning things, and that it is not absurd to use “musical language” to absorb a fundamental rule of english grammar. This is not any kind of breakthrough discovery. What makes it interesting is the context. How often do we think laterally when approaching standardized tests? Standardized tests are essentially associated with such words as dry, boring, unimaginative, procedural....
But alas, after ten years of teaching the SAT and ACT, I am seeing something else. If I were to show up at a student’s home, day in and day out and merely explain the content of the test, such as math equations and grammar rules, I would never have survived in this field for this many years. I would have withered up and been blown away like a dustball in the wind.
This has not happened, because I see the training for this test as a critical opportunity for many powerful intellectual and spiritual lessons.
For many students in today’s day (I love that expression: “in today’s day”....like “In tomorrow’s morrow”), the ability to concentrate, for an extended period of time, particularly on the written word, seems to be at an all-time low. Perhaps we can agree that the causes (cellphones, texting, rapid edit television, internet) affect us all. So adults can relate. We are a nation of ADD, all of us! Or to be fair, perhaps our attention is now in a different, more highly tense, gear. Some of us have found meditation, or yoga, or some other path to help us to slow down and to bring us to a greater sense of presence and inner calm.
I propose that for some high school kids, training for a standardized test can be a meditative practice. It can be a meditation in itself. I have had students who I have guided toward a more concentrated, step by step, honest-to-goodness “I am in the present moment with the question that is right in front of me on the page” kind of process. Such a way of working is very powerful, and it can be very satisfying. It unleashes certain mental capacities that one did not suspect one had. Because very often the mistakes we make, both in life and on a standardized test, originate from one simple source: we are not in the moment.
