The SAT Using Your Brain for Your Own Advantage –Ends With Dunkin Donuts Pumpkin Love Rings
Compare March 4 and March 5 to Congeal Strategies to Answer:
When You Know Immediately and When You Do Not Know Immediately
Look at my strategies, considering my personal learning styles and test-taking styles, to see why I would miss points if I answer math questions on SAT tests the same way I answer language arts questions on SAT tests. Classic examples are the March 4 and the March 5 questions for the day! When I make these adjustments, I add blocks of points to all test scores.
No, I did not know all of this when I was a teen. I have learned that understanding these concepts helps in critical thinking skills and in life skills in every area. I share these tools in my columns as organizing tools for thinking.
Use these patterns to understand what to do according to your ‘best practices’ to feel confident that you do get every point you know on the SAT test, especially if you are taking the test on March 13. Pretend you are taking the test on March 13 to give yourself the urgency to understand the difference that test strategy makes to get performance points while taking a test.
First, know whether you perform better while writing on a test than, say, in front of people. I am NOT a performer in front of an audience. I need to know this about myself in order to do my best on everything. The superintendent of schools in the state where I am certified to teach won a million dollars answering questions I was able to answer sitting in my living room watching her on TV. The show is called ‘Are you Smarter than a Fifth Grader?’
(By the way, she pledged that same million dollars, before she started the contest, to the schools for the deaf and blind in Georgia. A bankruptcy judge blocked that money from going to those schools! By what reasoning can that be?)
My point here (I have more points about the above judge and his 'reasoning' ) is that Ms. Cox performs well, perhaps even better than in writing, in front of an audience. If you have this strength, be sure to study in contests with other people. Perform in games and spelling bees. Get into drama club. Recite poetry. Learn entire scenes from Shakespeare. Dance. Sing. Write your own plays and songs. Debate. Get on student and city council. Be on stage. The skills will carry over to every area of your life.
In a seminar at Jekyll Island, I listened to Pulitzer Prize winning authors speak about inspiration to writing. Ed Larson, a Pulitzer prize-winning author of historical writing—non-fiction writing that is as enjoyable to read as any fiction, said that he had a teacher who insisted that he memorize poems. Today, he says, he quotes from those poems--poems he memorized long ago in her classes. He still enjoys ‘owning’ those words. As he acknowledges, he leans upon those passages to write his own.
As much as I read and love literature, I have never memorized poetry; nor have I enjoyed acting on stage. Public performance is not a strength for me, so I develop compensatory strengths. If you do enjoy these activities, please know that these pleasures and talents will help you in mathematics, in science, in social studies, and in economics. How can performing on the stage help you in mathematics and social studies?
Life is drama and comedy. Trust me, and I will explain as you read my columns. You will recognize patterns. You will notice cause and effect. You will find support and resources. You will join in community and give support. You will experience the joy of celebration of another’s success through empathy. You will realize the connection your brain has made from a left brain to a right brain function. You will reap advantages.
Sow these seeds of practice—in front of the mirror, holding a hairbrush as your microphone, if necessary. When you have a talent, there is a way your talent works in every area of life; and your strengths help you in every area of a test. Grooming your talent makes you feel good, perform well, and do well. This is why I like to encourage students to find what you like to do and to expand upon those interests by reading, writing, and researching them, as well as adding to them.
Do you like skateboarding, swimming, playing chess, designing cars, designing web pages, analyzing crime scenes, caring for babies, styling hair, inventing robotic organizers, writing short stories, singing hip-hop, dancing on your toes, parachuting from airplanes, hiking desert trails, surfing huge waves, tracking non-supporting parents’ accounts, organic gardening, or making your own clothes?
Are you going to decide what to do each day of your life and how to be content and what to do in relation to other people? Or are you going to wait for others to make those decisions for you? What factors in to ‘freedom’ to live the way you want to live? Is it where the money comes from? To whom are you obligated to ‘think’ the way that person wants you to think? Is it the person who pays you?
Before you ‘sit for a test,’ you have to get your mind into the mindset for that specific test in order to perform as well as possible to reap the benefits for your personal portfolio. The Scholastic Aptitude Test is a test to measure your aptitude. That is why I am throwing these ‘cosmic’ questions at you a week before taking a standardized test.
Before taking the SAT, think this about the test question designer and the test question grader:
“The correct answer to this question is going to be an answer that a person will give who has excellent potential to learn NEW concepts and excellent potential to CONSTRUCT new ideas from information right in front of her or him.”
Think about the kind of person you believe is likely to succeed in college. Who is she or he? Why is she or he likely to succeed in college?
One way to know is that she succeeded in high school. The people who admit students to colleges use that information. They use the grades and courses the student had in high school. Theadmissions workers for colleges even weigh how difficult those courses were in relation to other courses and other schools.
Another way for the college administrators to know about the potential college student is from the written information the student sends, and this written information includes the essay on the SAT test. Think about the essay in this way. What do you want a person to see when that person sees your essay after looking at a huge stack of essays from others who want to go to that school?
Another way the college screens the students, mostly screening out students, is from scores on the college entrance exams, including the SAT and ACT. Here is where you can note, for example, if you do score extremely high on one area (say, language arts) if that is the area in which you plan to major in college.
You may be thinking: I don’t even know why I am reading this. I either know the answer on a test or not. If I can figure it out, it isn't because I know what kind of answer they want. It is because I know the answer.
That is not necessarily true.
Standardized tests, especially aptitude tests, often have all the information you need right in front of you. We already know the answer is right in front of you.
Remember every question counts one point. No question, no matter how much more difficult than the one before or the one after, counts more points than another question. You must have a strategy about when to make a choice and to move on even if you know how to do the problem. This is a matter of pacing. It is also a matter of judgment. This judgment is part of what is being measured.
I want to add a note here about accommodations. If you have a valid need for accommodations about time, there is a way to receive these accommodations, even if you are homeschooled or if you are in public or private school without an individual plan.
Note: Go to the College Board site, www.collegeboard.com, and see the articles about special accommodations. These do have to be arranged well in advance. Reading about them can be quite helpful in understanding metacognition, how to learn, for anyone.
The March 5 SAT question for the day correct answer relies upon your knowing the meaning of words. The clues in the sentence lead you to the ‘interrelated’ answer because it is a positive word about the intermingling of politics and music.
The sentence is either neutral or positive about the fact that a mostly musical TV station had a great deal of information about a completely political event, the 1992 Presidential election. As you read the sentence, you should pick up the tone and connotation (feeling of words) that the intermingling of music and politics is not being treated as a ‘bad’ thing by the writer.
The fact that the 1992 election is the one mentioned (and I read this question in 2010) indicates that this mixing of music and politics is not new; and, connecting my own knowledge, the mixing is not. Nothing in the sentence indicates negative connotation (contradictory) or blurred, little known concepts (obscure). The word ‘enclosed’ does not fit the sentence and neither does ‘permeated.’
USING METACOGNITION: Your Personal Pattern and Strategies
1. In The Way of the Warrior, the Samurai turns the strength of the enemy against him. In the same way, the ‘flip’ side of your greatest strength is your weakness, so you have to keep it working for you and not against you.
Paying attention to my own learning skills, the potential for error I face in almost questions is answering the wrong question. This is because my learning style is to be looking for everything I know and everything I can connect while reading the material. In essence, I am rapidly ‘answering questions’ while I read and predicting what the questions will be. (One of the jokes about being old is: You know you are old when you know all the answers and nobody will ask you the questions.)
The fact is, I can help people to do well on standardized tests because I know about reading on the test and using the test itself to perform as well as I can: Comprehension and success in taking tests is based upon how quickly you can do exactly what I just described, while using all of your resources to do so: reading, connecting, predicting. The fact that I can do it better in a test situation has helped me in life because of my life choices.
If I take all these same qualities to a quiz show, I will not do so well. I freeze in front of an audience!
Yes, my choice was ‘interrelated’ without hesitation, yet I still ticked off each of the other words, eliminating them even as I marked the correct answer.
The above procedure—the way I, personally, answered today’s question quickly and correctly (as 81% of the responders did today) is the way I approach most styles of questions on the SAT test.
2. My procedures that I use on 80% of the test questions on standardized tests (see above) is absolutely WRONG for the March 5 test question. My usual procedure is not appropriate for the mathematics section in general, though it works well for a lot of it. Yesterday’s question, specifically, is an example to watch in developing your mathematics strategy. If I had spent as long in a test as I did in real life on this question, I would have made a mess of the math test section. I got it right, but there is no way that the point was worth it.
3. Plus, the pattern that I followed to get it right, while being the same as the one explained by the SAT website, revealed to me, early on, that I should mark the probable answer and come back to the question because it was NOT going to be either 5 or -5 (a whole number) answer. In short, I could eliminate two, I should have put a dot in one of the other three circles and moved to the other test questions to come back to this one because I could see I was going to have to be careful about minus and plus and numerator and denominator.
March 4th’s question for the day is a math question that requires you to follow more steps than evident from the beginning.
There is no doubt that you will have this type of question on the SAT. However, if this one seems difficult to you, even though the numbers are only 2 and 3 and 5; and the operations are few, do not despair when you see another one on the test. It may be easier.
This one is not as straightforward as some. Once you have formed the necessary algebraic expression for this problem from the information given, you still have careful steps to realize that the answer is NOT going to be 5 or -5.
March 5th’s question is not only quick for me to choose the correct answer, but it is equally quick for me to check by eliminating the other answers. The comparison to the way my brain handled yesterday’s question is so stark and clear that I use these two as strategy for the type of questions they are. Notice these things about yourself.
My bigger advice for test-taking strategy comes from what I did when I worked the math problem yesterday. I do every type of word question rapidly, and I always eliminate every other answer once I choose the answer. Every correct answer is a point. While I am in the language arts areas, I am merely working to gather all of the points in the most efficient way.
I take too long on math and science questions—and on some math-related questions in other subjects. For me to gather in the full benefit of what I am able to do in these areas, I have to monitor myself in a different way other tests. Many of the styles of problems are predictable. We know they will be on the test. For some, I can recommend a strategy similar to what I do rapidly with language arts questions: Know what you are looking for and eliminate everything else.
For these tests, I must have a strict self-monitoring strategy to keep moving. I took too long on the question yesterday. It did not take long to put the question into the proper algebraic form; but, then, I toyed with it. For one thing, I wrote it as y+2y+5=x+2x. That is fine. It is the same thing as the way the SAT writers have it—except switched (like 5+2=2+5 instead of 2+5=5+2).
Too, I wanted to try every answer. I am not adept enough with this type of problem to eliminate all of the incorrect answers for this form of problem. I need a better pace.
MY CORRECT STRATEGY FOR THIS PROBLEM:
Do what I notice immediately to do: In my case, I knew right away to write the question in algebraic form, and I did so as y+2y+5=x+2x. I should put this on my scratch paper with the test problem # next to it and in the booklet, along with the next step, which was also evident to me. 3y + 5= 3x
At that point, it may be very quick for you to see the answer, and if it is, you know your strategy for these questions; but, if, like me, you see that you do know that the answer is not 5 or -5, but you do not ‘see’ immediately which of the others it is, note what you do know, put a dot in one of the other choices, AND MOVE ON!
Each answer on the test counts one point. When you are doing problems that make you stop, look, and listen for too long, as I do on some mathematical problems—and notice I am aware of what type of problems they are—have a strategy.
Tonight, I saw a show on TV about witness preparation. The witness was warned not to ramble. He wanted to tell more. This is what your brain does sometimes when it is in test mode. You have to have a set thing to do. (The lawyer told him to stop after nine words.) You stop after you have tried the problem and realize that you cannot ‘dive’ to an answer. If necessary, mark ‘C’ on your answer sheet, so you will see the dot in the center of the circle of C; and keep moving.
Find the way to do five to six problems, filling in the marks you’ve made. Keep closing the gap of how many until you have only two that you are filling in. Manage your answer sheet CAREFULLY.
Remember to stop several minutes before the end of the test to fill in the circles you want to count and look more into the ones you have marked for consideration later.
PUMPKIN LOVE RINGS
TWO THINGS RELATED TO GETTING MATH POINTS:
1. Some of those strange looking questions with cubes and patterns are just cool riddles. Figure them out on the spot. They are a great relief if you start to feel at sea.
If you do feel that you are getting stranded, literally close your eyes for one minute and ‘float’ like you are really in a pool or on a wave. Then open your eyes and breathe in, breathe out—get your rhythm going and relax. You can make it all better later, if necessary.
2. For a minute now, take out a blank sheet of paper and a pen and make up your own problem that goes like this: Somebody asks you your age, and you tell them that you are 4 years older than your sister, and she is 2 times as many years old as your younger brother. Using M for yourself (Me), S for your sister and B for your brother, write this out showing that M is 4 more than S and S is 2 times B.
Pretend you are a detective, and you are given clues like this. There are things you do know, and there are things you want to know. There are things you can find out from what you have.
Do you have enough information here to find out anybody’s age?
TWO THINGS RELATED TO GETTING POINTS EVERYWHERE ON THE TEST:
1. Keep learning vocabulary—even from the Questions for the Day—all the way up to test day.
2. Make connections with the words and terms. Use the glossaries from all the textbooks you can find to do this, and look at all the images related to the terms. Watch children’s word shows. Seeing the letters made into a robot, a duck, and a clock keeps reminding your brain about the codes. It works. What can I tell you?
Have a little fun on-line while you are studying. Today, I designed a doughnut in a contest for Dunkin Donuts. I could win $12,000.
It was just fun. Plus, I named it. Mine is Pumpkin Love Ring—a pumpkin doughnut with white icing and chocolate sprinkles. Then, I was asked to ‘tell the story’ inspiring my doughnut. Well, I chose the pumpkin because Dr. Amen, the brain-based psychologist on PBS, says that male and female people love the aroma of pumpkin. It is a smell we like.
I related that relationship to the pumpkin doughnut ring to giving a ring—the doughnut ring—and eating these tasty, sweet, colorful, aromatic snacks at June weddings, for summer snacks, in the fall (when we traditionally think of pumpkins .Halloween and Thanksgiving)…on into winter holidays…and spring sproutings, too! Does anyone have a healthier pumpkin doughnut, vanilla iced, chocolate sprinkle version of the Pumpkin Love Ring I can send them? Pumpkin is good food! Remember, if you write a song about it, nothing rhymes with orange.
Have some fun with words, concepts, brain-games, and test strategies. Pass this way!judiethcarol&rocketcatmarch2010c.
