ACTing With Sympathy

I participated in my first math ACT prep session last Thursday night.

The way it works is that parents pay $10 to enroll their child in the 2-hour course. Mrs. S (a former college softball player and genuinely all-around sunny person) led off by giving some test strategies. For example, sometimes since they give you five answers to choose from, it's fastest just to plug in the answers to the given formula one at a time until one of them works. Another strategy that sounds funny but is soberingly real: Answer the question that's asked! Just because you figured out that x=3 and one of the listed answers is "3"... doesn't make it the right answer if the question is asking what the value of y is. Stuff like that.

Ten students had been signed up for our section, deemed the lower level section. There was also a middle level and higher level session going on in other rooms. As of the start time, we had... zero. Just as we started to gather up our things to head out and help one of the other rooms, a student walked in.

"Got a calculator?" Mrs. S asked. Nope. Off Mrs. S went to go fetch one for her.

Student #2 walked in. Grasping a chance to contribute, I said "Got a calculator?" He politely pointed to the calculator on his desk, while no doubt wondering who this blind guy was.

As the class began I scribbled notes diligently. After a half hour of overview (including the % of the test that is geometry, the approximate number you have to get right out of 60 in order to get an ACT score of 20, etc.), she handed out a sample exam for the students to work.

She looked at me. Want to go one-on-one, or team up? I interpreted the question to mean: Do I want to help tutor, or just watch her tutor them both? Being the leadership type, I said one-on-one. Since there was a female and a male student, it felt proper for me to help the male.

I did... so-so. Honestly the hour felt like three hours. This student was lacking the basics. When you don't know that a straight line is 180 degrees, and given that two-thirds of the exam is geometry or harder, the upside is pretty low. He was a tough, wiry dude and stuck it out despite not getting a question right for the last 30 minutes. Hey, at least he showed up and got something for his parents' money. And I learned a lesson that if you want to truly use an ACT prep class to increase someone's score, you need to structure it WAY longer than two hours.

In fact, ACT prep is probably best used merely as a chance to refine the test-taking strategy. Perhaps there could be a separate "geometry review" class or "algebra review" class to do the heavier lifting for students who have a big knowledge gap. It would be all semester long, maybe an hour or so once a week. Something that a person retired from a corporate job could do with his free time. Hmmm.