The End of an Era

The Rest of Me: On My Tenure as an SAT Tutor Coming to a Close

Note: The Rest of Me is an occasional series about my non-writing life.

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As the back-to-school photos start to pepper my Facebook feed this week, I find myself getting a bit choked up, not because I’m a parent—I’m not¹—but because for the last 18 years I’ve worked as a standardized test tutor, helping 8th graders prep for the SSATs (a standardized test for admission to private high schools) and 10th and 11th graders prep for their college entrance exam of choice, SAT and ACT.

Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash

The pandemic turned the standardized test industry on its head, canceling all tests in the spring of 2020, inspiring colleges and universities to adopt test optional or test blind policies,² and forcing a long overdue reckoning about the utility of these tests that continues to be felt today. Three and a half years later, many of the schools remain test optional for seniors applying to college in the fall of 2023, and when the SAT transforms from a paper format to a digital format starting in 2024, many schools will remain test optional through the transition year.³

There are definite advantages to a digital standardized tests, but I’m not writing this to make a case for or against the digital test. The College Board has made its choice to accelerate the timeline for the switch to the digital test—as an inoculation against ever losing as much revenue as they lost during the pandemic, one has to assume—and objections posed on a writing newsletter are not going to change any minds.⁴

I’m writing because the shift to a computer adaptive test—a test that changes which questions are asked next based on whether a student has answered the previous question correctly or incorrectly—has forced me to choose to stop tutoring the SAT. While the computer adaptive testing has huge benefits—scores will come faster and international cheating rings will be thwarted—it’s tough to simulate the experience for students preparing for the test. Without a fleet of programmers at my disposal, how do I prepare students for a test that feels incrementally more taxing in direct proportion to how well you’re doing? And given my accidental tutoring niche was anxious high achievers,⁵ I couldn’t in good conscious send them into the test without simulating the particular stress of a computer adaptive test, so I’ve decided to opt out of tutoring the digital test.

Not happily, mind you.

It took getting an email from the mother of a student I worked with in 8th grade asking if I’d work with her for the SAT to make me finally decide I can’t continue, and I cried after I sent that email.

To be clear, I think the earthquake rocking the standardized test prep industry has the potential to be very good for students—I’ve long said that a reckoning was coming, but I expected it to come as a result of a few ivy leagues coming to their senses about the utility of these tests and other schools following suit, not as a result of a global pandemic. One less thing to worry about in a college application process that is already too fraught with falsely inflated high stakes is definitely a good thing.⁶

But, man I loved teaching this test.

It was the dream job I never thought to dream about—in the history of adults stressing kids out by asking them far, far too early what they want to be when they grow up, I don’t think a single child has ever clutched their hands to their chest, batted their eyes, and said they wanted to be an SAT tutor.

I certainly didn’t.⁷

But I stumbled into tutoring when a poet friend I met in graduate school recruited me to apply to the SAT prep company she worked for, and though I was skeptical that tutoring the SAT would be a fit, it turned out that tutoring was maybe the perfect job to support a writing life:

• I tutored after school and on weekends leaving my mornings and afternoon free to write,

• the logic of algebra—x has one true solution—was a relief from the world of my novel where the solution to any given writing problem was anything goes,

• I was a natural with anxious kids because of my storied tenure as an anxious student myself, and, most importantly,

• I absolutely loved tutoring.

I loved guiding frustrated students to lightbulb moments. I loved being passed around from student to student in a school or being handed down from one sibling to the next in a family. And with the families who had me work with kids first when they’re in middle school and again when they’re in high school, I loved watching those kids grow.

For the past seventeen years, the start of a new school year had marked the start of my busiest season, but this year—with the SAT still optional—I’m winding down with my last few students, so those first-day-of-school posts in my feed are bittersweet.

I’m grateful I’ll have more time to focus on revising my novel this fall and lean into writing coaching for both teens crafting college essays and adult writers who want accountability and support—and I’m dipping my toe into the possibility of life coaching for teens—but as my Facebook feed fills up with first day of school pictures, I’m also mourning the big part of my life that’s coming to a close.

Mostly though, I find myself lingering over the photos of the students starting 9th grade this week and hoping that they don’t buy into the mythology of the high school hamster wheel.

For many students this indoctrination started in eighth grade, with well meaning parents warning them that ninth grade would be the the start of their future, and it would be time to get truly serious. Then suddenly ninth grade hits, and the kid just wants to figure out how to be a freshman in high school, but they keep getting messages about the best way to make sure they can become freshmen in college four years from now. “Work hard,” adults all around them say. “Play all the sports, join all the clubs, volunteer at every opportunity, and just generally be a well-rounded jack of all trades!”

If I could whisper into the ears of the freshmen in those photos—if I thought anyone would listen to advice from a woman who doesn’t have kids herself—I’d tell them to breathe.

Your future is important, I’d say, but so is your present.

If some amorphous future reward is the only thing motivating you to keep your grades up, you’re going to burn out.

I'd tell you that even though it feels like all the adults your life are pushing you to be studious, this adult talking to you right now is pushing for you to stay curious. Keep an eye on your grades, sure, but don’t obsess over them—obsess instead over the questions your classes are helping you answer:

• Why is the universe expanding?

• Why does Bartleby refuse to live?

• Why is any number to the zero power always one?

• How does your body turn food into fuel?

• How could the founding fathers developing a government of the people by the people even as they continued to enslave people themselves?

Chasing a grade is drudgery. Chasing your curiosity, though, is an exercise in wonder. Or it can be, if you let it!

And as for that laundry list of extra curriculars everyone around you is pressuring you to take on? Hold tight to the activities that bring you joy and let the rest go. I can’t tell you how many avid middle-school readers turn into high school students who never pick up a book that’s not assigned, not because they don’t still love to read, but because juggling their school work with time spent playing sports they don’t really want to play and attending clubs they don’t care about means there’s no time left in a day to read.

If your greatest passions in middle school are still bringing you joy, please make room for them in your high school life. If you get into the habit of making time for joy as freshmen, you’re more likely to grow into an adult who knows how to make time for joy.

In summary, then—breathe, be curious, and choose joy. That’s the best advice I have for this year’s high school freshmen or anyone really—myself included.

A photo representation of my childhood candy shop dreams courtesy of Sam Lashbrooke on Unsplash

1. That’s a post for another day.

2. Test optional schools will gladly look at the high score you’re proud to send; test blind schools won’t.

3. I suspect this is at least in part to sidestep the confusion created when a class of applicants are submitting results from both the paper and digital tests.

4. Though I will say that’s it’s unconscionable that the response to the international plummet of the verbal scores was to dumb down the reading comprehension. And I don’t use the term dumb down lightly, but you be the judge—the current test includes challenging passages with complicated arguments and asks 10 to 11 questions about both the content of the passage and the rhetorical choices made by the author while the digital test has students read one paragraph and answer one question about said paragraph. I don’t know about you, but in a world where misinformation is running so rampant that an Onion headline has been read into the congressional record at least once, I think our students need more practice parsing logic rather than less, but what do I know?

5. It’s like students flocked to the one tutor who threw up after taking the PSAT because she worked herself into knots over a misunderstanding about the connection between performance on the PSAT and qualifying for national merit actually meant. Where PSAT is the way students qualify for the national merit scholarship, I’d somehow misunderstood that to mean that performance on the PSAT qualified students for all scholarships period. This seems horribly naive, but I was the first in my family to go to school and money was tight enough I felt guilty my feet kept growing and I kept needing new sneakers. Paying for college seemed like an impossible hurdle, so I desperately needed to shine on the PSAT. Instead I went home, looked up the definition for “august” and then had a 24-hour sick headache. I think I worked particularly well with anxious students because I’d been one. I wasn’t just another adult telling these kids to get past it. I was an adult who remembered what it felt like to make myself sick with worry.

6. And admittedly an argument could be made that there were compelling reasons for me to opt out of tutoring standardized tests long before 2020—questions of equity top the list—but as long as I was helping relieve anxiety, I felt I was doing more good than harm, particularly since the SAT was a requirement. Now that the test is optional, that’s a harder argument to make, and I’ve found myself talking parents out of extensive test prep for students who were applying to all test optional schools—one less thing for these students to worry about is a boon even if it meant I talked myself out of a new student.

7. I toggled between wanting to be a writer and wanting to own a candy shop with a dog rescue out back. I picked writer, because how was I to know the publishing world would implode so badly that a combination candy shop and rescue would look like the wiser of the two choices??! I can still picture the shop I imagined as a kid. Think old soda fountain with counters cluttered with apothecary jars full of candy.