AP Testing with Spencer and Friends

The kids taking the AP Calculus test are meeting me at 7: 30. Their teacher, Andrea Wiseman, serves them bagels in her classroom at 7, an annual tradition, like Thornton’s for his AP Lit students—fruit drinks or Mexican Coca-Cola in old school bottles. Most go for the Coke. Checking off the Calc kids as they arrive, I find I still know a few. Several were in my classes, give me a hug. Chatting with these, I see a tall young man arrive and quip that I didn’t know Spencer was coming and could we please not take him? The girls I’m talking to laugh indulgently.

“Where’s Tyler?” I ask, peering at my list.

“She’s here,” someone says, nodding toward a gorgeous, graceful young woman who smiles at me.

I stare at this stunning transformation. The Tyler I knew was a skinny, awkward thirteen. “I hate the way you guys grow up,” I complain.

“We’re sorry,” Spencer offers complacently.

A girl compliments my top.

“It’s all stripey,” Spencer observes with satisfaction.

You can’t expect to get something back when you teach. If that’s your requirement, you’ll have a miserable time of it most days. But the children are sometimes appreciative of and sweet to their teachers and when they are it’s gravy.

At exactly 7:30, we cross the street to the college campus, where we’re borrowing a lecture hall. They shriek and laugh, letting off pre-test steam. When we arrive, I say primly, “Inside voices, my dears. Leave your backpacks and cell phones by the door.”

Once they’re seated, I repeat the instructions about electronic devices and several who missed it the first time get up to dispose of them. We’ve bubbled in names and such, when I ask for the third time and Spencer, startled to hear it, gets up to put his cell away.

We pause while he does so. A girl sighs. “You see why I didn’t want to bring him?” I demand.

I distribute the do-not-open-until-told-to-do-so test packets. When I give Miranda hers, she smiles. “I always wanted one of these.”

Finally ready to start the actual test, I pause for questions. Apologetic but urgent, a girl asks if she can go to the bathroom. I examine her anxious face, decide: “Make it snappy.” “Oh, is she going? I need to too.” Three run. To pass the time while we’re waiting, I say, “you’re math students: tell me how long this test is going to take.”

“Oh, Ms. Dubrava,” Spencer explains, “we don’t do basic math.”

The bathroom goers return within three minutes and I say, “O.K. set?”

“Wait,” George interrupts. “Let’s start this in true Mrs. Wiseman style.” He inhales, saying, “in the nose, out the mouth,” and most do it with him.

“Go,” I say, as they finish exhaling, and make a note of the time. Like all the DSA students I’ve ever had, they bend silently to their work. The jostling and pre-test jitters vanish: dead serious juniors and seniors, heads bowed over their tests.

One young man is wearing his golden brown turkey hat and now I have time to examine it at leisure. On the sides, there are two fat furry drumsticks capped with white paper frills. To be worn at the Thanksgiving table. Brings him luck, I imagine.

The lecture hall has a steep rake, so from a back row every desktop, every test booklet is visible. I walk up and down the stepped aisles regularly, just to walk, to hand out fresh pencils or tissues. It’s spring. Allergies. Not a sound, besides occasional sniffing.

Proctoring exams is dull work unless you relish silence, a commodity increasingly difficult to come by. When I worked here, I enjoyed the serenity of this campus across the street from my school, but now they’ve polluted the air with music on outdoor speakers, like every shopping mall and restaurant in the U.S.A., most of it inescapably loud. Silence is propitious for thinking. I think about how I miss the stimulation of interaction with students. If I stop coming to this school, I’ll need something like it to stay sharp. When I sub after not doing so for a month, my teacher skills are rusty. On the other hand, subbing for a week leaves me exhausted.

First half of the test sealed and collected, time for our ten-minute break. Looking at the clock, I say, “Let’s agree on when we’re returning.”

“Never,” suggests Spencer.

“Ten-twelve,” say two all-business girls, which is precisely ten minutes. And at 10:12, everyone is back. When George wants to start with the Wiseman breath for the second half, the kids say, “yeah, yeah, let’s just get this over with.” What’s enough? What’s too much? How do you know when to quit?

At 11:35, we start the last section. One or two always finish miles ahead of everyone else—either the geniuses or those without a clue. Not knowing them as students, I have no idea which. They all look tired. At the start of the last section, a girl said, “I’m so done.” But she read every question, bubbled in every answer.

When it’s finished and I’m collecting pencils, I ask the turkey hat kid, one of the last to leave, if it brought him luck. Oh, no, he replies, he wore it to remind himself and his classmates that this isn’t the end of the world. They were so stressed about it. “I told them, look at my hat and remember: ultimately this doesn’t matter.”