#9 Practicing Safe Tests

As many of you may know, a great number of Highschool juniors sat down for four hours and took the SATs last Saturday. Now, now, before you turn green with envy, I should warn you that this post is not about some dreadful SAT experience. No, no, this post is about some dreadful practice SAT experience!

I took my practice SATs at a college in New York City, and the first time I went there, I had to figure out which of the two empty classrooms on a certain floor was the one I had to go to. That's how all of this started. Naturally, I thought to play a strenuous game of eenie meenie miney mo, and let fate decide which classroom was correct.

Some other teenage girls walked in and made themselves comfortable at their desks, some of them chatted but it was sort of early, so we all sort of kept to ourselves. Finally, an older woman walked in and introduced herself. She then asked for all of our names, and our reason for being there. All of the girls said some variation of, "I'm doing this for school credit." I responded by saying, "my tutor told me to come here and a bunch of my friends have to do the same thing." There was some snickering but, whatever. Then, without further ado, the proctor opened her backpack and took out a box. I was expecting her to take out timers, pencils, or busy work (it's no fun to proctor a four hour test). She then passed out a condom to every girl in the class.

If you're reaction right now is, "um... what?" then we're on the same page. If you think this is normal, you have a future on Dateline NBC.

So, anyway, imagine my surprise. I take out my calculator, and place it right next to a condom. Furthermore, NO ONE was acting like this was weird... I snickered, naturally, and the woman shoot me a glare and goes, "if you're not going to take this sex-ed class seriously, you can leave."

...

So, okay, I was in the wrong room. Had I walked across the hall I would have been sharpening my pencils and bubbling answers like the rest of 'em. Luckily, that test hadn't started, but that's not the point. I quickly took a trip down memory lane to recall what I said in this Sex Ed class that must have been horribly misinterpreted.

First of all, when I informed the class that I was there because, "my tutor had sent me," I certainly raised some red flags. What tutor forces their student to go to a sex ed class? Was "tutor" codeword for pimp?

Second of all, when I tried to make conversation with the girl sitting next to me, I mumbled something along the lines of, "God, these tests are so stressful!" to which she responded, "not if you're safe..." I chalked it up to some weird testing technique, until I realized that she thought I was talking about pregnancy tests.

Lastly, as I continued to socialize, I said, "you know, when this is all over, it's not like I'm going to use the stuff I've learned for this in real life." Out of context, I was talking about factorials and logarithms... In context, however, I appeared to be some girl just begging for a Lifetime movie to be made about her.

So, readers, this post comes with another very valuable lesson. If and when you go to take an SAT (or ACT, I suppose), and you are handed a rubber... your answer should always be, "E: none of the above."