,
12 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
When I took the SAT, it was the first time I'd ever set foot in a high school. I was already working most days. I'd never taken a formal math class. I was pretty stressed out by how much the test fee cost. I drove myself. I'd practiced with five year old books from the library.
This whole story is hilarious, but only in the darkest way, because it's also devastating. I feel cold all over, reading shit like this. When I took the SAT, I was in tenth grade. I already knew that getting into college was going to be solitary, difficult, nearly impossible.
Because I didn't have a transcript, grades, a school record, I called college admissions departments to ask how to apply. I got their numbers from the library. Most of them were hostile. Some of them were kind. None of them knew what I should do. One told me to take every SAT II.
I took all the tests I could afford, out of my minimum wage barista job. AP tests and SAT IIs. The library only had prep books for some of them. I tried to look up practice questions on the twenty minute-limit computers. I drove myself back to that high school and took APs.
I actually did well, I'm a good test taker. I was already interested in psychometrics. I'd read the Bell Curve & The Mismeasure of Man at 15. What odds, though. What luck. I remember the talisman of having a few perfect scores, people suddenly acting like I was worth something.
The local high school didn't have equipment for AP Art History and canceled my exam! That was one of the random tests I'd signed up for, trying to do "everything." I sat in the lobby corner in my weird clothes (we weren't supposed to wear pants) and the AP students laughed at me.
The AP teacher--I think history--shut them up. He brought me a croissant from their breakfast spread. His face is still vivid in my mind. I thought he was so old but he was probably just a twenty-something. His kind face really meant something.
I got a National Merit Scholarship. It probably changed my life. Getting OUT, and building achievement from scraps is never one thing, one event, but that was big. I told my coworkers at my minimum wage job in our economically dead town in the back of the woods. We all cried.
Less than 2 years later I taught SAT prep for free. I taught it in grad school too. I did a research project on my school's SAT scores. It became my first conference presentation. It probably made a huge difference to my grad apps, because my school didn't have research labs.
It never even crossed my mind to tell the story of my life in my personal statements. I was certain that colleges would reject that (after all, the admissions people were so mean on the phone!). I didn't know anything about "triumph over adversity", it was just my life
This story simply proves, again, what I've known since I was a very small child, hearing that people like me don't *get* to go to school. They think we are worthless.
Well, I MADE the chances they wouldn't give me. And the chances meant everything to me. And they were razor-thin. I have tried to repay them every single day. I am not a genius, I'm not worth more than other people. But I am sure as hell not worth less than other people.
