I remember many things from eighth grade: my first Broadway play, my first pair of button-fly Guess jeans, my first real kiss.
Apparently, however, not everything I learned and experienced in 1987 made such a mark.
As I flipped through the pages of the eighth-grade Maine Educational Assessment math test, I realized immediately that a person’s memory can only retain so much over a 16-year period.
Mine obviously chose to remember my best friend’s instructions on how to make my hair stand up instead of Mr. Haskell’s lesson on prime numbers.
It was the third question on the 41-question test: How many prime numbers between 6 and 15?
My options for answers: 1, 2, 3 or 4.
OK, I can do this, I thought. I started by writing out the numbers: 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. Then I stared at them. And stared some more.
I considered whispering the question to my co-workers, who were sitting beside me breezing through their tests. But the teacher was always looking.
Since I only had 45 minutes to complete the first section and I had already wasted 10 on the first three questions, I decided to skip it and fold the corner of the page.
I moved on to No. 4. It showed a picture of four L-shaped designs. Each was made up of a different number of blocks. The question: Which rule describes the number of tiles in the nth term? My options: 2n-1, 2n-2, n or n+2. My answer: SKIP IT!
By the time I reached the end of the test, I had folded the corners of about 15 pages. It got worse as I got to the end. I was clumsily drawing trapezoids and graphs on grid paper as both of my co-workers turned in their exams and school-issued pencils.
Imagine the stress.
In the end, however, I surprised myself. Thanks to fractions, probabilities and the freak chance that I remembered that volume equals length times width times height, I earned 31 out of 46 points.
Not bad, right?
C’mon. It was either my favorite lines from “Dirty Dancing” or the difference between a greatest common factor and a least common multiple.
“Nobody puts baby in the corner.”
— Lisa Chmelecki
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