Once in high school, I’d finished some unnecessary standardized test early and was staring into space when a man I’d never seen before asked me what I’d thought of the reading prompts. With the know-it-all confidence only a high schooler can muster, I tore into all the ways I thought the passages sucked. When I was done, the man informed me that he had written the test. Instead of feeling bad for being a jerk about it, I remember thinking how sad it was that his job was to write tests. Little did I know that years later, writing tests would be my job too, and it would actually be pretty cool.
In my life before journalism, I often made my money grading and creating standardized tests. I had a seasonal gig evaluating reading tests, deciphering shoddily-scanned children’s handwriting and assigning it a number score. Later, I worked for a company creating math materials for standardized test prep, which would come in handy down the line when I had a stint as a narrative designer on an educational math game that was–you’ll never believe this–ultimately cancelled. I’ve also worked in schools as a teacher’s assistant (the semester after I left, my class was in a documentary) and at an online tutoring company that, now I think about it, was well ahead of its time.
The math-heavy nature of a lot of this work was ironic considering that I was absolutely abysmal at math when I was in school. I more or less failed math every year since third grade long division, despite getting tutors and staying after school for extra help. Math is one of those things you can get in your head that you’re just naturally not good at; when the math test prep job came along, I thought about my past and was wracked with anxiety that I couldn’t actually do it.
I stuck to elementary and middle school questions, far too afraid of and traumatized by anything higher. My mom, a middle-school English teacher, sent me a bunch of curriculum materials from one of her math colleagues, which explained how teachers taught the concepts I’d struggled with as a kid. Armed with these books, the internet, and my life experience since those grades, I was shocked to find that math wasn’t as hard as I remembered, especially when I had the logic of it laid out in front of me in a more robust way than my textbooks had provided. Stuff like geometry made more sense now that I was an adult who’d actually used some of its concepts.
It also helped that each question I wrote, pegged to the Common Core, had to adhere to strict guidelines regarding its content, difficulty level, and where it fell on Bloom's taxonomy. This turned the tangled wilds of math into discrete, specific concepts both mathematically and in terms of the cognitive skills they required. But these limitations also made writing questions challenging–what is a high difficulty, complex reasoning question about area that can only involve the basic math skill of counting squares? The work required so much more than just knowing how to do elementary school math, and I had to get creative to come up with questions that met all the requirements. It was fun to put my friends’ names into word problems, and to try to think of age-appropriate, practical situations for concepts that got around the eternal complaint about learning math you’ll never use.
The questions I wrote were multiple choice, which meant that in addition to providing the right answer, I also had to provide three wrong ones. These had to be “plausibly wrong;” if the question was “what’s 10+5?” one of the answers couldn’t be “1,364.” It could, however, be “105,” because a student might just put all the numbers together instead of adding their value, or “5” in case they mixed up the plus and minus sign. Coming up with these plausibly wrong answers was my favorite part of the job. I’d put myself back in the mindset of young me and try to imagine how I’d have misunderstood a word problem or made a mistake in a multi-step question. And then I got to write a supportive little note explaining the error and guiding the student back toward the right track, the kind of thing I wished I'd had instead of a teacher frowning at me as they handed back another red pen-covered failed test.
Later, the math game I helped design took all of this to another level by trying to add fun into the mix. As a kid, I had always assumed educational games were made by boring adults who didn't actually care if a game was fun or didn't really understand what games were, but our team put so much thought into avoiding what educational games people call “chocolate-covered broccoli.” It was energizing to have conversations with the other narrative designers and the content team, trying to draw out the core actions of a math skill and thinking about enjoyable–but still educational–situations they could apply to. We wrote a bunch of interesting, diverse characters to go along with the game’s story; I was especially excited about a plotline involving math anxiety, thinking back to my own struggles in childhood and the skills I wished I’d been taught or the messages I wished I’d received. While we knew we were fighting a losing battle for kids’ time against games like Roblox and Fortnite, we still hoped to give them something they’d enjoy, remember, and see themselves in. Though I’d left the company before the game was cancelled, I was still sad to learn that no one would ever get to play it.
The main takeaway from my experience is probably that even if you totally suck at math in school, you can still find yourself doing it as a job–so much so that you get stuck doing it all the time if you start a business. But young me would have been horrified by this lesson–the thing I hate the most, all the time?--so instead, I like to see it as proof that your relationship to something can grow and change over your life. Difficulties in school don’t mean you’re “not a writer” or “just bad at math;” without the pressures of grades or the restrictions of a class, you can always learn something in new ways or with new tools. I like to hope I gave kids a little bit of what I was missing and, in some small way, helped them avoid some of the struggles I went through. At the very least, I hope I never wrote anything a kid would tell me sucked to my face.
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