We figure out how much you save by buying two CDs together rather than separately. (The trick is to read the question carefully; the test asks for the discount per CD.) We add up the distinct prime factors of 60. (Remember, distinct means different; the answer is 2+3+5, not 2+2+3+5.) We find the areas of oddly shaped figures. (Ballpark! Eliminate outrageous answer choices!)

Finally, we channel the spirit of Joe Bloggs--the fictional character created by The Princeton Review to teach high schoolers how not to take the SAT. An average student, Joe nails all the easy questions (except for the ones he makes careless mistakes on) and misses all the hard ones. Once students are armed with this knowledge, "What would Joe do?" becomes a question rivaling the familiar bumper sticker query in cosmic importance. On hard questions, you probe the answer choices for the likely Joe Bloggs answer--that is, the most appealing (read: wrong) answer. When you identify the answer Joe would pick and eliminate it, you can guess from the remaining four choices, statistically upping your score.

The image that comes to my mind is John Dewey doing a 360 in his grave. (Which, by the way, is the sum of the angle measures in a quadrilateral.)

The SAT represents everything that's wrong with American standardized tests, and SAT prep represents everything that's wrong with American education. Forget teaching to a test. I'm teaching inside a test--living, breathing and eating the SAT, stretching for a precious 10 points here, squirming for another 10 there.

Thinking is discouraged. I typically respond "I don't know and I don't care" to most questions beginning with "why?" (such as, "Why isn't one a prime number?" and "Why aren't we allowed to smoke during break?"). Nothing I teach will help students in school or life, with the possible exception of the work ethic they might develop through dutifully completing the monotonous homework sections I assign directly out of a manual. The learning process is nothing. The end goal--raising scores and deceiving college admissions officers--is everything.

Then there is a moral problem: I'm perpetuating the socioeconomic disparity in education by improving the college prospects of those who can afford my class. Of course, The Princeton Review does have a touch of social conscience. The Princeton Review runs free programs in inner cities and reveals its trade secrets in books you can buy for under a grand. But The Princeton Review is a firm, and as I learned in Ec10, firms are profit-maximizers. They charge whatever they can get, and it turns out that they can extort obscene amounts of money from enough people to make unintentional class warfare worth their while.

Yet it's the best job I've ever had. I get to hang out all day with kids who are about my age, many of whom are pretty decent people. In between the stupid math I get paid to do, we eat lunch, joke around, talk about college and life in general. While I admit this might not really be educational per se, it's also undeniable that the time they spend with me is time that they're not smoking crack or watching Pokmon re-runs. I feel like I'm being a good role model...or something like that.