I smiled when I saw Daphne’s tweet: “Overheard in Borders: ‘I had an SAT tutor for a month but he smelled really bad so I got rid of him’.” When my daughter’s tweet got replicated on Facebook, her husband Etan and his friend Eric, a recent law school grad, made comments about their own SAT tutor’s “yeasty-smelling” bad breath.
Among certain circles it seems unthinkable not to have special tutoring for the SAT’s, which has the potential to make the test more a measure of parental means than aptitude. For the record, my dad, a lawyer working in civil services jobs for most of his life, made sure each of his three children got SAT tutoring.
Dad swore by the recommendations of a science teacher who happened to be the brother-in-law of a guy he knew at work. For approximately 8 weeks, Dad drove me into Manhattan for a course given by Samuel C. Brownstein and Mitchel Weiner at the Statler-Hilton Hotel. Which one of them taught the verbal portion and which taught the math escapes me. The point was that they were the guys who wrote the SAT handbook in vogue back in the ‘60’s.
For most of my years in school, Dad had attempted to “help” me with my math homework. This usually translated into giving me the answers, but only after he began to sound more and more exasperated with my inability to comprehend what he thought he was teaching me, and my lack of mathematical aptitude.
When I got my scores after taking the Brownstein/Weiner coach course, there were few surprises. I did nicely on the verbal. But then I had always done well in any class requiring reading, writing, and analysis. My math scores were pitiful.
In Dad’s mind, those math scores would have qualified me for any college he held out as punishment for not studying hard enough, and that included C.W. Post, Long Island University, Hofstra, and the University of Miami. (Suffice it to say there are people who have gone to those schools and done just fine, thank you.)
Rather than risk the stigma of having his daughter attend one of the above-mentioned schools on the basis of poor SAT scores, and even worse yet, the stigma of my selecting a husband from one of those schools, Dad decided it was time for one on one tutoring.
It was junior year at Forest Hills High in Queens, and I had heard about a math teacher named Mr. Leeds. He gave his own SAT coach course, and did one on one tutoring on the side for $40 an hour, which in 1967 seemed like a lot of money. For several months, he came to our home every Sunday morning.
A kind, patient and heavy-set man in his 50’s, Mr. Leeds managed to drum into my head whatever math skills I’d failed to pick up in 11 years of schooling. And all with a smile!
Although our focus was the math portion of the next SAT exam, Mr. Leeds also made it a point of finding out when my own math teacher, Mrs. Katzenberg, was giving a test and what she planned to cover. Needless to say, he tutored me on that as well.
Surprise, surprise! I began doing very well on her tests. When I got my next round of SAT scores, I had gone up over 100 points. Knowing that Boston University could be my safety school, Dad breathed free at last.
Today I remember little of the algebra, geometry and trigonometry Mr. Leeds taught me. I do remember that he always took off his shoes after sitting down with me at my desk. Boy, oh boy, did his feet stink!
What are your own recollections of preparing for the SATs? Please share in the Comments portion of this blog.
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