The SAT Tutor

            by Julian Pollack

 

There was a knock at the door.

            “He’s here,” my mom said.

            It was a Wednesday evening in mid October and I was scheduled to have my first weekly, private, two-hour-long session with the man who was going to teach me how to take the SATs. What fun. The first test wasn’t until the following March, but all the smart kids’ parents told my mom that it was a good idea to get started early. Over the summer I went through thousands of SAT vocabulary flash cards, read hundreds of pages on test-taking strategies, and took a three hour and forty-five minute practice test, yet the official test that was supposed to assess my logic and “reasoning” skills wouldn’t take place until practically a year later.

            “I’m so not down with this,” I said to my mom as I put my plate in the sink.

            “Go and answer the door. He’s waiting,” she said.

            I had talked to this man on the phone a few weeks before I was supposed to meet with him. He sounded nice, but I couldn’t tell. He was an SAT tutor. How could I relate to a guy who thinks about SATs all the time? I don’t need to waste my time on the SATs. I don’t need to go to an excellent or prestigious college. I’m a musician, I thought.

            I opened up the door.

            “Hey, you must be Julian.”

            I wasn’t expecting a big middle-aged man, wearing khakis, a White Sox hat, and tennis shoes—completely informal. I always thought an SAT tutor would wear sleek black shoes, a tie, a fresh hair-cut, and a phony smile, just like the way the test is packaged: so slick that it’s disgusting. He had a genuine smile on his face and we shook hands.

            “Don, right? Yeah, hi, come on in.” I turned and led him into the kitchen, to the table where we would have our sessions for the next seven months.

            “So how did playing at the Monterey Jazz Festival go? Did you play well?” he asked. It took me a moment to remember that he had asked me on the phone, a few weeks before, what my interests were and what I was doing in the few weeks prior to our first meeting. I was surprised he remembered.

            “It was cool,” I said as we sat down at the table.

            “Do you have anything else coming up?” he asked. I told him no, but I had just finished making a CD. He said he wanted to hear it.

            “Alright, let’s get started,” he said. “How did you do on the practice test?”

            I didn’t do very well. My scores added up to be in the high fifteen hundreds, out of twenty-four hundred. I’ve never been good at multiple-choice tests.

            “That’s not bad, Julian,” he said as he looked at the problems I missed and the ones I answered correctly. “We can get your scores higher, though. I’m sure of it. Where are you thinking about applying?”

            “I don’t know,” I said. I was only a junior. “I want to be in New York. Maybe NYU or Columbia. My mom wants me to apply to Columbia.”

            He sat back in the chair and I prepared myself for a long talk about how I was going to have to work hard and about how much competition there is to get into colleges such as NYU and Columbia.

            “Here’s what we’re going to do, Julian. We’re going to get your scores as high as we can, but in the long run, your music and creativity will set you apart from other people. I think you have a really good shot at getting into Columbia, if you want to go there. Colleges will be very interested in what you do outside of school, your music. So don’t be frantic or discouraged about your scores. You can go to Columbia.”

            “Oh,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Columbia seemed as distant from me as the moon is from earth.

            “So, what’s the first problem that you missed?” he asked. I told him and we flipped to the page. “Ah, it’s a subject-verb split problem.”

            “What the hell is a subject-verb split?” I asked. I hate that type of academic lingo, I thought to myself.         

“Here, read the sentence.”

            “For her birthday party, Mia, along with all her friends, go out to dinner and then to the movie theater,” I read aloud. “Hold on a second, It should be goes instead of go.”

            “Now you see how you missed it? By reading it aloud, your ear told you what was wrong. A subject-verb split is when the subject and the verb are separated. It’s as simple as that. And the SAT will try and trick you. But most of the problems in the SATs aren’t that difficult once you can see what they’re getting at.”

            “Wow. That’s not even that hard. I can’t believe I got that one wrong,” I said.

            “Alright, what’s the next problem that you missed?”

            The session went on and he showed me many tricks of the SAT. At 9:15, our two hours were up. He said that it was enough for one day. We had been very productive. Surprisingly, I was in a good mood. I thought I would be bummed that I had wasted two hours studying for some stupid test.

            I went into my room and got a copy of the new CD I had made. I gave it to him as we walked to the door.

            “Now I want you to try and do something this week,” he said in the doorway. “Try and find some time each day to do something you want, your music, something creative. I always try to give myself about an hour a day to read poetry. Even if it’s just for a little bit, play or listen to some music. It’s good for the soul. You need it. We all need it.”

            A couple days later there was an envelope on the front porch. It contained a few extra SAT practice problems and a note saying how much he enjoyed my CD.

 

            After seven months of tutoring, I got a 1750 on the test in March. Not great, but I had gained a hundred and fifty points. Don and I had talked on the phone and he said he was proud of me. He couldn’t believe my scores had increased by that much. I couldn’t either. I was improving, but he wanted me to take the test again in May. He wanted me to give it a second shot, just to see if I could score higher. However, he thought that even with a 1750 I had a chance of getting into Columbia. My mom was happy to hear that.

            We resumed our tutoring sessions on a Wednesday evening in mid-April. I wasn’t particularly in the mood to start studying for the SATs, again. After seven months of tutoring, seven full-length practice tests, and countless exercises from five different two hundred paged workbooks, I didn’t want to think about the SAT anymore. I absolutely hated taking the test in March. My skull felt like it had been bashed a hundred times on the desk after taking the three hour and forty-five minute test, with only two five minute breaks. I don’t get headaches, but I had one when I left the testing room. All I could do for the rest of the day was sit on my couch and eat cheetos. I didn’t even want to go out and party.

            Although I hated taking practice tests and doing exercises, my sessions with Don were never terrible. As a matter of fact I enjoyed spending my time with Don.  Many of the techniques he showed me about approaching the SAT would lead us into conversations about other topics such as art, literature, and poetry. I knew a fair amount about music, but I was relatively naïve when it came to words. Don loved words, and he made me appreciate them. We would read an excerpt from a novel in the Critical Reading section and Don would reveal to me a beautiful image in the writing that I hadn’t noticed. We read an excerpt about a man and his cello at a conservatory. Don read out loud to me the part when the man would put his cello in the instrument storage room and line it up with all the other cellos. The author anthropomorphized the cellos and characterized them as “lonely silhouettes of people.” It touched me. I thought about that image the next time I played music.

            However, I didn’t realize that Don was inspiring me—not just teaching me how to take the test—until that Wednesday evening in April. Our high school junior prom was the weekend before and I had the symptoms of spring fever. I was playing great music with some local musicians and I didn’t want to think about the SATs anymore.

Don and I sat down at the kitchen table and opened the SAT study guide.

            “How are you doing tonight, Julian? You look tired,” he said.

            “Yeah, I am. I had a really tiring weekend and I have this huge Latin test on Thursday. We just started reading the Aeneid by Vergil. Do you know about it?”

            “Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam fato profugus Lavinaque venit,” he recited from memory.

            “Wow,” I said. “You have the first lines by memory. When did you read it?”

            “I took Latin in high school. But just a few years ago a friend of mine and I decided that we would get together once a week at a coffee house and read the first six books of the Aeneid together. Do you like it so far?”

            “I mean…sure. I guess it’s cool. We’ve only done the first thirty-three lines.”

            “I love some of the images in the epic. You know, maybe it would be fun to get together, maybe before your first big test on the first book of the Aeneid, and read it. I haven’t read it for a while. We could go to some place like Café Au Coquelet.”

            What a dorky thing to do, I thought. But there was a part of me that said, wait a minute, I might really enjoy doing that. This man loves poetry, art, anything beautiful. I wanted to see how he enjoyed a piece of art like the Aeneid. Perhaps it would inspire me.

            “Sure,” I said. “That might be fun.” 

 

            Up until our final tutoring session, Don brought me a poem every week. I’d read it during the week before I was him, and then we would talk about the poem when we met. He brought me a poem written by a man who served in the army during World War II. The main image of the poem is a young man, lying dead on the ground, dripping blood, with a smile on his face. After we read the poem, Don told me that the poet himself was killed during the war.

            We talked about Bach. At the time, I was playing a couple of preludes and fugues. Don told me that when he was in college he loved listening to Bach. That was when I found out he went to Yale. He told me that being at Yale was the best part of his life. He told me about his room—an old room made of oak with a cozy fireplace—and how he loved to sit by the fire, read poetry, listen to Bach, and look out at the beautiful old campus, especially during autumn when the leaves turned red and orange. My preconceived vision of a Yale student was a snooty, too-smart-for-his-own-good person who didn’t care about anything except being smart and getting a good job. Don freed my mind of that image.

            I bought books and started reading more. I paid greater attention to words. I had a CD of a pianist named Brad Mehldau, and in the liner notes there was a poem, by the German poet Rilke, that addressed issues about the intangibility of art. I sat down, after having owned the album for over a year, and read the poem. I had been missing out.

           

Our last session was in the beginning of May. Don and I talked about how we would read the Aeneid together before I had my Latin final, which was in June. For the last fifteen minutes that night, we read Shakespeare. Then it was time for Don to go. He would not come back for our regular weekly sessions. They were over.

            “Well, Julian, I had a great time working with you,” he said as we walked to the front door.

            “Yeah, me too,” I said. My mom came to the door to thank him and say goodbye. I stared off into space, realizing that I wouldn’t see Don the following week.

            “Don, we’re going to miss you so much!” my mom said. “This has been so great for Julian. Thank you for everything. God knows how we’ll survive when you don’t come every week to remind us what sanity is!” It was a typical, exaggerated remark that my mom would make, but it had truth to it. And we both knew it. Don got the message that his presence would be missed.

            “You know, this is just how it happens. Times change. I get attached to certain kids and then it’s time for us to move on. I stay in contact with them, as I will with you, but it’s not the same as seeing them every week. It’s sort of sad, but that’s just how it is.”

            “Well, we’ll definitely stay in contact,” I said. “And we have to read the first book of the Aeneid together before I have my test.”

            “We’ll do that, Julian. That would be really fun for me.” He turned to leave, but then stopped to say, as if he had forgotten. “Good luck on the test this weekend.”

 

            I got a 2000 on the last test. Pretty good. It doesn’t really matter to me, though. Without the SAT, I wouldn’t have met Don. We haven’t gone to Au Coquelet yet to read the Aeneid, but I know we will someday.