Quantitative Skills: A Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, there was a student named Leah. She spent her evenings and weekends sipping vanilla latte's and typing away on her laptop at either Starbucks, Caribou or the charmingly local La Spiaza, a pile of books by her side. Since these were the only coffee shops close to her college, there were always a plethra of fellow students working nearby. Ah, the buzz of academics! Young burgeoning minds!

Though her days in college are over, she is spending quite a bit of her time these days studying for the GRE. After finishing college and spending some time in the "real world," Princess Leah is finally ready to commit to a career path and invest more in her education. When she took the SAT at the end of her Junior year of high school, she literally never studied. She bought an SAT study guide, and it sat unused on the bookcase for 5 months until the morning of the exam, when she cracked it open and read page one, "What to Expect during the Test." Not the shiniest moment of her academic life.


If she had studied for the SATs, I'm sure it would have felt a lot like studying for the GRE. Memorizing the definitions of words. INCHOATE. QUIESCENT. TORPOR. CHICANERY. Reviewing math she hasn't thought of in years. For which triangles can you use the pythagorean theorem? Isoceles, or only for right triangles? Princess Leah just hopes that the person sitting next to her in the coffee shop doesn't notice her adding 6 and 8 on her fingers.

When Princess Leah was in 3rd grade, her relationship with math was very turbulent. Multiplication and fractions, especially, were really hard for her. Every day the class took a multiplication test, the first test was the one times table, the next was two, etc., etc. up to 12. Once you scored a 90% on a test, you could move up to the next test. Once you finished all 12, you got to go out to recess every day while the rest of the kids finished their tests inside. Mr. Huganough make the mistake of letting the children grade their own tests. Soon, Princess Leah found that quelching the small amount of guilt she felt by lying on the tests and giving herself a higher grade than she deserved was easier than actually practicing her times tables to earn a grade. By cheating and lying, she was outside playing in the sun within a week. Of course, Mr. Huganough caught Princess Leah and made her retake all the tests she had cheated on.

To this day, Leah still cannot recite the 8 times table without having to think really hard about it. So all these years later, she will have to buckle down and memorize everything she cheated on 15 years ago (I had to use a calculator just now to calculate how many years have lapsed...).

I guess the moral of the story is, don't cheat on your homework, kids.