We discovered that the ACT was canceled for the third time just two days before my son M was supposed to sit for the test. The first time was in March just when everything slid into the sea of the pandemic; the second was in June, which we didn’t ever believe would happen anyway. But we thought the damn thing might actually go in July, especially at the suburban school north of NYC in a region that Governor Cuomo had allowed to open faster than the city. We would have shown up to an empty school gym or cafeteria that Saturday if we hadn’t checked the ACT closures website and called the principal’s office to confirm.
The ACT is terrible in just about every way, including at what it’s purportedly designed to measure (who would likely be successful at a particular college). The value of ACT and SAT scores has always been farcical, overwhelmingly favoring those who have the means and room in their lives to prepare, to get a good night’s sleep and a good breakfast before, to make the abnormality of a high-stakes four-hour multiple-choice test with a strange kickback calculator somewhat more normal. It’s nevertheless a broken paver in a familiar path. If you want to and can go to college, the way it works is you need to spend your junior year focused on grades and extracurriculars, and you take the ACT or SAT depending upon which test suits you best and destroys you least. We went to the many parent meetings and webinars for college-bound kids offered by M&Q’s school, and we decided to follow the somewhat less aggressive schedule of having M take the ACT in the spring and, if necessary, sit for it again in the summer prior to applying to colleges in the fall. This was the pre-covid plan, essentially lifted off the societal shelf.
The only thing worse than having a terrible thing to do is never being able to do it. After the July ACT fell through, we tried to recalibrate the schedule again, to find a way back to the familiar path. After six months of lockdown, no path of any sort has become clear. M still doesn’t know what he wants to study or do in college, or he does have some sense but is (understandably) unsure of whether a plausible future exists with him in it. He doesn’t know how to look for a college that’s a good fit when everything’s closed or how to determine which college will handle an apocalypse best. Frustrated by unknowns and all the time he has invested in test and college prep for ostensibly nothing, M said “I just don’t know how to be good in the world.”
(He really did in fact say this; I swear this isn’t some convenient newsletter setup. Honest.)
How does one be good in the world? We often talk, as we should, about wanting to “do good” or to “be a good person.” Until M’s question, I would have described my parenting strategy in those terms (as opposed to help my children become “successful people”). But I realized that I, like many people, usually leave off the “in the world” bit, and it’s arguably the most important part.
I’ve read a lot of philosophy over the years for professional and personal reasons, and I’ve even understood some of it. German philosopher Martin Heidegger is primarily known for his work Being and Time and for being largely incomprehensible. I too have struggled to make much sense of his work on the nature of being, but a key insight has stuck with me. Heidegger draws an interesting distinction between different ways of “being-in.” When someone describes herself, for example, as “in the theater,” she could mean that she is literally inside a building dedicated to performance. But she could also be expressing a deeper relation, namely that she is part of the theater in the cultural sense, as an actor, director, etc., that she has committed herself to the project of theater.
For Heidegger, this second, deeper relation is the more fundamental one for beings like us. Our most basic relation with the world is one of concern, of choosing how we commit ourselves to each other and the world. But also fundamental to our state is what Heidegger calls “Geworfenheit” or what often gets translated as “thrownness.” We don’t arrive in a static world that we then act on in whatever way we choose. We find ourselves in a world already full of others and underway, with its tangle of concerns, structures, mechanisms, and limitations in place.
Existing concerns are deeply entrenched. The ACT needs kids to test to maintain its grip and economic advantage, and its software automatically assigned M to the nearest available seat in September, which turned out to be in a hotel ballroom out by the airport in Newark, NJ. The hotel was close map-wise, but traveling in and out of the city gambles with time, and we booked a room at the hotel so that M only had to take an elevator to the test instead of the Holland Tunnel. We checked in after another parent and high schooler who had the same idea and were also told that due to the virus the hotel restaurant was closed, but a Starbucks would pop up in the morning for coffee and some “light food.” It was late, and we were tired and hungry. After some searching, we learned that most places to eat nearby were closed, but we did find a Stop & Shop a short drive from the hotel. The pandemic has spun so much of life strange that we noticed but accepted that about half of the Stop & Shop’s overhead lights were off and the freezers and coolers were humming but completely dark. We settled on a plastic clamshell of lemon poppyseed muffins and a couple of apples.
As we ate our dinner muffins on the beds in our hotel room overlooking Newark’s runways, I felt stuck in the middle of a bad joke. How could this be a good route to college and to a life?
We came down in the morning to long lines to check in for the ACT. M wore one of the masks that he’s been prepping in. The students were all in masks as directed by the website and waiting quietly to be called. They took turns showing their IDs to the woman at the table and then pulling their masks down to look more like their photos. Many kids still dressed like it was summer, lots of tank tops and flip flops, but it wasn’t summer and hasn’t been any time for months. M runs cold and had dressed for aggressive air conditioning, which turned out to be right. He knew himself and was as prepared as he could be. I could do little but wait for him in the lounge area. I overheard one family mention that they had come from Pennsylvania that morning. A mother talked about about visiting Cornell in the before times and how they’ll probably maybe apply though who knows these days. A test official told another that the students will be taking a fifth, unscored (and deeply unnecessary) section today consisting of potential future questions, and the official replied, “I can’t believe they’re going to make the kids go through that after everything.” One woman said, “I bet those kids are so happy to be in there right now,” meaning that getting access to a test has been so difficult and stressful that finding any seat at all, even one in a freezing ballroom out by the airport, must bring relief.
As we waited in traffic to go back through the Holland Tunnel to New York, M did seem relieved. “Can’t believe that after six months it finally happened,” he said. “It’s over.” Who knows whether it will matter. More and more colleges and universities have gone “test optional” for the upcoming admissions cycle, but this move might end up reinforcing the power and bias of standardized tests, as only those able to test and receive high scores will submit them to admissions officers comfortable with that metric. Still, perhaps the public clumsiness of ACT and the College Board trying to keep testing alive will finally change things.
Going back to M’s question, he’s really asking how he as the person he is and could be should concern himself with this world as it is now unfolding. He and his sister have definitely been thrown into a difficult world, even if their corner of it could certainly be worse. He, like all of us, is subject to the concerns of others, many of which make little sense. How does he — or any of us — square our personal loves and desires with the values afforded us? The life that M wants requires that he go to college, and to go to college he is told he needs to follow certain paths, but everything (college, paths, life) is currently a calamity. And these days it’s not just that the traditional concerns we’ve been thrown into seem misguided, but that the mechanisms of concern have been broken. How do we go about making more kinds of life possible?
We might as well begin in the middle. All of us are already thrown together, and together we can care differently. M was told his scores would be ready in 2-8 weeks. We must remember that we still get to decide, at least in part, what they mean.