My mother never lets me forget the story of me and long division.
In sixth grade, and a couple years after I first played multiplication games with the “Little Professor,” my math teacher provided my class a homework exercise comprising about a dozen long division examples.
We were supposed to divide 123 into 456,781 (or some similar insane number) and show off our line-by-line skills of adding ones, dropping down zeros, and inserting decimal points.
At my pubescent age, I figured I’d never use long division again in my life so plugged the numbers into my calculator and wrote in the answers. Wait, maybe I wrote-out one or two examples to show I grasped the concept.
Mrs. Whatchamacalit (I don’t remember her name), who the next morning decided to treat the homework exercise as a pop quiz, was unappreciative of my grown-up calculator and rationalization skills and failed me.
After a parent-teacher conference, with my folks arguing on my behalf that the exercise was pointless in the greater scheme of life, the fact the story continues to be told is indicative of “Ari marching to his own beat.”
In graduate school, during the first session of a statistics class, Professor Doug Snow told us in clear and simple terms that calculators and open books were expected to be used in every class, alongside our homework exercises, and during every test. His rationale was in the real world, calculators and books were the norm. Nobody was expected to memorize details of z-squared, the tail of this, or the whatever of that.
Apparently, Mrs. Whatchamacalit never lived in the real world.
I raise my history in light of 15 tips from ex-recruiter Breanne Potter who writes on Brazen Careerist about resumes, shoe polish, thank you notes, and cruises. Some of her points make sense and others are silly, such as marking “see resume” in the employment section of a recruiting form and taking math tests.
My frustration with recruiting firms is with those silly computer tests. Some applicants ought to be tested on Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and other programs; but when I specify on the “computer skills” part of the recruiting form that I was a computer instructor in college and can guarantee to score higher on the computer tests than the recruiter, to which the recruiter later sees as truth, tell me again its purpose.
I’d like to see a scientific study comparing the benefits of a recruiting firm today compared to online recruitment on networks, such as LinkedIn and JustMeans.
Come to think of it… maybe I should walk into a recruiter’s office this week, ask for a job, and wait to see if after describing myself as a social media consultant, if I’d be asked to take a test on how to use the Internet.
Care to place bets on the outcome?
Photo source: David Gowing
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Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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But you’ve already answered why those computer skills tests at recruiting firms are necessary: because some people need them. And if some do, then those same folks could lie about their skills, and if the firms didn’t administer the tests, then their asses would be on the line when someone gets hired and is found to have lied.
That said, I enjoyed the story and was totally the same type of kid.
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Many teaching exercises are about training and building foundations for learning. I was also the kind of kid who didn’t have the patience to work through pointless exercises, but sometimes the point is to train an approach. I wish I had learned much sooner, for example, that test-taking was trainable…that grades and tests do not measure anything beyond your ability to satisfy the requirements of the test. Your grade reflects how well you took the test. It does not matter if you are really smart.
When I studied for the bar exam, I had finally figured this out. I took numerous practice tests of the multiple choice portion of the test–the multistate bar exam–over and over until I was able to score higher. It is a from of training, of mental conditioning, that is not about learning information or even exercising keen intellect. There is some intuitive component that can only be learned through practice. I suppressed my lack of patience and forced myself to write test essays and practice instead of just studying. When I took the exam, I finished on time and confident that I had passed. And I did.
There are times when we need to set aside our impatience and learn to follow the instructions because those instructions are not arbitrary or stupid, but designed to train us. In real life, we are presented with challenges–challenges we cannot control. While we must think out of the box at times, we must also exercise patience and deal with the challenge as it comes to us instead of becoming frustrated and quitting because we think it is “unfair.” In real life situations like that, we have no option to find a calculator or walk away. We have to take the situation as it is. And what we learned, in all those stupid exercies, becomes invaluable.
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