Working the Corners

"An army can be likened to water; water flees from the high places and seeks out the low. Thus must an army flee from strength and attack weakness." Sun Tzu, The Art of War


"The primary thing when one picks up a sword is the purpose to cut the enemy, whatever the means." Musashi Miyamoto, The Book of Five Rings


I don't know a lot about history. However,I was once told--or maybe I saw it in a movie, which seems more likely--that the warmaster Shaka Zulu employed a particular battle tactic that analogyzes nicely with test preperation. King Shaka would put his weakest (and hence most disposable) warriors at the foremost place in his attacking force, front and center. Since prevailing military wisdom (and indeed, common sense) dictated that one should attack from a position of strength, Shaka's weakest forces--those holding together the center of his army---would be inferior to the men they faced, and would be at a disadvantage, combat-wise.


As I heard the story, "at a disadvantage" does not adequately characterize the plight of King Shaka's core contingent. In fact, they would be slaughtered. The enemy, upon meeting such easy resistance at the outset, would push forward into what they thought was easy victory. So anxious would the enemy warriors be that, by the time they realized that they had fought their way through the soft center and were surrounded on all sides by Shaka's best warriors, they were doomed.


Such a gory image--and one can only imagine the horror of Shaka's enemies on those bloodsopped savannas--probably holds currency for those in the midst of test preperation. The makers of standardized tests use more than simple knowledge against us; they also use our own humiliation and exhaustion. By the time we know enough to be able to devise a strategy, we are too exerted to implement it. Shaka's brilliance, although it must have come as scant comfort to his lowest minions, lay in the realizaton that by turning his weakness into strength, he could synergistically make his strengths invincible.


In this same spirit, I offer two core tools to you who are preparing to take a standardized test: concentrate on middle-difficulty questions, and re-work questions that you have previously done. I tell my students this frequently, and most often they don't want to hear it. After all, they reason, if they can solve the hardest questions on the test, surely the easy ones will fall into place. This accords with common sense, but see above. There are times when common sense can get one surrounded, and when strategy requires doing the seemingly nonsensical.


By concentrating primarily on middle-difficulty questions, we learn to think like the testmakers. Remember, most of the questions you have to answer--the strong core of your score--will be middle-difficulty. Working these questions allows you not only think about the individual problems themselves, but also the more subtle elements of your test. Don't just ask yourself what the answers to the problems are; study the wrong answers; study the way the questions are phrased; look for those patterns to reappear.


Likewise, work problems that you have seen before. This is perhaps the hardest test-preperation strategy to convince my students to follow, which is a shame because it's one of the best. Students, understandably, want to work new questions that they have not seen before. However, see "common sense," supra. Re-working problems a month or two after you've last seen them allows you to re-examine the test from a structural and strategic perspective rather than a purely reactive one. It allows the student to re-examine wrong-answer choices that once might have looked tempting, and to catalogue them. Having thus catalogued them, you'll be able to reject those wrong-answer types when you see them on the real test.




▼▽▼▼Douglasの過去の記事を読む━━━━━━━━━━━
・【Smoke and Makuuchi】2008.10.01 (Wed)
･【It's Always Something】2008.10.22 (Wed)

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