A View from the Stacks: Everything I Need To Know I Learned From My Math Book?

Higher standardized test scores are to better school admissions what Oprah’s Books Club is to better book sales.  Wait, no, that is not the proper analogy.  Or is it?

I bought a GRE book a while back off Amazon.com in the hopes of spurring along my higher-higher education track.  Turns out that it makes a wonderful prop for my curling iron, balancing my $50 Kmart table and making it look like I am serious about this whole going back to school.

My reluctance to dive right into this book is based on the simple fact that every time I look at the math portion, I think the same thing: where in the history of law librarianship has someone needed to answer a reference questions involving the area and volume of a cone? Or calculating the amount of space a cylinder occupies?  My 12th grade calculus teacher may be disheartened to hear that after I passed my college admissions math tests, the most math I have done is to balance my check book (albeit on rare occasions).  But when I open my GRE test prep book, I am confronted with differential equations, formulas that I know I once knew and those annoying matrix things.  And I begin to wonder, “Do graduate programs really look at the GRE?”

Turns out they do. 

And each year it gets more competitive to get into the top programs.  So now, I have found myself in the situation much like I was in the 10th grade, prepping for the SAT: making flashcards.  Nothing fancy, but frankly, in beginning to review those tricky little formulas that I at one time really enjoyed working on, I have begun to see the benefit in being an active learner in all stages of life.  I never really understood the value of intellectual curiosity when I was in high school because they pretty much forced it on me.  But today, I realize that allowing skills that I once had to fall to the wayside has resulted in me making flashcards.  The same flashcards I made when I was 16, for that matter.

But, in the end, I think I can honestly say that I will be better off for really taking the time to study for this rite-of-passage test.  Because my initial instinct to wing it might end up backfiring when the first question I see asks me to identify the value of a plane cut by two lines in three-dimensional space.

And I break the computer out of frustration.

Stina McClintock, Library Technician, King County Law Library (Seattle)

Editor's Note: No calculus or trig in LSATs because, as we all know, lawyers aren't rocket scientists.