Disturbed by the Bubble

[Reflections]

The room is quiet. I bubble in an answer on my sheet from the booklet of the SAT Reasoning Test. The test administrator stands next to the chalkboard, a young woman in her twenties. She checks the time and writes “25” on the board, the time left to complete this section. Before the test she read the rules from a sheet of paper on her desk. Her voice is like a recording, monotonous and cold, no cheating or disturbing, the usual.

With our number two pencils, we fill in the bubble for the correct answer. If x equals 2y, bubble. What is Maya Angelou referring to, bubble. If twenty men work at Acme how many women do, bubble. Here I am in the bubble bath of questions getting ready for the party, college. What are the different viewpoints of the two writers, bubble. If it needs a period, bubble. Of the five bubbles per question only one is correct. There is no middle ground, not just in the math section, even in critical reading. Is it a theory or fact, bubble. The test administrator writes “18” on the board.

If I want to get to college there is one thing I need to do, bubble.

The tests are usually administered on weekends in public school classrooms. It is my first time in a public school classroom, you know, one in which they teach this stuff. The walls are bare, typical for a government building. The plumbing is visible to anyone who can afford a moment to look up while taking the test. There is a board and bookshelves and windows. Windows unlike the ones we had in yeshiva, frosted and locked. These windows are huge, see-through and open.

It’s through these windows that I hear the song rising from a car zipping by. I think I’m gonna ah, ah, ah, ahhh.

The boy behind me, about my age and clearly bored by the questions that require him to focus, picks up on the song and starts humming it. Disturbia, eh eh ahh. Irritated, I try to tune him out. I looked to the woman giving the test expecting her to say something, but evidently she didn’t hear anything. I keep looking at her hoping she’d notice. She looks to be in her mid-twenties, with straight black shoulder-length hair and greenish blue eyes. Her skin tone is light, but not pale, her posture is strong and tall, the kind that sends the message, “I have it under control.” She wears a green shirt that hangs loosely on her chest and jeans like scaffolds molding her thighs. How did I not notice her?

Am I going crazy? I think to myself. I’m taking the test, not just any test, the SAT! There will be plenty of girls in college, what am I doing? The boy is still humming Disturbia, and I start thinking about the song.

No more gas, in the rig, can’t even get it started
Nothing heard, nothing said, can’t even speak about it
All my life, on my head, don’t wanna think about it
Feels like I’m going insane, yeah

Yes, I’m going insane. I have never taken a real test before. In yeshiva, a test was a discussion; all you needed was familiarity with the subject and the ability to play with words. For every question there were at least five correct answers. What mattered during the test was the test giver, manage to impress him and you’re good. I remember when I went to my future rosh yeshiva for the intake exam. I botched up one question; seeing the murky waters I waded into, I quickly quoted a gemara that said something similar but unrelated. Impressed with my knowledge, a smile appeared on his face and we continued our discussion. With the SATs there is no one to impress. A machine will review my answers and assign me a score.

How am I to give a yes or no answer, when there is no such thing in the yeshiva world? The questions are so foreign. In yeshiva you had to choose which “depends” you want to go with. Can you bequeath your assets to an unborn child? Depends. (What’s the state of a fetus? What’s the process of inheritance? What is inheritance when the owner is still alive?) Can you sell yet-to-be-acquired truma? Depends. (What is truma? What is truma before you aliquot it? Does your final action prove your initial intent?) Can you trust the confession of one who forged a contract? Depends. (What is the value of a contract? Is it a convention or an agreement? Are a person’s words trusted until proven otherwise, or not?) For every question you have at least five depends, each of them correct. Not five bubbles, four wrong and one right. My depends-wired brain was being fried in a pot of bubbles.

It’s a thief in the night to come and grab you
It can creep up inside and consume you
A disease of the mind it can control you
It’s too close for comfort

But, after all, this is what I wanted. I wanted to attend college so I left yeshiva. I wanted an education, and for that I needed to do some bubbling. In yeshiva everything was up in the air, everything depended on everything said prior to that, forever perpetuated in inconclusive discussions. If you struggle with a question and then come up with an answer, your answer may or may not survive, but the question will carry on. It will be asked again and again regardless of how many answers you come up with. It’s the discussion that is important, not the conclusion.

Yet I wanted more. I wanted the feeling of continuity in my intellectual musings, not mental fixation. I wanted my thoughts to be part of the accumulation of knowledge, part of the ascent towards full awareness. And here I had it, in the five bubbles in front of me, each bubble was the end result of a conclusive discussion, each bubble a springboard for further inquiry. In front of me was the promised land of definitive thought, a city of blinding lights.

Put on your break lights, you’re in the city of wonder
Ain’t gon’ play nice, watch out you might just go under
Better think twice, your train of thought will be altered
So if you must falter be wise

Your mind’s in disturbia, it’s like the darkness is light
Disturbia, am I scaring you tonight?
Disturbia, ain’t used to what you like
Disturbia, disturbia

Thomas Kuhn, in his famous book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” claims that the nature of the scientific discourse is through paradigm shifts. With each revolutionary idea there is a paradigm shift. A paradigm shift is when the accepted questions and methods change. After each paradigm shift there is a period of fine-tuning, during which the ideas introduced during the shift will be modified and perfected until a new paradigm emerges, one that can resolve questions the previous one couldn’t.

I wanted to be part of a paradigm shift, not a periodic paradigm. What I wanted was the freedom of questioning solidified by past scholarship. In a sense, I wanted both worlds. I wanted the elusiveness of a Yeshiva discussion bedded on the concreteness of modern academia. I thought I could have that in the paradigm shift. In the popular science book it all seemed that way, open-ended questions followed by strings of possible answers. Yet, I failed to realize that shifts in paradigms play but a small role in the conventional schooling of minds. A paradigm shift can’t be hunted or pinned down, you can’t force a paradigm to change. A paradigm changes when bubbles burst, when answers don’t satisfy.

In yeshiva, the discussion was at the mercy of the discusser, discourse emerging from one’s willingness to do so. In this classroom, discourse happens when there is recognition of failure within the excepted system. If I want ideas with concrete backgrounds, I have to hand it over to the ideas to run the show. I have to let the idea decide if it’s time for a paradigm shift or not. Until that time I need to continue bubbling.

The test administrator writes “6” on the board. Six more minutes.

Faded pictures on the wall, it’s like they talking to me
Disconnecting on calls, the phone don’t even ring
I gotta get out or figure this shit out
It’s too close for comfort, oh

It’s a thief in the night to come and grab you
It can creep up inside you and consume you
A disease of the mind it can control you
I feel like a monster, oh

The boy behind me is still humming. During the break I heard him talk to some friends about test-taking strategies. “Didn’t Mr. X talk about these kind of questions?” “Hadn’t Ms. Y mentioned that technique?” The people around me are all doing the usual tricks, skip to the easiest question, eliminate wrong answers, etcetera. It was then that I realized that both the yeshiva world and the secular world have copped out of the question-and-answer mindset.

To honestly pursue the vicissitudes of intellectual discussion requires a duality of mind. The ability to be fluent in the language of doubt where possibilities are endless, and the capacity to recognize certainty with all the surprises it brings along. The languages of doubt and certainty are diametrically opposed. Doubt rests on the slippery mind, where the past guides with a nebulous arrow pointing vaguely in a general direction, an unknown end happily encountering previous thoughts. Certainty and conclusion are rigid and reverential, a recognized end can renounce all of the past, call for a revision of all that has previously been said. With certainty, one is confined to the idea and its framework.

Both my yeshiva and this classroom have copped out of this challenge. The yeshiva chose the vernacular of questions endowing their students with the ability to endlessly run around ideas never facing the inflexible, never modifying that which is disproved. This classroom sees the universe of questions and answers as a system of rules to be played with, it places students outside the storm, to observe rather than to take part, to absorb concrete knowledge that has already been determined, not to take part in creating such knowledge. Around me are people neither questioning nor answering, they probe a machine that is to assign them a number that will tell someone how good they are at playing the rules of the game called academia. The nomadic mind pursuing the solace of certitude has no place in either.

Release me from this curse I’m in
Trying to maintain but I’m struggling
If you can’t go-o-o
I think I’m gonna ah, ah, ah, ah

The woman at the board indicates that the test is over and asks us to lay down our pencils. Around me, people stretch their limbs and smile to their friends. The test is over, gone is the anxiety of preparation, of studying and memorizing. In a couple of weeks we will each receive a letter containing a number that will follow us around. You are your score. I along with 160,000 students in New York take the SATs. Of those students, 21,000, like me, hope to pursue their doctoral degrees, of which 4,000, like me, plan to study biological sciences.

The test administrator starts collecting the booklets, passing the open windows that make her hair surrender to the soft breeze entering the room. When she gets to my desk I hand her my booklet of bubbles and my booklet of questions and answers. The questions and answers will be reused for the next kid who takes the SATs, while the booklet of filled-in bubbles is unique to me, it will tell my story of how well I played the test game and the admissions counselor will know me.

As I hand her my booklets I smile to her and she smiles back. I don’t know what I tried to achieve with that smile, but I did it anyway. “Thanks, I say, and leave.

The streets appear as they do on a usual Sunday morning. People stroll in nearby parks as trucks pass by lazily. Delis serve coffee and street vendors set up shop. People are out and about playing with and by the rules of everyday life. As I head home I replay the test and all that happened. The bubbles, the yeshiva memories, the test administrator, the boy humming behind me, the classroom.

They say a test is to tell you how well you know your stuff, and before I even recieve my score I know. I know that a mind is a tough thing to change. If I want to be a part of this world I will need to do some rewiring. I will need to learn how to play the game of systems and rules, where you always break one to win the other.

Several weeks later I receive the envelope in the mail. My combined score is 1840, which places me in the 85th percentile nationwide. I apply to my college of choice and enroll later that year. On the street one day I think I see the girl who administered the test, but I’m not sure. I don’t see the boy who sat behind me again, but the voice of him singing comes back to me as I hear the same song a hundred times over, sung by high school students on the streets, blasting from car speakers, or with its rhythm beating my ears at a nightclub.

I go on to take a placement test several months later, which is to determine my required classes. A slew of additional tests will follow until in four years I will take the big test that will let me graduate. After that, I will take a few other tests until I move on. Then I will write my own test. I will gather all the depends in front of me, each depends will be based on the knowledge of facts I’ve accumulated over years of test taking. After blowing and bursting every bubble I hope to come to the final answer, an idea that will humble me into surrender. All the discussions will be behind and ahead of that moment. At that moment I will create an answer, and for that moment it will be like what I envisioned when I read Kuhn. At that moment kids across the world will be bubbling in on their test sheets the bubble I blew out of all my speculations. At that moment, my mind, the same one that contemplated the frosted windows of the yeshiva and the chalkboard in the classroom, will be happy. At that moment I, who discussed Talmudic subjects with roshei yeshiva and bubbled in answers on test sheets, will be satisfied. And for that moment it will all have been worth it.