Today's good news: I can graduate from high school

My best friend is a math teacher and tutor. She gave me a copy of a practice test that is used by kids preparing for their high school proficiency test. So I went at it. I didn't cheat--no calculator, no computer, no Internet. Hard-core: just me, a pen, and the paper.

I scored 39/40. I missed one only because I had no idea what a "box and whiskers" diagram was or how to interpret the data presented in that format. (If you, like me, finished formal schooling before these little pieces of hell came along, you can bone up on them here and here.) But on the upside, I correctly guessed at another "box and whiskers" problem (I intuited that the middle line represented a median, which turned out to be correct, and that was about all I needed to know for one question), and I also correctly answered a few questions about "stem and leaf" plots. Even though I had never heard of or seen them before, it took me only a few minutes of looking at the possible multiple-choice answers to figure out how they worked. (See here for the explanation, if you, too, are old as dirt.)

I'm pretty sure this New Math crap is being foisted upon our kids by the Communists. Or maybe it's the terrorists now. Yeah, that's it. It's another way they're trying to destroy our American way of life. If we do box-and-whisker graphs or stem-and-leat plots, the terrorists win. I say no!

But at least it appears that I could eke out a high school diploma if I had to, even at my advanced age.