EppsNet

My son has a math test today. He was up till 3 a.m. studying for it.

In my experience, a positive mindset is essential to successful test-taking, so on the drive to school, I give him a piece of advice.

“Walk into the classroom,” I say, “look at the teacher and lay down a challenge, like ‘Let’s do it.’”

“It’s not her test,” the boy says.

“What does that mean?”

“It means every class takes the same test — Schneider, D’Antonio . . .”

“THAT DOESN’T MATTER,” I say. “The important thing is to lay down the challenge. ‘Stop bitin’ on my styles.’ Granted, that one doesn’t make any sense, but it gives you the positive mental framework that you need for mathematical success.”

As my son comes downstairs for dinner, he says, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune –”

I finish it with him: “– must be in want of a wife.”

“We spent 45 minutes in class today analyzing that one sentence,” he says.

“It’s a very famous sentence,” I say. “The next sentence will probably go faster.”

At Northwood High School, Honors Euro Lit is known by its acronym — HEL (pronounced hell) — and widely regarded as the hardest class at the school.

In order to get an A in the class for the first semester, my son needed a very high score — around a 98 — on the final exam, didn’t get it, and finished with a semester grade of 89.27 — a high B.

If he’d had at least an 89.5, the teacher would have rounded it up to an A. So out of 1,000+ possible points over the course of the semester, an 89.27 means you missed an A by only three or four points.

I’ve always encouraged the boy to be proactive with his teachers. Some people call this “sucking up” but I’ve been a teacher myself and I can tell you that teachers like students who are engaged and make an extra effort. When there’s a close call on a grade, those students may get the benefit of the doubt.

Being a public school teacher is unrewarding in many ways. You’re not going to get rich, for one thing. And you’re not going to be held in high esteem because the conventional wisdom is that public education in America is a disaster.

The only real attraction of the job is that every day you have an opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives. And even there, in most cases you will fail.

“Make sure the teachers know that you want to do well in their class,” I tell my kid. “Ask them what you need to do and they’ll tell you. They want to help you.”

After his final score was posted in HEL, he went in after school to talk to the teacher about his grade. They went over some previous assignments and exams, including a Macbeth exam where the teacher found a question that he felt he “didn’t teach very well.” He gave the boy four points back on the question, which gave him an 89.55 for the semester. That’s an A.

Father knows best, suckas! Academic success is not (just) about academics.

A young lady named Hope Xu — from University High right here in Irvine — scored a perfect 2400 on this year’s SAT exam.

I’ve advised my 16-year-old son that henceforth, when he’s faced with a tough decision in life, he should ask himself the question “What would Hope Xu do?”

I know one thing she wouldn’t do and that is to run into her dad’s bedroom at 11 p.m. and start doing flying front kicks when he’s trying to sleep.

“Why are you doing that?” I ask him.

“I just drank a Red Bull,” he says, then dances back out the door singing a song I don’t recognize . . .

Worked some physics problems with my boy last night . . . the subject at hand was torque, which his textbook expresses in units of mN.

“Back in my day, we used to measure torque in foot-pounds,” I said. “What’s mN? Millinewtons?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess so.”

“OK, we’re off to a great start!”

We were trying to figure out what time the boy needed to wake up to get to the PSAT test on time. The test is at 9 a.m., check-in starts at 8:40, it takes 10 minutes or so to drive to the school, and 30 minutes for him to get out of bed, have some breakfast and get ready to go, so I was thinking he’d need to get up at 8 a.m.

“WHAT?!” he shouted. “That’s too early! I’ll be the first person there!”

“OK,” I said, “what time do you think would be good?”

“8:05,” he said.

High school roller hockey starts tonight. To prevent the use of ringers, each kid has to turn in an enlarged color copy of their school ID card.

I reminded my son about that requirement last night as he was doing homework in his room.

“Why don’t you go ahead and make the copy now while you’re thinking about it?” I said.

“I’m not thinking about it,” he said.

“You are thinking about it.”

“What am I thinking about?”

“Okay, do it your way,” I said, and left.

“What did you come in here for?” he called after me.

Hilarity is really going to ensue when he shows up for the game tonight and can’t play because he doesn’t have a copy of his ID card . . .

My son’s a junior in high school now . . . tonight he went to a school homecoming dance instead of watching the USC-Cal game with his dad.

Sing it with me:

The cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon . . .

This morning he went with his mom to buy a dress shirt and a tie. When they’d narrowed the choice down to two ties, he took a photo of them with his phone and sent them to the girl to see which one would go better with her dress . . .

My son and I went to Barnes and Noble in Irvine this weekend to buy the books on his 11th grade Euro Lit reading list: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, Candide by Voltaire, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and The Stranger by Albert Camus.

“Have you read any of these books?” I asked the checkout girl.

“I’ve read Candide and Pride and Prejudice,” she said.

“Candide is fun. Virginia Woolf is kind of a downer though, isn’t she? Didn’t she kill herself?

“She did,” the girl admitted.

“Doesn’t that set a bad example for the kids?”

The Irvine store didn’t have the edition of Ivan Denisovich that the boy needed but the guy at customer service was able to call around and find a copy at the Aliso Viejo store.

The boy was beside himself: “We’re going to drive all the way to Aliso Viejo?!” (Aliso Viejo is a 9-mile drive from Irvine.)

“This will help you when you read the book,” I said. “You’ll have an appreciation for what suffering is all about.”

My son’s going into 11th grade next week. He’s got a couple of honors classes, a couple of AP classes, Spanish 3 and a music class.

It looks like a very tough schedule to me — he’s also got college entrance exams this year — but that’s where his academic history has brought him and he says he wants to do it.

One thing I didn’t know about AP classes is that they start giving kids assignments during summer vacation. He’s working on ‘em right now!

He asked me for a little help on the physics assignment so I get to do two things I love to do on a hot summer evening: sip premium tequila on ice with a lime, and solve problems like this:

A kangaroo jumps to a vertical height of 2.7m. How long is it in the air before returning to Earth?

Oh I’m in heaven!

Hi everybody! It’s me, Lightning!

My owner’s son has this book for his AP U.S. History class. You should read it! The title — Don’t Know Much About History — makes you think of the famous song by Sam Cooke, so right away you want to know more about it!

History is fascinating! For example, did you know that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had ELEVEN pugs?! The Duke used to be the King of England but he had to “adbdicate” (that means quit) so he’d have enough time to walk all of his dogs.

I hope that fact is in the book!

— Lightning

Flying back to California from the east coast, I sat next to one of about 60 kids coming back from a three-week tour of Europe to celebrate their graduation from an Orange County high school.

“You guys must be rich,” I said to her, “traveling around Europe for three weeks.”

“We’re on the low end of wealthy,” she said. She put her hand out in front of her, palm down — not too high — to indicate her standing on the wealth ladder.

Northwood High School grades came out today. My son got A’s in all of his classes. He won’t know that himself until Saturday night because he’s currently incommunicado at Children of the Corn camp, but the honors classes at Northwood are anything but a slam-dunk A, even for the best students, so we’re very proud of him.

He’s become a lot better at managing his time and plotting out academic strategies, down to the level of selecting the right background music for study sessions. He’s still not as proactive with his teachers as I’d like him to be, but behavioral modification takes time. You can offer ideas, but until an idea and the kid’s readiness for the idea converge, nothing happens. Years may go by.

For example, he just recently started setting up more study groups with his friends, a mere four years after I first mentioned to him that study groups were a big help to me when I was in school.

I’m considered the parent in charge of academics at our house. I used to spend quite a bit of time with the boy up through junior high school but now that he’s in 10th grade, I don’t really do much. Or actually, I do the same thing I’ve always done, which is to say, ‘Let me know if you need any help with that,” the difference being that he rarely asks for help anymore.

My wife has never been totally on board with my approach. “You can’t just say, ‘Let me know if you need any help,’” she says. “You have to help him.”

I say, “You’ve probably already noticed this yourself, but if a person doesn’t want your help, you’re not going to be successful in helping him, no matter how smart or wonderful you are.”

“Blah blah blah,” she says.

I’m scoring this semester’s report card as a triumph for my pedagogical method.

Tomorrow’s the last day of school here in Irvine. I walk by my son’s room . . . he’s studying for his last finals and listening to bebop piano music, which is not on his normal playlist.

“What you listening to, Mr. Noodling Jazz Musician?” I ask.

“Thelonious Monk,” he says.

“Is that part of an assignment?” I know he’s been studying the Harlem Renaissance in English.

“No, it just helps me study.”

He’s in 10th grade now . . . he continues to improve his study habits and time management so I pretty much let him do things the way he wants to.

“OK. Let me know if you need anything.”

By this time tomorrow, my little boy will be halfway done with high school . . .

It was like a ghost town yesterday. The Lakers were playing a close-out game. It’s Finals Week at the local high schools. Everyone young and old had something to do.

My own 10th-grade boy spent 12 hours Saturday studying at the Barnes and Noble cafe at the Marketplace, followed by an Extreme English Breakdown session yesterday at Starbucks on Culver . . .

Good luck, students!

Spring season just started for high school roller hockey. My son’s team has two goalies, one who’s really good and a backup who’s not ready yet to play at this level.

The coach started the backup goalie at this week’s game. He gave up eight goals and the team lost.

His mom was sitting next to my wife during the game. “I wish they’d take him out,” she said. She was almost crying.

I am so glad my son doesn’t play goalie.

Every kid makes mistakes and every kid has bad games but the highs and lows for goalies are too extreme.

The counselor also stressed that colleges are looking for well-rounded kids, not just academic standouts.

“If you’re talking about well-rounded kids, you’re talking about Casey,” I said. “He’s like a sphere, that’s how well-rounded he is.”

“That can be his new nickname,” she said. “Sphere.”

“I like it!”

We were at Northwood High today for an academic planning session with my son and his counselor.

One of the things the counselor went over in the college prep handbook was a section on interview tips.

“At a private school like USC,” she told the boy, “you can schedule an interview with them if you think that will help your candidacy.”

“UCLA won’t let you do that,” I added. “They don’t want to talk to you.” I went through the application process at both schools so I know all about it.

“None of the UC schools will do an interview with you,” she said.

“It’s very impersonal,” I said, “like if the DMV ran a university.”

“It’s worse. At the DMV, eventually you’ll get to talk to someone.”

“By the way,” I said, pointing to a “Joey Ramone, 1951-2001″ poster on the wall, “do you think Joey Ramone is a good role model for the kids?”

“I like him,” she said, “and it’s my office.”

“You’re the best counselor ever,” I said.

The IHF post-season honors have been announced. My kid was selected to play in the all-star game on April 18, and to receive a Special Achievement Award, sponsored by the Anaheim Ducks and bestowed by the IHF on kids who’ve distinguished themselves off the rink, via academics, community service and extracurricular endeavors.

It would be nice if modesty prevented me from mentioning this stuff, but I’m happy to see the boy coming into his own as a well-rounded young man.

Northwood High School dominated the Special Achievement Awards. The IHF has 30 high schools participating, 53 teams and almost 600 kids, of whom 11 were selected for this award. Four of the 11 were from Northwood, showing once again why Northwood owns all other high schools in Orange County and probably the nation . . .

The Northwood Wind Ensemble went deep into the repertoire at last week’s Irvine Band Festival for some avant-garde pieces, including one called “Rollo Takes a Walk.”

“It’s the quirkiest, gayest piece I’ve ever played,” my son said.

“Rollo” didn’t have any good percussion parts, just oddball instrumentation with rimshots, slide whistles, etc.

“And in measure 126,” he said, “everybody stops playing and says, ‘Rollo…takes…a walk.’”

“Hmmmm.”

“Except it’s not written into my part so I don’t say it . . . and I play one note on the chimes.”

“What note is it?”

“An F.”

“I’m thinking the Rollo composer could follow up with an entire Rollo suite,” I said. “‘Rollo Takes a Shower,’ ‘Rollo Takes a Test,’ ‘Rollo Takes a Vacation,’ you see where I’m going with this?”

“Stop being stupid,” he said.

“Why is it stupid? Because you didn’t think of it?”