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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.”

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.

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 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.”

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.

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.

From the weekly Northwood High School bulletin:

Do you like reading? Do you like children? Do you like children but not reading? Or reading but not children?

Come to the Giving Tree meetings every Monday in Mr. Emery’s room 1103.

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?”

My son’s one-eighth Japanese on his mom’s side and the student body at his school is about 40 percent Korean, so when he comes into my room yelling, “YES! I am going to shove it” — punctuated with a fist pump — “at those Koreans tomorrow,” it doesn’t take long to figure out that Japan must have won the World Baseball Classic . . .

He said it was “an AYSO 10-and-under caliber trophy.” He doesn’t really care though. He doesn’t display the trophies he already has.

He had a great season though, and a great game in the finals.

The coach asked him to play defenseman this season — which he’s never played — because they had too many forwards. He made a few mistakes but it turned out to be a great coaching move because he’s probably the strongest skater in the league and the best forwards on other teams got frustrated when they couldn’t just skate around him like they could with all the other defensemen.

He’d get my MVP vote, if I had an MVP vote, and if the league had an MVP award, which it doesn’t . . .

Northwood won their IHF final game against El Dorado, the number one seed, 5-2.

I saw this team at the beginning of the season and said to my son, “You guys are going to lose every game.”

He said, “I think we’re going to go undefeated.”

It turns out he was closer to being right than I was . . .

Northwood wins 3-2
IHF Finals next week
May the best team win

Grammatically incorrect — “best” should be “better” — but it’s okay because I’ve got a poetic license!

It’s right here in my wallet . . .

“Forty percent of the people at my school speak Korean,” my son says. “Or Chinese. I can’t tell the difference.”

It’s the last high school roller hockey game of the regular season.

One of the kids’ dads shows up for the first time and asks questions like, “Do they win most of their games?”

Do they win most of their games?! Are you kidding?! You should know that. Even if you don’t come to the games, you could ask your kid when he gets home.

Another dad has a great answer. “Come over here,” he says. “I want to introduce you to your son.”

Over on the moms’ side of the bleachers, they’re talking about financial matters. One woman is sad because they bought their house at the peak of the market and they’re financially stuck in it for the foreseeable future.

Another woman almost cries describing how 14 years of contributions to her husband’s 401k have been totally wiped out.

Meanwhile on the rink, Northwood dominates Capo Valley pretty much as expected . . .

First semester grades are out. My son missed getting straight A’s by a point and a half. He had an 88.5 in honors history.

He got an A in honors English with a 90.14.

The honors classes at Northwood are very demanding. Even the best students get low A’s and high B’s.

Three kids got A’s in the history class. The high score was a 91.1.

“The 91.1 is Ted,” my son says. We know Ted. “Ted is history. He’s bad at math, average in English, but he knows everything there is to know about history.”

“Make sure you touch base with the history teacher,” I say. “Let him know you’re really doing your best for him and ask him what you need to do to get that extra point and a half this semester. He’ll tell you.”

“He’ll say, ‘Study hard, get a good score on all the assignments, blah blah blah.’”

“You’re a pessimist,” I say. (I was going to say “fatalist” but I’m not sure he knows what that means.) “I’ve been a teacher myself and I can tell you that teachers like students who are engaged and make an extra effort. They want you to do well and if there’s a close call on a grade, they may give you the benefit of the doubt. So be proactive with this guy.”

His mom chimes in at this point: “That’s right,” she says.

“I hate that,” the boy replies. “You don’t even know what he’s talking about. You just say ‘That’s right.’”

I say, “She doesn’t have to know what I’m talking about to know it’s right. If my lips are moving, it’s right.”

My wife is telling me that because Northwood finals are over today — Thursday — the boy now has a four-day weekend.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I say. It kind of makes sense to have Friday off, but why Monday?

“It’s semester break,” the boy says.

“Semester break?!”

“That’s right. It’s like the off season.”

The off season . . . it’s so ridiculous I have to laugh.

“Isn’t it nice you have a funny family?” my wife says.

“It’s like the all-star break,” the boy says.

My son had a drum set part in the Northwood Holiday Concert last night . . .

Drum set parts are a showcase for high school percussionists because usually they stand at the back of the orchestra, the audience can’t actually see the instruments, and nobody knows what they’re doing.

He told me after the concert that was the worst he’d ever played that song but it sounded great to me, maybe because I’m a parent . . .