Hard Lessons

The rules are a little different in Penny Smeltzer’s classroom, a portable trailer at Westwood High School in Round Rock. When student messengers come from the main office, they recite a quotation—anything goes, from a sports star to a 17th-century English poet. Her students smile with her when she demands the quotations. They shrug good-naturedly when she urges them to turn in their textbooks so they won’t have to wait in long lines. “You are the generation that plans to wait till the last minute,” she says, her Michigan accent strong after 30 years in Texas. “It’s your senior year. Go to the lake.”

Smeltzer has spent nine months pushing her students hard, with one goal: perform well on the advanced placement statistics test. “I do not stop,” she says. “We go bell to bell.”
On this cool, sunny Friday in mid-May, the class can relax. It’s the first time they’ve seen Smeltzer since the exam Wednesday. “[The exam] wasn’t as in-depth as any class period that we had,” one student says. Smeltzer tells the class that sometimes the tests are graded harder if the questions are easy.

“Oh, no,” one boy says as others agree. “I don’t think your average statistics student in Mississippi would get them right.”

The students aren’t just saying that to make their teacher happy. Smeltzer’s one of the best AP Statistics teachers in America, with lists of awards to prove it. She’s been from coast to coast and to Singapore teaching other teachers how to get kids excited about math. Smeltzer recruits AP Statistics students wherever she goes—grocery stores, school plays, anywhere she sees a parent or high-schooler. Once they’re in her class, she finds a way to prepare everyone. “If they’re not understanding a manufacturing problem about quality control in statistics,” she says, “then maybe what I need to do is talk about the price of prom dresses.”

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