High school teacher or teenage rebel?

Gaby Canjura, a student in the humanities magnet at Hamilton High, writes:

When my math teacher passed out general district answer documents, saying the math coach told her LAUSD now required the Algebra 2 classes to take the district assessment, my class was decidedly unhappy.

When she then told us to get started without passing out the actual tests, we were bewildered. No one was really sure just where she was going with this. Despite the fact that we are studying probability in all its glorious forms, I almost immediately brushed aside the notion that we were simply participating in an experimental probability scenario. Because our teacher had given us the assessment code and had us fill in our student ID number, it seemed like we really did have to take a district assessment. Because it seemed so authentic, my friend and I were left with only one possible answer: Our math teacher was "sticking it to the Man."

The idea that my math teacher was giving a theoretical finger to LAUSD testing and state standards was, for some strange reason, thrilling. The idea that she was partaking in a rebellion I saw as only for teenagers gave me a strange sense of pride.

It was only after she revealed to us that the test we had taken was an illustration of a probability project we were doing that I understood why this was. Because I believed my math teacher to be breaking the rules, she was automatically bound to us in a way most teachers are not. In that moment, she shared in the rebellion that all teenagers take upon themselves. She was one of us.

When it turned out that this was all an experiment in probability and not at all the insurrection I was expecting, I was a little disappointed. She was not a teenage rebel, and rightly so. In the days that followed, I came to see the occurrence as just another experiment in probability -- my math teacher had shown us who she was and who she could be, and there was 0.5 probability that she could be either one of those things.