Pop Quiz! How Much Math Do You Remember From School?
Surprise! You’ve come into class today without expecting a test. Yet as the teacher comes around, you realize you probably should review some things before they get to your desk. The teacher says, “It’ll be fun!” You know that isn’t the case. For weeks, you’ve been thinking about the first time a pop quiz happened and you were so unprepared. A while ago, you swore you’d be ready with the right answer if called on for the next one.
But the teacher has printed out pop quizzes and you don’t feel the slightest bit confident. You don’t want to play their game but have to. It’s your turn and the sheet of paper is placed on your desk. As you flip it over, your alarm goes off and you wake up from this dream. You’re not in class. You’re in your bed. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still take a pop quiz. Think you remember math from your kindergarten days all the way through high school? See if you do.
The word "quiz" has a long history that didn't always mean what we know it to mean today. In the 1780s, it meant an odd or eccentric person in a slang way. In 1835, quiz was used as a part of a bet to try and popularize a strange word. This was the select word that two or more people had to use to get it off the ground. There are versions of this tale found in British newspapers. It was written about by an Irish police magistrate in his memoir.
Initially, that story may have been based on the word "quoz" instead of "quiz." No one is confident about where the word quiz comes from, and even Merriam Webster's dictionary can't place it. If you think about quizzical, that means eccentric, so the original way the word was used still lives on. In the modern usage, people used the verb to mean to question something. Pop quizzes didn't become a thing until the 20th century.
A quiz can also mean a simple series of questions without right or wrong answers. It became a part of our verbiage, as a test, in the early 20th century. To this day, students shudder to hear of a pop quiz and dread it even more when they get one back and see plenty of red marker on it.