While many college students spent their summers easing their way into the world of adulthood with internships, summer jobs and academic research, I spent mine with high school students. I taught The Princeton Review's 18 hour SAT course for 4-Star Camps at the University of Virginia. It wasn't the first time I had taught the class, but the experience was altogether distinctive.

For the past two years, I've worked as an SAT instructor for The Princeton Review. While I'm at school, I teach two or three courses per year, each of which consists of eight three-hour classes spread out over six weeks. During the summer, however, the high school students supposedly have more time so as a result, the courses transform into "camp courses." A usual course meets once or twice per week; a camp course meets every day. The students who enroll in the camp courses do so through a program, which organizes each minute of their spare time for the entirety of their stay.

The other salient difference between a regular school-year course and a camp course is the makeup of the students. In the Amherst area, the school-year course costs $899. Students who wanted to take the course I taught this summer must fork over an astonishing $3,200 for two weeks. This means that while families must be fairly well off to afford an SAT preparatory course to begin with, the students who took my course this summer came from the upper levels of the socioeconomic scale.

The first session I taught began in late June; two weeks later, the first batch of students shipped off and a new group arrived, staying for two more weeks. All in all, I taught three sessions this summer.

On the first day of each session, I asked the students why they were in class. A student inevitably said, "To get into college;" this was followed by a chorus of students' mumbling, "To get a good SAT score." After this, there was a pause.

"Did any of your parents make you come here?" I would ask to the silent third of the room. "Yeah," a few of them would say, and I'd spend the next 15 minutes explaining to them things I didn't believe. "There is no such thing as a bad SAT score," I'd say. "The better your score, the higher are the chances you'll get into the school of your choice."

Then I'd go on to talk about the differences in admissions standards between small liberal arts colleges and big state universities, explain the importance of extracurricular activities in high school and move on to talking about the twists and tricks of the Critical Reading section.

The students were nice, friendly and for the first few days, even attentive. While they were excited about being at 4-Star, it certainly wasn't because they got to sit in front of me for three hours while I cajoled them to love the SAT. These kids, some of whom came to Charlottesville, Va., from Greece, China or Japan, were there because it would look good on their college applications, because they were bored at home or because their vacations to "the beach" weren't for another few weeks and they needed something to do.

After the first few days of perfunctory attentiveness and obedience wore off, the students stopped doing the assignments for the course, stopped participating in class or took a few too many bathroom breaks. Some persisted with the homework; generally-and unsurprisingly-these were the highest-scoring students.

But what about the rest of them? Why would they be so eager to spend someone else's money for something that would, purportedly at least, sweeten their applications to more likely rub an admission officer the right way, yet refuse to prepare for a test so revered, dreaded and infamous that its abbreviation stands for nothing?

As my daily homework checks gradually became less fruitful, I tried to reason with the students. "Why are you here?" I would ask them. "To get into a good college," they'd parrot once again while looking at their cell phones.

Days went by, but nothing seemed to work. I tried to appeal to them by the only means I hadn't tried. "Look," I said. "This program is really expensive. You're paying me a ton of money to be here. My job is to teach you the SAT, so you might as well make the most of it and get as much from the class as you can."

As I finished my sentence to bored looks and a request to go to the bathroom, I started to think I was being unreasonable. I tried to imagine what I would have been like in their situation-would I really have wanted to sit for three hours in an un-air conditioned classroom in the accumulating Virginia summer heat?

And I tried to imagine it, but I couldn't: it was a subjunctive statement, a conditional past perfect verb whose question had no answer, not only grammatically but literally too. My parents wouldn't have been able to pay $900 for any of the SAT courses I've taught for the past two years, let alone $3,200 for a two-week tryst at a college preparatory camp. My SAT score-and my college preparedness, for that matter-were left to me, and not for negligence but because test preparation, at least that to which I've been exposed, is a stratifying industry, and one we couldn't afford.

And at that moment, standing in front of high school students who had more in the bank than I do, I realized the old adage doesn't hold, that I couldn't put myself in their situations. Maybe that's why it feels hypocritical, that it feels somehow wrong to teach this class that even now I can't afford to take. It seems wrong to perpetuate the system that separates students like me from the students I teach.

And it seems wrong, somehow, to teach a class to people to whom I can't appeal.