It is late spring, and the season of fully sanctioned worship in our public schools. Separation of church and state, perhaps, but now let us bow down for the great portion of the school day and pay obeisance at the feet of the god of standardized testing.
At Kira’s school, during this holy time of year trite pleasures of art and music are put aside, that proper devotion to all things memorized may more fully be made. And for three blessed weeks the gym is redeemed from its lowly purpose of physical activity and sanctified as a holy temple of test-taking. So while only the 3rd, 4th, and 5th-graders are eligible to receive the bubble-test communion at this K-5 school, the lives of all students are irredeemably touched by the sacramental offering.
I’ve written before, at some length, about my feelings as a non-believer, and I won’t rehash here today. But this year I’ve decided to make a little log of Megan’s instructional day. (By all means put little air quotes around the word “instructional” as you read that sentence aloud to your spouse, your dog, or your Boston fern).
I do think that the teachers in the gifted program that she attends try pretty hard to keep giving their classes new material as May rolls on. But they’re under the gun, and the amount of review that the kids belly up to not just in May, but all quarter long, would choke a hippo. The teachers are no happier about it than the students, and my heart goes out to them.
Megan’s recounting of yesterday’s hours between 7:45 and 2:15 did not paint a picture of a day brimming over with innovative instructional time. Although she did get to play some dodgeball and was quite pleased about that. (Aside: I don’t personally recall loving dodgeball. Did you? Of course, I’m sure I wasn’t any good at it, and she is.)
On the bright side, her class IS engaged in an original and rather inspired project that she’s quite enthusiastic about. It’s a group endeavor, brainchild of one of her classmates, that’s supposed to culminate in a 100-page book titled “Kill Bobbie J. Cutlip.”
I suppose I should be correctly, politically, horrified, but my understanding is that BJC is the author of the “What I Need to Know To Pass the [fill in history subject] Standards of Learning Test” catechism that the poor stultified students in Megan’s generally overachieving class are drilled on daily commencing in May.
And in truth, there’s no murder or even mayhem at hand. Rather, the exercise is to come up with imaginative and innovative ways to dispose of the book. For instance? Sandwiching it between two large pieces of meat and driving over a bayou bridge in Louisiana in search of a hungry alligator, as one girl in Megan’s class has suggested.
With apologies to the lady herself, I’m all for killing Bobbie J. Cutlip. Bring on the premeditation, all 100 creative pages of it.
fraught 