Vitaly Umansky Illustration

I have witnessed the 3^rd grade ELA test today and yesterday. Was it as bad as everybody says it is? No. It was much worse! For instance, few questions asked to distinguish between fact and opinion, whereas, “fact” stands for something meaningless that children need to learn to sort, and “opinion” stands for something nobody is interested in hearing. Over the years, children will get intimately familiar with the two terms. But since it is only their first test of that kind, the terms can appear a little confusing to anyone who is still capable of thought. What is a fact and what is an opinion? For example, according to the DOE experts “The New York State tests are designed to measure how well students have mastered necessary skills and to monitor the effectiveness of instructional programs. These tests reflect the high standards set for elementary and intermediate grades and help ensure that students are prepared for high school. The tests children take were developed and evaluated carefully. Many New York State educators and researchers conducted extensive reviews of each test question, approving only those test questions judged to be of the highest quality and in alignment with the New York State Learning Standards. The test questions have been field-tested to ensure that the directions are clear and easy to follow, the material is interesting to students, and the tests are reliable indicators of student achievement.” Is that a fact or an opinion? You could look at the tests from a different angle. You could also say that these tests only appear absolutely meaningless. In fact, they do serve one purpose. $350 million government money go to test-writing companies to ensure that the generation that is now in schools will be a generation of non-thinking subjects, incapable of questioning anyone or anything that would smoothly go through the bureaucratic machine from birth to death. Is that a fact or an opinion?

But enough speculating. Let me give you the fact of how I personally felt during this test. Did you know that before taking the marvelous test (which is “interesting to students”) the teacher “ensures that the directions are clear and easy to follow”? Yes, and it happens in the following manner: the teacher reads from a document compiled by some corporate lawyer (judging by the nature of the language) for 30 minutes. During this time students cannot lift a pencil, turn a page, or do anything that would imply that they are young homo-sapiens. The students are dehumanized, demoralized and bored to their bones before the teacher reaches the middle of the instructions document. Do you want to know how it feels? Imagine a small and empty room with grey walls and no windows; only a fluorescent lamp is flickering above you. Now imagine that you are tied to a board, and a special machine intravenously pumps shit into your body. The total experience lasts 90 minutes. If there is anything human left in you after that time, how do you call it?

The test itself is, no doubt, interesting to the students, as the DOE claims. It is interesting to read a dead text; a text of a certain genre - the test-text. A text is certainly followed by interesting questions, each has four possible answers that can be broken as follows: no; retarded; stupid; also stupid but less than others. Or: idiotic; retarded; no way; wait a second, nothing here matches the text. Or: no; it’s either both of these or none of the above; who’s the moron who wrote these questions?; did they even read the text? I can't reveal the exact phrasing of the questions, but I can make analogous ones.

1. A rabbit enters a supermarket. What is the most likely food it would select? (Here you of course, imagine a supermarket and the vegetable section with carrots and cabbages, and lettuces, but hold on, here are the possible answers)

A) Chicken

B) Spaghetti

C) Can of Tuna

D) Eggs

Well one of them is right, and three of them are wrong.

2. After reading the novel The Catcher in the Rye, what is the relationship of Holden with his grandmother.

A) Pleasant

B) Tight

C) Warm

D) Explosive

HIS GRANDMOTHER???

3. In Franz Kafka's novel America, what does the word "it" on page 52, line 26, refers to?

A) The blank paper equivalent to your mind right now

B) The choice in a supermarket this test is preparing you for

C) The street where you would rather be right now

D) The paper airplane you want to make out of the answer sheet

After some 45 minutes of debates of this kind, the students that ought to look like the famous Munch’s painting “the Scream”, are allowed to go to the bathroom – under escort! Lest, of course, the students of different classes will conspire to check their answers against each other. Somehow, I doubt that. I could imagine this option would be possible if there were few (= not many) questions that really make you think deep (= not “what the hell could they mean?”) and check your knowledge, and one of these questions was really tough, and you couldn’t solve it, but you wanted to solve it, or you wanted to know how others thought about it. But here it is not the case. Here is the case of sinking to the bottoms of the ocean of idiocy. After 45 minutes you reach such depths that not only you don’t have any desires but you don’t have any thoughts, also. Nevertheless, teachers should be on guard (kind of like in prison).

But that’s not all the fun. After the soul was largely removed by the test, the test administration protocol makes sure that no bits and pieces of it are left, and it requires the 3^rd graders to sit still for the remaining of the time. It means they cannot leave the classroom, they cannot read, they cannot draw, they cannot have anything in their hands, they cannot talk, they cannot exchange anything with anybody, and they cannot really move much. They are just supposed to be done with the test quietly for the reaming time. If they’re done in half an hour, tough luck, they get to sit quietly for an hour. That’s where the true purpose of the test is most visible. At the end, mission accomplished; a human ceases being a human and becomes something else, some neo-human, or non-human, something not really alive, or half-alive but definitely without a purpose. During the reading of the directions, the teacher said that every teacher in New York State is now reading the same words. I wanted to joke that I can hear the echo.

These tests are deadly. Anyone who gets in contact with it becomes dumb, regardless of age, intellect, or experience. This is probably the largest debilitating machine in the history of humankind.

So why do we have it? I have not yet heard a single educator who would speak in favor of these tests. Of course, the makers of the test rely on “profound research” favoring the tests and advertise it as very useful. But what about the teachers; those individuals whose job it is to know what children need, and who, through their jobs, actually know what each of their students need?

Some 230 years ago people in this country knew to protest against conditions they found unfair, or inhumane. We lost this capability somewhere along the way. We swallow every poison given to us and we are afraid to say that we don’t like it. Or, more accurately, we say we don’t like it, but we drink it anyway. The fact is, we don’t like it, and this system poisons us. This method, if continued, will turn us all into a nation of morons, at best.

I opened the news and saw that Jobs resined. I decided to learn more about this man and looked him up in Wikipedia. I learned many details I didn't know, like that he left Apple in the 80s' and that he made Pixar out of a division of LucasFilms, but what stroke me was the combination of encyclopedic formality with the immediacy of everything. "He is ... former chief executive officer of Apple Inc".
-Huh, they updated it already, I thought. I kept reading until I hit "On August 24, 2011, Jobs announced his resignation from his role as Apple's CEO". It was written as if the matter at hand was some event in the life of Napoleon or something from the Cold War affairs. I looked at the clock. It was 12:01 AM, August 25. With the snap of fingers, life was alphabetized and archived together with all the rest of the events that happened on a certain date in the history of the Earth. I felt like I instantly aged, and was myself stuffed between bits and bytes, possibly to be found on some date in the history of the Earth. What happens when you are found? Is it like a resurrection, or more like a reincarnation, since you are unrecognizably out of context?
Dear diary, in my next life I will be reduced to few words by someone who is also tagged in some tiny, meaningless corner of the informational cosmos.
And I will be able to Google us both in the current life. Watch.