"We Smarter Than Y'all Was! "

I found myself in a classroom today in which an English teacher had an "unplanned" absence. She broke one of her ankles being Superwoman on the basketball court and to that end left no assignment for her kids.  I won't call myself a writer as I don't get paid for it, but I do pride myself in my ability to put sentences together. I gave myself five minutes to think and came up with a writing prompt which I thought wouldn't prove too daunting to a ninth grade English class. The prompt?

"The richest people in the world have offered you a charge card which gives you access to ALL their money for one week. In that week you can spend as much of their money as you can, but you agree that at the end of that week to be executed on live television. There are conditions. You can't simply GIVE their money away. You have to use it to buy things (no you can't BUY a cashiers check for a trillion and give it to your family) but the things can be bought and given away. You can't assassinate the people whose money you're spending and you can't buy your life back.  Would you take it? Explain your answer in detail."

That was the assignment. When invariably asked "How long it gotta be?" I responded "How long does it take you to express yourself? How long does it take for you to evaluate an ethical dilemma? Give me your answer and explain your answer as best you can." Some students took the ball and ran with it. I got some well thought out responses, but I also got a plethora of blank pages and the odd paper with two or three sentences as a response.

One student handed in a two sentence reply. The grammar was horrific, the punctuation was non existent and the subject verb agreement was painful. I looked at the paper and at him and asked: "Is this all you want to say?"
"YEAH!" He replied angrily. "What I'm supposed to do now?"
"Well, read and write down in your reading log." Students are given reading diaries to indicate what their reading and their degree of understanding of the materials. He did that for a few minutes then asked to go to the library. I asked why and was informed that he was "Bored." I pointed out that boredom was part of life and if he was truly bored to read something. He bellowed "I don't come to school ta mutha-fuckin' READ!" I reminded him that he was in an English class and the better part of what we did in English classes was reading and told him not to swear when speaking to me."

One of his classmates chimed in. "We aint here to read. We here to PASS!" I mentioned that every class required some reading and they were in school to learn and that learning was done quite often by reading. "Hell naw!" the student answered "We just gotta pass. We aint gotta read nothin'!"  He then stormed across the room saying "Y'all act like school was so much harder when y'all went through it. All y'all was doin' was READIN' shit. Fuck it! We smarter than y'all was cause we take more tests than y'all did! " His classmates emphatically agreed.

Part of me wanted to laugh in his face for being so ignorant, another part of my wanted to cry because he and his brethren HONESTLY believe what he said to be the truth. He's a ninth grader who reads at maybe a 5th grade level.  His vocabulary  is minuscule and he sincerely believes that not only is he my intellectual superior, but that his superiority is borne of having to take "more tests" and that all he has to do in school is "pass." He made this declaration with such conviction that I didn't doubt his sincerity.
     He reminded me of a chihuahua restrained by a leash as he charges a rottweiler.

I write this piece NOT to ridicule this child as he's obviously NOT the only one, but rather to provide those of you who are NOT in a classroom with a window into what we have to deal with in the course of our day. Children are given low standards from elementary school and are told that "good enough" is all that's expected of them.  You needn't make the honor roll, you need only "pass."  They spend a third of the school year either testing or preparing to be tested and they honestly believe that these tests accurately measure their intellect and make them as smart (if not smarter) than those attempting to teach them.
        Giving students a test once a year and using that test as a bench mark for student progress on the surface isn't a bad idea, but when you reach the point where you've created a culture of quasi-professional test takers whose only education was how to take a test you've damned an entire nation and began the path to the Idiocracy of which Mike Judge wrote.