Monday, February 7, 2011
Why are we taking tests from Iowa anyways?
I built a city today. Standing in front of sixteen middle school students, I settled the land, laid the foundations, sprawled slowly into the low-lying foothills, and spent 200 years of quiet aging. Churches, homes, barns, ski lifts, snow, trees, wind, clouds, craggy mountain tops in the curling crisp air. What I built had always been. The stories and lives of those before were not remembered, save in the earth and concrete of the place. If there were stories at all. I refused to give the place people. Daisy asked me where all the people were, and I said there weren’t any. I told her people ruin everything.
That may have been harsh.
We had standardized testing at school this morning, which means I’m supposed to hand out the little orange and purple booklets with intelligent looking kids laughing, printed on the front. Read some stupid instructions about how to fill in a bubble properly (which, if you ask me, ought to be part of the test; if they can’t figure out how to answer “D. All of the above” then I think they should be banned from being assessed. We have bigger issues than reading competency here. Little Suzy can’t shade in an oval).
But they didn’t ask me. So I mumbled through the instructions (my flippancy was appreciated) and just got them started on the stupid thing. Besides, let’s be honest: when you’re in the 6th grade, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills at 9 a.m. on Monday the 6th of February is the least of your worries. Put on the scale next to John McHormones and Susan B. Popularity…I’d say they’ve got more on the mind than what time the train, leaving southbound around 6 p.m. and traveling at a speed of 40 mph, will arrive in Topeka if it makes three stops, and has a headwind of roughly 15 mph. That gosh-dang zephyr doesn’t stand a chance.
And so I doodled. Not on a small scale, mind you. I did have the next three hours (broken down into five increments and one game of Heads-Up Seven-Up to get the blood flowing). So I used the white board as my canvas and I created a whole village. I wish you could have seen it, really I do. It sort of started with just a main street and a few houses, but three hours is a long time for my imagination to frolic around with a dry-erase marker.
I’d rather not try to describe it all for you. I don’t think you’d get it. You can’t feel it. You can’t start from one end of the room and see this rough, cartoonish doodle, move closer step by step and become engrossed in the smudges, the eraser marks amongst the pine grove on the western edge of a mountain. You can’t see that the tiny cross-like structures are actually a ski lift, or that the house with round windows must have a fire going because its chimney puffs frozen dots of cloud. You can’t choose which house you would live in, let alone tell me why. You can’t see the distinction between the deciduous trees of the town center and the wild conifers growing in the crook of two mountains.
But it was a hell of a drawing, I tell you. I was pretty proud.
And then I got sad all of a sudden. I realized that the place I drew didn’t exist, and that my apartment in Naperville, Illinois, was quite the disappointment compared to my white-board drawing. It wasn’t like a sharp sadness, like the stinging insult of a door slamming on your finger. Or the sort of sadness that comes from the loss of something that means more than life to you. No one has died, nothing was taken. It’s a deeper sadness. One that you can’t shake for the life of you. It’s a longing for that which doesn’t exist, a pining for…something you can’t quite put your finger on. You can’t describe it, because that would give it actuality, and end up killing or cheapening it. Whatever this “It” is, it isn’t something that you can speak metaphorically about, because it has no comparison and it isn’t akin to anything in reality. It is wholly other. It is, quite simply, the Imagined.
When did we stop creating things? When in life did we reach the age where, in our exhaustion, we began to prefer the creativity of others to fill the imagination in our lives? When television replaced books for our pastime, when “Lego’s” became “Call of Duty: Black Ops” and we no longer had to create our own worlds before we played in them, we simply had to exist, eyes glued to the screen, within the parameters of an overly-stimulated universe that answered all of our questions and didn’t beg any doubts? When we no longer needed to decide, down in the unfinished basement, if we were going to be mad scientists or gun-wielding robots out to conquer the world, before we began playing?
I kept stepping back from my drawing, while my students scratched furiously at those elusive little ovals. I’d move forward again, then step back. Draw a line here and there, then step back. When they were all done with their tests, I told my students to call me in ten years if they felt like they had lost their imaginations. I told them that that was the easiest way they could make me cry. I’m not sure if they thought I was serious or just kind of weird.
I built a city today. Ken the janitor probably erased it already. But it’s okay. I’m left with no choice but to create another tomorrow. Thank God for the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and my job as a proctor.
That may have been harsh.
We had standardized testing at school this morning, which means I’m supposed to hand out the little orange and purple booklets with intelligent looking kids laughing, printed on the front. Read some stupid instructions about how to fill in a bubble properly (which, if you ask me, ought to be part of the test; if they can’t figure out how to answer “D. All of the above” then I think they should be banned from being assessed. We have bigger issues than reading competency here. Little Suzy can’t shade in an oval).
But they didn’t ask me. So I mumbled through the instructions (my flippancy was appreciated) and just got them started on the stupid thing. Besides, let’s be honest: when you’re in the 6th grade, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills at 9 a.m. on Monday the 6th of February is the least of your worries. Put on the scale next to John McHormones and Susan B. Popularity…I’d say they’ve got more on the mind than what time the train, leaving southbound around 6 p.m. and traveling at a speed of 40 mph, will arrive in Topeka if it makes three stops, and has a headwind of roughly 15 mph. That gosh-dang zephyr doesn’t stand a chance.
And so I doodled. Not on a small scale, mind you. I did have the next three hours (broken down into five increments and one game of Heads-Up Seven-Up to get the blood flowing). So I used the white board as my canvas and I created a whole village. I wish you could have seen it, really I do. It sort of started with just a main street and a few houses, but three hours is a long time for my imagination to frolic around with a dry-erase marker.
I’d rather not try to describe it all for you. I don’t think you’d get it. You can’t feel it. You can’t start from one end of the room and see this rough, cartoonish doodle, move closer step by step and become engrossed in the smudges, the eraser marks amongst the pine grove on the western edge of a mountain. You can’t see that the tiny cross-like structures are actually a ski lift, or that the house with round windows must have a fire going because its chimney puffs frozen dots of cloud. You can’t choose which house you would live in, let alone tell me why. You can’t see the distinction between the deciduous trees of the town center and the wild conifers growing in the crook of two mountains.
But it was a hell of a drawing, I tell you. I was pretty proud.
And then I got sad all of a sudden. I realized that the place I drew didn’t exist, and that my apartment in Naperville, Illinois, was quite the disappointment compared to my white-board drawing. It wasn’t like a sharp sadness, like the stinging insult of a door slamming on your finger. Or the sort of sadness that comes from the loss of something that means more than life to you. No one has died, nothing was taken. It’s a deeper sadness. One that you can’t shake for the life of you. It’s a longing for that which doesn’t exist, a pining for…something you can’t quite put your finger on. You can’t describe it, because that would give it actuality, and end up killing or cheapening it. Whatever this “It” is, it isn’t something that you can speak metaphorically about, because it has no comparison and it isn’t akin to anything in reality. It is wholly other. It is, quite simply, the Imagined.
When did we stop creating things? When in life did we reach the age where, in our exhaustion, we began to prefer the creativity of others to fill the imagination in our lives? When television replaced books for our pastime, when “Lego’s” became “Call of Duty: Black Ops” and we no longer had to create our own worlds before we played in them, we simply had to exist, eyes glued to the screen, within the parameters of an overly-stimulated universe that answered all of our questions and didn’t beg any doubts? When we no longer needed to decide, down in the unfinished basement, if we were going to be mad scientists or gun-wielding robots out to conquer the world, before we began playing?
I kept stepping back from my drawing, while my students scratched furiously at those elusive little ovals. I’d move forward again, then step back. Draw a line here and there, then step back. When they were all done with their tests, I told my students to call me in ten years if they felt like they had lost their imaginations. I told them that that was the easiest way they could make me cry. I’m not sure if they thought I was serious or just kind of weird.
I built a city today. Ken the janitor probably erased it already. But it’s okay. I’m left with no choice but to create another tomorrow. Thank God for the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and my job as a proctor.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)