Strategy 1: Arrive Late

Teachers and administrators insist that students arrive on time to school, but whatever our words say, our actions do not encourage punctuality.

Students know that we do not record tardies on TAKS day.  It is too hectic for such a nuanced approach to attendance records; we mark “present” or “absent,” and then our administrators phone home like E.T. to get the absent kids’ butts in their chairs.  The state grades us on our attendance statistics on TAKS day, and we’re too busy working for one hundred percent attendance to bother marking tardies.  So it makes sense for students to relish these last few minutes of soul-breathing autonomy before we shackle them to their desks for six hours.

Fewer than half the students arrive on time.  Even those who arrive early on the bus will loiter in the parking lot for twenty or thirty minutes after the bell.  We are powerless to enforce any consequences for tardiness.

The few who arrive on time must wait quietly for those thirty minutes; they are of course not allowed to talk, play games, or even read.  Everyone knows that we will wait for the stragglers; we will not start the test until at least eighty percent of the students have come.  State law requires us to read the five-page instructions, verbatim, in every student’s hearing.  If we started on time, we would have to read the instructions again and again each time a student arrived.  This action would only distract the punctual ones who had already heard the instructions and begun testing.  It is much easier to wait and read the instructions once we have all but three or four students in the room.

These remaining three or four will arrive at various times throughout the day–two, three, even four hours late, to the dismay of their peers (who will have to wait for them to finish testing before they are allowed to read a book or sketch).  There is of course no penalty for arriving late.

In fact, arriving late is a pretty effective coping mechanism.  Many students have figured out that if they arrive after the proctor has read the directions, he might be in an “oh, whatever” mood.  He might even give an abridged version of the instructions, since most of them are unnecessary and inefficient anyway.  (For example, the instructions use about three hundred words to tell students to copy a number from their test book onto their answer sheet.  With a late student, some experienced proctors will point and say “See this number? Copy it right here.”)

A truly bright student–one who can finish the fifty or sixty ridiculously easy questions in fifteen minutes–should come to school at least four hours late: that is, fifteen minutes before noon.  Then he can hear a very abridged version of the instructions–proctors have stopped believing, not only in education and the youth, but also in justice, goodness, beauty, virtue, and God himself and may shorten the directions to a “here-get started”–forget state law. 

By arriving after lunch, the truly bright student ensures that he will finish his test at just the same time that his final straggling peers do–ensuring that he wastes none of his morning counting spots on the wall or cursing the day he was born–the only two activities seemingly open to his diligent but less forward-thinking peers, who arrived on time and finished the test a reasonable hour or so before it began.