Strategy 2: Sleep the Morning Away

All is not lost for the punctual student, though.  For the student who fails to plan ahead and foolishly arrives on time, the first and most obvious course of action is to fall asleep so that the day will pass quickly.  Students have been known to try this strategy both during and after the test, both of which can work if executed with prudence.

A successful mid-test snooze requires some planning and skill to execute properly.  Again, students who employ the method most successfully have learned to utterly ignore the advice of well-meaning adults.  Teachers and principals advise students to “get a good night’s rest” before the test and “eat a helathy breakfast” that morning.  I have even gone so far as to specify “eight hours” of sleep and “fresh fruits and whole grains” for breakfast.  Good sleep and good food make students energetic in the morning–which would be the right temperament if they were required to lay brick or paint a barn or write a symphony or do anything else intrinsically valuable.  Energy and alertness, however, are useless on TAKS day.

The student who must arrive on time–who has no ride to school, for example, and must ride the bus–would do well to stay up all night drinking sugary, caffeinated soda pop and playing video games.  Such action prevents any actual bodily weariness (what would result from physical work or exercise), but will ensure a hazy sleepiness throughout the morning of TAKS.

Heavy sleep is not the goal.  Heavy, healthy sleep is too conspicuous.  We teachers are required to wake sleepers, and since we have nothing else to do, we are actually quite good at it.  A heavy sleeper is likely to breathe heavily, even to snore.  Neither of these are permissible, even after the student has finished testing; for heavy breathing is loud and a distraction to other students.

Pure sleep, then, healthy sleep, is no good.  It invites the worst possible exigency: direct contact between tester and proctor, something that neither party really wants.

No: the effective TAKS sleeper cultivates a zombie-like half-consciousness, an inert oblivion somewhere in the nether region between rest and awareness.  Sleep of this kind wafts the student witlessly past the hours of the morning without alerting the proctor to his status as “a sleeper.”  With any luck, his eyes will remain half-open, so he will seem to be focusing them on his test booklet; the nervous twitches caused by the previous night’s caffeine overload may even resemble vigorous writing or the thoughtful and involuntary weight shifts of deep deliberation.

The student who fails to plan ahead–who gets a good night’s sleep, as his teachers so naively (or insidiously?) advised–will indeed by ready to test early in the morning.  Woe to that student!  He will finish his test in a reasonable amount of time–an hour or so–and will then then have to try to sleep for the next five hours or so while his classmates pretend to finish.  (More later on this strategy: it’s called “dragging out the test to the last possible moment.”)  The student who sleeps well at night, then finishes the test in the morning, is in quite a bind: he has plenty of energy and nothing to do.  Torture.

Fortunately, such foolish lack of foresight has a remedy.

Junk food.  Every student should bring a full-size bag of industrially produced corn chips, which he should eat immediately, and as quickly as possible, after finishing the test.  He should crunch them down by the handful.  (This act has the added benefit of breaking the excruciating silence, and since food is the only allowable accessory on TAKS day, the proctor cannot prevent the student from crunching away.)

A whole bag of chips will hit the bottom of a student’s stomach with all the force necessary to pull his whole body–mind, too–down to the depths of unconscious stupor.

Let him beware, though.  A Dorito-nap is often a snoring nap, and if he draws attention to himself the proctor will awaken him.