Strategy 3: Use What You’re Given

Students who arrive punctually, finish the test, and cannot sleep–either because of their misguidedly helathy habits or because of an unfortunate natural youthful vigor–craft extraordinary stratagems to keep their minds active during the four to six hours of soul-killing stillness.

They cannot enjoy the stillness, in a Zen or naturalist way, because they are imprisoned in a cell.  Teachers must cover their walls or take down all colorful, inspirational, or educational posters before administering TAKS.  The presence of encouraging messages might give students an unnecessary advantage and constitute cheating.  And very few classrooms even have windows, so the chance of enjoying sunlight to brighten the stillness is next to none.

Instead, students must invent self-entertainments using the very limited tools available to them.  Their resultant activities rival the Apollo 13 landing for ingenuity and industry.

Since students may not bring any non-testing materials on test day (except, of course, for junk food), they must turn infant-like to their own limbs for entertainment.  There are the usual, banal bored-student habits; the jock scratching his armpit, the class clown making water-dropping noises by thumping his cheek, the math team/debate nerd who somehow twirls his pencil on top of his index finger.  But for most students, such easy answers only amuse for half an hour or so.

I saw one student whose eyes seemed fixed at some point in the distance, almost unblinking, for a full ten minutes.  What an effort!  I eventually followed his gaze to the clock on my wall.  Counting the minutes?  But that would be excruciating!  Then I noticed his right index finger laid across his left wrist.  He was timing his pulse.  An appropriate activity: it was the day of math TAKS; he had finished his test and was hungry for more math.  I could see him thinking hard: seventy beats per minute, sixty seconds per minute, seventy divided by sixty is what fraction of beats per second?…

I couldn’t help thinking it was also oa commentary on the effects of this test on one’s soul.  Counting one’s pule is a wordless way of asking, “Am I still alive?”  A good question once one has been sitting still doing nothing for four hours.

Some students even resort to self-mutilation–of the relatively harmless kind that is possible in this controlled, sanitized environment.  I saw one student “frogging” himself after he finished his test: a funny trick I haven’t practiced since middle school. Using one protruding knuckle, you hit a person on the forearm or bicep–hard.  If you hit right, you will see the muscle bunch together and jump up like a frog.  We used to to this to one another while waiting in the lunch line.  This student, because he was not allowed to communicate with anyone for any reason, was forced to frog HIMSELF.  Repeatedly.  For fifteen minutes or more.

I have seen others.  We are not allowed to provide students with scratch paper, so some request kleenex (which we are required to provide) and then draw on it.  Some use the kleenex to make paper airplanes.  Yes, tissue airplanes: these will never fly, even if thrown, which perhaps makes them less likely to be banned.  (I can see the rule now, inserted into the TAKS instructions.  “While waiting for other students to finish, you may not read a book, draw, or make tissue airplanes”…what?)  Students who make these useless instruments show great cognitive power, I think; they seem to be saying, “the Snot-Force One flies in my imagination!“ 

Creative students like these often commandeer their TAKS booklets for creative purposes.  There is a name for this; my wife does it with magazines full of corporate advertisements.  It’s called “creative reclaiming.”  You reclaim the paper, which was originally used for the sake of avarice or propaganda, and use it for healthy, human, soul-expressing purposes.  I have seen TAKS booklets positively TATTOOED with student art: names drawn in huge, shaded, angular letters; abstract and random-looking designs to rival Pollock; dark portraits of loves lost or unrequited.  Boys draw girls; girls draw boys; everyone draws stars, both human and celestial.  Chains, birds, flowers, skyscrapers, super heroes, even pictures of rows of morbid-looking students taking tests.  My favorite students cover their test booklet with sketches or send them back to Austin laden with obscene or rebellious messages.

One student filled his math TAKS booklet with a rather eloquent essay (for a fifteen year old) about the evils of standardized testing.  Not particularly original, but an admirable effort.

No one scores the test booklets; they contain the test questions and nothing else.  The answer document, a four-page, 8 1/2 x 11 scantron from hell, is all that they score.  Does anyone see all of this marvelous art?  The sketches are a cry from the depths of despair; and, true to the despairing teenagers’ fears, no one is listening.  They offer up these half-hearted prayers to a big, empty sky full of indifferent psychometricians who apparently think only in statistics.

One other such message really impressed me.  During the math test, a student turned in his test at noon, but kept his calculator by mistake.  Then he realized he had just given me the only raw materials he had, and had left himself nothing with which to fabricate a soul-saving activity.

That is, until he realized he had kept the calculator we lent him.  A TI-85–an amazing machine that has not only all ten digits, but all twenty-six letters of the alphabet.  A large screen, too, with scrolling capabilities like a computer.

This student typed a multiparagraph letter.  Yes, a letter.  It began with the words, “So it looks like everyone is freaking out about the swine flu virus.  I wonder how quickly it will spread…”  He typed this way for about an hour, until everyone finished testing and I took up the calculators.

He cleared the message–just hit delete, and that was it.  To whom was he writing?  To God?  To everyone?  To nobody?  I will never know.  This was an act of existential courage–an ultimate “YES!” to his own soul and to his own circumstances.  I have never seen anything like it.