Month: June 2002

In today’s Salon, Amy Weivoda writes:

We all understood that the kids behind the tests were real, and we never intentionally tried to screw them. But discomfort, resentment and tedium no doubt caused our minds to wander and our scores to get sloppy. Subtle pressure from our co-workers, or open pressure from our managers, caused us to rush through the tests. We were underpaid and poorly trained and none of us was qualified to be scoring those kids.

Great. Like I needed more reason to be pissed off at standardized tests.

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well — this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and sociality as a whole.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Some things just piss me off:

In a feat of literary sleuth work, Ms. Heifetz, the mother of a high school senior and a weaver from Brooklyn, inspected 10 high school English exams from the past three years and discovered that the vast majority of the passages — drawn from the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anton Chekhov and William Maxwell, among others — had been sanitized of virtually any reference to race, religion, ethnicity, sex, nudity, alcohol, even the mildest profanity and just about anything that might offend someone for some reason. Students had to write essays and answer questions based on these doctored versions — versions that were clearly marked as the work of the widely known authors.

Found via Metafilter. Requires NY Times registration.