Regents Fail

Today was the January English Regents exam. I plan a full post on my "Gradgrind's Grind" blog about that one, but just a note or two here. Lord in heaven, what a terrible test. We have enough trouble getting some kids excited about school, or even awake for it, without the state coming in with their boring and mundane "reading" selections, vapid and often confusing multiple choice questions, and formulaic writing assignment. I was the teacher elected to read the listening passage to the juniors assembled in the gymnasium; it was a yawner. I tell you true, the older I get the harder it is not to let my contempt for the standardized test show during the test. I already tell my students in class how much I hate these tests, and why. But today in the middle of reading the passage for the second time I felt an overwhelming urge to begin making sarcastic comments and jokes about the passage while reading it. I wanted to break into silly accents and make goofy faces. The tests are so humorless and we are made to take them so seriously. There's so much solemnity about the taking of a standardized tests; perhaps because we are at the funeral of real learning.

Anyway... on to the sentences. As always, these are real sentences from student work and my comments are in (    ).

- (In answer to the question, What color is the light?) Hope

- (In answer to the question, Who does Myrtle Wilson mistakenly believe is Tom's wife?) One student wrote "Nick," and another "Jay Gatsby." (Score two for marriage equality in the 1920s, I guess.)

- She had the money to ravish herself in gifts.

- A trust passer is about to get hung. (Trespasser)

- A person's car went into the ditch that was drinking. (Nothing worse than a ditch that's been drinking. Ditches be crazy, man.)

- Teenagers are the future tomorrow. 

- I read only 5 chapters of Gatsby because that's all I felt like doing. (Nice to have you in school.)

- The building itself looked a banded. (Abandoned)

- The back story of this specific matter is never filled in so the reader can interoperate it into something for their selves.

- ... a man is remembering and thinking about his diseased wife. (She's dead, not sick.)

- I think what caused her initial death... (And her secondary death? Did she have nine lives?)

- (Said aloud in class:) "So wait, Macbeth killed Danforth?" (Yes. The character from Shakespeare's play invaded The Crucible to kill the judge.)

- The only thing this woman hatted was her husband's art.

- If there is more foreign adoptions then the gender balance will maintain normal. (Maintain Normal would be a cool name for a band. Or self help book.)

- It loses significance when the green light doesn't mean anything to Gatsby anymore. (It lost significance when it lost significance? Got it.)

- I like Daisy (Buchanan) because she wasn't a typical mother. (Did you read The Great Gatsby, or some other story about a Daisy Buchanan?)

- (On the deep meaning of The Great Gatsby:) be yourself!

- The Great Gatsby is upbeat. (I think he meant fast paced. I mean, I hope he meant fast paced.)

- The actions that Montresor possessed... 

I have two more for you, but I present them not for their potential humor. I guess I'll let you come to your own conclusions about my motives for tacking them on.

- I found it difficult to find time and actually sit down and read (The Great Gatsby) with working 2 jobs and having other homework to do, but when I did find a chance to read it, it was engaging and I found it hard to put down.

- (The Great Gatsby) made me want to live my life differently from how I've been living.

J