THE GRATE TESTING DEBAIT

Is it just me or is this talk about testing in school a bit of nonsense!? Why do we always seem to be reinventing the wheel? Teach these kids how to spell, read, and do math without gadgets and then test them. How are we ever going to know the value of an education if we have no way of seeing “if it took”? I took tests to get out of high school. I took tests to pass college courses. How were they ever going to tell if I learned anything? While few of us like to take tests, I never thought it much of a problem, just something one had to do. Life is nothing if not a series of tests. And we already see the results of lowering the bar on the Bar Exam for potential lawyers. Just pitiful!

The teachers at East Greenwich schools in the Dark Ages when I went to there were certainly fine enough. Many of my classmates, as they report in for our 55th reunion this August, seem to have had some pretty good careers. At James H. Eldredge School, we had spelling bees. Spelling bees are like tests, aren’t they? I always liked spelling bees and I was always good at them. In recent jobs, editors and writers called me, asking to spell a word for them. New York City sophisticates, nonetheless. Did I, do I ever feel bad for those who could never spell? No, of course not. We all have talents. Some were much better at football, quahauging, or picking up pretty girls than I ever was. As Forrest Gump said, “Ya gotta chew on the candy you gits!”, or something to that extent.

Does anyone still stand up in front of the class and read aloud these days? Or do math at the blackboard where everyone in the class can see how you do it? We had to learn math the hard way, by memory or on paper. But they crammed it into our noodles and somehow it stuck—at least until gizmo stultification set in. Today, of course, I need my iPhone's calculator app to do simple addition.

So Deborah Gist narrowly made it back into the education driver's seat. Bravo! At some point we must return to the notion that we have to push hard to get ahead in the world. Making things easy doesn't do anyone any good. Showoff that I was, if I was in front of the class and told to spell antidisestablishmentarianism—as I just did—I would have thumped my chest much louder than if I was told to spell hammock. Here's a test: how many of you know how to spell fid? Let see the hands!

Have we lost sight of the fact that we have to be pushed? Some of us, a lot of us, were just plain lazy. I was. That's why I didn't have jobs that took me much past Block Island. Some of my classmates worked all over the world. The ones who were pushed did much better than me. It was too late when I figured that out and started to push myself. The late Steve Jobs set the best example I can think of: he was pushy, a madman, driven, self-righteous, pompous, occasionally obnoxious, and often a wee bit unkempt. But he knew what he wanted, wouldn't settle for less, and he built one monster of a company.

Students! Pry yourselves from those silly nose-rings, tongue-studs, tattoos, baggie too-long shorts, untied $1,000 sneakers, your green and purple hair and that fog-whimsical dullness behind your eyes. Get serious! Learn something and then take a test, a hard test, to make sure you learned it. Don't be afraid! Your head won't explode if you put something in it. We are losing ground to those who are learning and getting smarter and pretty soon we'll be serving them from behind counters and pizza delivery trucks and we'll have to learn their languages in order to do it. Have you looked where all the money is these days? It's at the top and it's not going to be coming back down here. You kiddies want some, you're going to have to go up there to get it and it's a hard climb. Believe me, Deborah Gist is your best friend and she's holding the keys to your Maserati!!

And speaking of spelling and quahaugs, unless we are ready and willing to accept Apponog, Weekapog, Quonochontog, Montok, and Escohegue, we better get putting that “haug” thing back on the end of bivalve Mercenaria mercenaria before they rebel and take all the fun out of chowder. We took everything else away from the Narragansetts, do we have to rob them of the way they spelled their words too? Well okay, they spelled it poquaûhock, according to, I think, Roger Williams, which was probably more work to say than it deserved. I blame the shortcut editors at the Providence Journal for corrupting quahaug by spelling it quahog. They probably pronounce it co-hog when talking amongst themselves and chuckle at the folly of it all.