It's Your Lucky Day!

As required once per semester, the Bruce had to make his presence known over the afternoon announcements. This time, instead of discussing ID violations or giving dress code reminders (coughBruceTeescough), he decided to opine the grave importance of state mandated testing. This was in turn prompted by our school's recent attempt to use bribes to garner students interest in their education. Yes, it is no longer good enough to merely provide a free education to students, now we must give them material incentives to promote learning. Now, every student may fill out the "PSSA Math Question of the Week" and submit it in a raffle for a fabulous prize (ice cream, cake, cash, and best yet, free lunch in the cafeteria for a week!). These questions, which judging from the actual PSSA, will not be any more difficult than questions from a typical 8th grade algebra course. Thanks to the strong and noble communist tendencies of high school students, the answer was well known (D. 1/4) around the school by Tuesday afternoon. We at the SPLOoGE, in an effort to increase site traffic, will now be posting the answer as well as all required work to the questions on this site every Monday night. All we need to do then is work out a similar method of communal test taking to increase scores and keep our school from being taken over by the government for not meeting standards.

The unsettling aspect of this ordeal, however, was the second part of his message, "We need to reach proficiency, that's the important thing." Granted, this is a step up from the previous "failure is not an option." We now are working in a positive direction, as opposed to just trying to avoid a negative situation. My question is, what happened to excellence? Is it now sufficient to just skate by, doing the bare minimum. Now I'm a big fan of not overtaxing oneself, but one of the greatest joys of slackerdom is the feeling of satisfaction you get when you fail to meet someone's expectations. What are we to do now that the standard has been lowered to our level. Do we lose our rebel status now that we are following the party line? All through our public education we have been bombarded with posters bearing trite and insipid catch-phrases such as, "Aim for the moon, and if you miss, you'll fall among the stars." Are we now expected to forget our conditioning, and just do enough to keep our heads above the water? How will student's drilled on this new philosophy operate in the real world? I know I'd be thrilled to live at a time when doctors have a "basic understanding"* of procedures, and nuclear plant engineers only "make a few errors"*.

To recap, our school system is now an organization dedicated to mediocrity, and driven by a chance based incentive program that rewards participants for demonstrating rudimentary academic skill. Its about time the PA Department of Education and the PA Department of Revenue's Lottery Division got on the same page.

*(Taken directly from PSSA open ended Math and Reading question scoring standards for "Proficient")