Ladies, gentlemen. I come to you tonight with grave news of a problem that is so ruthlessly ravaging the nation. Young, helpless children are dancing in the streets with rotting eyes and rotting brains, teeth about to fall out at the seams and hair that refuses to lay anyway but flat. Their shoes are stuffed with crooked stones, their hands are shaking, shaking…shaking. With their splitting stubs of pencils tucked behind the softest parts of their ears.
America, this is madness! How could you send the next generation out to the slaughterhouse, send them with empty envelopes crying for paper cuts, each child with a smiley sticker plugged right above their slowly sinking chest bones? And the clock gauges in both circles and gentle slopes, as they sit with legs crossed, arms folded, toes bent one atop the other. The paper beneath their palms is blank, and it is frightening. Where are the words the belong on the thin blue lines, where is the heading with name, date, period, DOB, SSN, and mean verbal SAT score? Friends, and lovers—I know there are almost too many out there to count—but I must say this, and I must say this clear: there is a plague that is destroying the classrooms, and if it is not stopped, it will eat alive humanity from its fingers down to its toes.
The instructors will tell you nothing is wrong. But they, they are the ones who fault the most. They lounge with linen skirts behind pinewood desks, lean back with their tailored trousers in padded chairs of fuchsia and maroon, sipping their lukewarm coffee and feeding the students with page after page of meaningless poetry, until they are left alone with only one small notation at the corner of the board, one slight of the teacher’s shaking hand, and it reads: May 1st, 11:30 in the morning.
If only the teachers knew! If only they spent their hours plunging into twelve-page AP outlines instead of feeding their children the impracticable arts that explode their brains rather than tend them, if only a theatre performance could be replaced by Macbeth passage analyses—if only the history of the world could be learnt from worksheets rather than those who saw it first!
I come to you humbly now, a young girl of merely seventeen, with a simple desire, a quaint request: America, our teachers, whether they know it or not, are dousing the fervent fire that burns deep within the soul of advanced placement exams, and this great treachery must be stopped!
I was silent before, but I can hold it in no longer. My teachers—creatures of the day and red-penners of the night—are sitting idly by as students mark “just a test” in their green and yellow datebooks. But brothers, sisters, it is not just a test, it is an experience, one that will mark a student for the rest of his lowly life! Imagine: students who spend the hour before with flip-flops and sweat pants, eating flapjacks at IHOP with pecan syrup and eggs sunny-side-up to the side, these pupils with shutting eyes who bend their heads down to their tests just because they felt like Warcraft, or their boyfriend, or their dying cousin, was somehow more important than thirty-eighty multiple choice questions and three free response. No! We must have none of this! We must join hands together, as a community of learners, admirers, and the like, we must bond and break this through this terrible shackle. We must demolish this ignorance!
Now lend me your ear, for I must share a story that my own grandfather often told after pumpkin pie and shortbread cookies every cold Thanksgiving eve. With hair as white as the dripping wax of the candles, he would lean forward, tilt his crumpled napkin towards his wife, would sigh and then ask for silence. “It was during the War,” he’d say in that great Homeric voice, “when I was out in the Pacific, where the ships were just constellations in the sea. And my friends and I, we knew nothing. We knew nothing but the wind that blew into our trumpets, that blew through the hair on our arms, and billowed out our shirts when the Japs would dive their planes down into our decks. It was one October, one specific midmorning, half-cloudy sort of day, when one pilot in particular shot downward for our ship, and hit the band room where we used to play. We dragged the boat to the nearest island—a horror show of Asian corpses. My bunkmate, Darrell, said the British had been there as early as three days before, throwing bombs like confetti. And yes, the island was scratched thin with all their limbs: black elbows, knees, and feet. He told me to stay near him, to keep my pistol at close range. But still I didn’t listen, I just watched the sun drip in and out of the clouds, watched my hands dance in shadows of fatigues. I was near a rounded, wild bush, with my back to the leaves and my head still bent down as I studied my hands, when I felt something cold and hard against the soft part of my skull. I froze. Yet something made me turn—but so, so slowly. His hair, when I saw it, was black as the earlobes and knuckles at my feet. He looked at me with those blunt eyes and I could feel rivers rushing through my chest and to my brain. ‘You!’ he cried in hurried Japanese, ‘you have forty-five minutes to analyze these documents and write a well-organized five-paragraph essay in which you incorporate the data from the documents and your own personal knowledge. BEGIN!’ The last things I remember were the shaking of the three-page packet in his cracked and dirtied hands, and the slickness of the ink as I underlined my thesis.”
(Brief pause.)
I didn’t mean to cause a stir, but clearly, you must recognize the utter importance that advanced placement exams hold over our nation. You will never walk down the streets of New York without seeing numbers, ranged from one to five, stamped on the foreheads of every businessman off to work. You will never brush legs with a young woman at a bar without her glancing at your teeth, your eyes, and your ability to choose between A. I only, and C. II, III, and IV. And by God, as all the heavens as my witness, I swear to you that you will never, ever be handed another twenty dollar bill without your employer first asking you, Please calculate the wavelength of the standing sound wave produced by the tuning fork pictured in Figure 2.B above. It seems that we are at an impasse. After all, there is only so much time before the sacred exams fall from administrative hands in early May. Students are only human, I suppose, as are teachers, but we cannot stand to let this keep us down! Teachers, stop tossing your students to the out-of-doors, where they will surely wilt and whither in the sun. Instead, let them frolic in their windowless cubicles, where their minds will bloom like poppies. You must step up to the elevator, rise with it, carry your students to victory! Let them only write if it is in five-paragraph form, urge them to only sleep once they’ve named every president in order, forwards and backwards, and his party and his vice president, too. Help them see the light, see the rotation of curved lines to make an amorphous solid, and keep that light strong by perpetually finding volumes. And if your students flair out from path to an AP 5, I urge you, fellow countrymen, take a stick to their rear and beat them until they know the difference between confederal and federal forms of government! Because we are the future, you, I, every other 08671486. And if we cannot bring ourselves to study the true beauty of the world, a world filled with DBQs and Post-Modern passage analyses, then we will find ourselves an uninspired people, a people without the prize of faith, and the without the will to tuck equation sheets beneath our pillows as we shut our eyes to dream.
