Gross Disrespect? I'll say!

I've been putting writing this one up. It's going to be pretty long, and- like most of my entires- incredibly boring. I usually don't make a point of stipulating to the veracity of my anecdotes, but this one is pretty far-fetched, so I feel compelled: This story is 100% true, and I haven't exaggerated at all, as none is necessary.


BACKGROUND

The state of Michigan uses a test called the Michigan Educational Assesment Program, or the MEAP (pronounced "meep") for short, to evaulate and accredit school districts within the state. The state puts a huge emphasis on the results, and every 7th grade and 11th grader must take the test. In short, it's a fucking joke. The emphasis the state places on the exam has some incredibly disturbing consequences, most of which I'll be sussing out here.

The school I went to, Grand Blanc High School, perfectly illustrates the pitfalls of such an irresponsible system. For one thing, our entire curriculum revolves around the MEAP. The English department is easily the worst. English teachers are pressure to spend inordinate amounts of time on developing "Reflective Writing" and "Personal Narrative" writing skills. Instead of keeping the focus where it belongs- on literary analysis, argument construction, and persuasive writing, etc.- months of the year are dedicated solely to the 2 styles of writing upon which students will be tested on the MEAP. GBHS takes an inordinate level of pride in their MEAP results, which are typically near the top, if not at THE top, of all schools in the entire state.


This is problematic for myriad reasons, the foremost of which are:

1) Forcing students to develop skils which don't help them (a) get into college or (b) succeed in college or the real world is negligent. Luckily, I had a teacher my sophomore year who was so infuriated with the process that she rebelled, rightly refusing to gear her lessons towards the MEAP test, and instead towars the SAT and ACT English sections. Most students were not so lucky. Thankfully I was prepared for the reading and english sections of the ACT because of Mrs. Bernstein, who also ruthlessly forced her students to develop PROPER writing skills.

2) Teaching to a test almost completely invalidates the ends of evaluation the test was designed as a means to. If your curriculum revolves completely around a single test, and that test is not 100% comprehensive, the test does nothing but lower the quality of education.

The longterm results of the MEAP test run completely antithetically to the explicit goals. This is horrendously sad.

The actually testing itself takes place in 2-3 hour blocks over a period of 2 weeks. This waste of time is compounded when you take into account the additional loss of class time due to the hodge-podge rearrangement of student schedules. Teachers are incredibly inneficient when temporarily forced into a "block scheduling" system they are unused to. Without fail, every class ends up having a "study time" of 15-30 minutes appended to the end, leading to much lost teaching time.

I absolutely hated the MEAP test, and made my feelings well known. My 11th grade Honors English teacher drank the Kool-Aid with gusto, and we had a few spats. I told her very publicly how I felt, and she brushed me aside, implying that I was a troublemaking whiner. I've always been a very good student, especially in the reading and writing domains, so this was frustrating. Completely apart from my feelings about our wasted "MEAP time," I felt Mrs. Thomas was a poor teacher. She was narrow-minded, and reacted poorly when someone, usually me, challenged a standard interpretation of a literary passage. I wrote countless papers in which I took a difficult position, but defended it well with textual evidence and responded properly to counterarguments, but was nonetheless met with poorish grades. Most papers I wrote came back with something like, "Weak interpretation. We discussed this in class. Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. B-/C+."

Once I got so mad that I raised my hand and said, "Mrs. Thomas, why did you call me a Hobgoblin? That's pretty mean, don't you think? What will the principal think when I tell him you called me a Hobgoblin. I really think I'm more of a Dr. Octopus, or even a Captain America. You really should be more polite. How would you feel if I called you, like, an Ogre or an Uruk-Hai or something?" She was furious, but this was pretty much what our relationship was like. I hated the idea that a very good student who worked his ass off and took pride in his writing could just be brushed aside for silly reasons.

So when it came time for the Writing portion of the MEAP, I decided there would be no holds barred. You absolutely had to pass the MEAP to graduate (a rule GBHS instituted themselves, in order to artificially ensure high scores with countles retakes by mediocre students), so I couldn't tank the test, but I could sabatoge it, and make my point. I did so, resoundingly.

Part I was Reflective Writing.

In this section, you had to take some piece of writing you'd done before and reflect on its strengths and weaknesses. We were encouraged, if we had no adequate pieces in our portfolio, to simply pull something out of our collective asses.

Here are some excerpts from my essay:

- I claimed my biggest weakness was my handwriting. "Like an uneducated Kindergartener, I still have trouble with the lowercase letter 'e' In the paper I'm analyzing, I notice now that most of my e's are backwards, and some are upside down, resembling the 'schwa,' a character used to represent unstressed neutral vowels."

- A second weakness I'd since overcome was my propensity to use inappropriate, and at times obscene language, in my writing. I invented this example: "It's not my fault! The devils made me do it, damn bitchass devils."

- My final weakness was getting chocolate on the papers I turned in. I claimed I love candy bars so much that I often got chocolate smudges on my finished products. I also suggested I still struggle with this. To emphasize, smudged part of a 3 Musketeers bar in more than one place on my MEAP essay. That'll teach the school to hand out little treats to people taking the exam. "For energy and proper brain function" they claimed. Fucking morons.

The next day was going to be spent writing a personal narrative. The school emphasized repeatedly, with a despicably obvious wink, that we were not to turn our booklets to the next page, because the specific topic of the personal narrative was written there. I turned the page to prepare my attack, and saw that we were to "Write about a personal relationship that has shaped your life."

I went home that night, and narrowed my possible essay topics down to "My Experiences in the Trenches of Vietnam" and "My 'Special Relationship' with My English Teacher, Susan B. Thomas." I'm sure you can guess what I chose...

The next day my pen flew like a madman's. I constructed an account of my sexual affair with Mrs. Thomas. It was was written like a bad romance novel version of Mrs. Robinson. I took great care never to be graphic or obscene, and fulfilled all the requirements perfectly. The story was epic and expansive, and I absolutely used my arch-enemy's full name, including her middle initial. I also made sure to clue any reader in to the obviously satirical nature of the story with melodrama and silly language. The sex passages were full of Romance Novel style language, complete with words like "bosom" and "yearning." I can say with 100% confidence that whomever eventually evaluated this Narrative would surely see it as a joke, and not an honest confession.

When I was done, I showed it to my friends at the table. One person even had enough time to read the entire thing, and laughed all the way through. By the end of the day, slightly concerned about the administration hearing, I'd quietly told about 10 people. Unfortunately, those 10 people told 10 other people, and by lunch I was getting high-fives in the hallway from people I'd never met and hearing catcalls everywhere I went. By 6th hour everyone knew, and after 7th hour I was a legend.

After school, more than one person told me they'd overheard teachers and adminstrators discussing the scandal. The test was supposed to be completely confidential, but I knew the fascist administration would find some way to open the seal and read it. It was only a matter of time. I was fucked. I had a baseball game that day and, spurned on by the knowledge that I might miss some time in the near future, had a great double header, going 6-7 with 3 doubles and my first homerun of the season. (As an aside, a newscrew was there to film part of the game for a piece the local news was doing on our state-ranked baseball team, and my mammoth blast was part of the highlight montage, complete with some awesome play-by-play from the sports anchor.)

When I got to school that day, I was promtly told to see the principal. Like the asshole he is, he made me wait in his exterior office for about an hour before escorting me into the office. Justice was swift and harsh. The principal told me this was the most abhorrent thing he'd seen in his years as an administrator. I was forced to listen while he called my mother at home, referred to me as a pervert, and explained I needed serious psychological counseling. He was imposing the maximum penalty. 2 weeks out of school suspension, and a reccomendation to the school board for my expulsion from the district. I was also told that I would be banished to the In School Suspension room for the duration of the year during Mrs. Thomas's class if I was allowed back at all, and I'd be unable to take AP English the next year with Mrs. Thomas, the only teacher who ran the course. He also said Mrs. Thomas was threatening legal action. Supposedly she was talking to a lawyer to ascertain whether my actions were libelous (<--- of course I knew this was bullshit, and there was no way what I did constituted libel... I'm protected because my writing was so obviously satirical).

EPILOGUE:

In the end, I told the principal that his actions were probably illegal, and that expulsion was out of the question. I also told him that I wouldn't contact any newspapers or newsmedia if he could keep the suspension off my permanent record. He relented, all the while furious.

Mrs. Thomas, aware that I'd be receiving zeroes on all the work she assigned while I was gone, gave the bulk of the Marking Period's work during my absence, completely out of spite. Even though I was on course for a 93% in the class until now, I received a D+ for the marking period, and a C+ or B- (I can't remember which) for the semester. This was the only black mark on my transcript, and likely kept me of the 2001 Top Ten GPA list.

I missed 2 weeks of baseball, and didn't make the all-conference team, though I surely would have been a 2nd teamer otherwise.

My friends in Mrs. Thomas's class passed around a sympathy card that said, "We Love and Miss You Buddy!" for everyone in class to sign, and left it standing on my empty desk in silent protest. Everyone signed it, with the exception of 3 girls who had always hated me. When they told me about this, I actually started crying a little bit. It remains one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.

The school, hostage to their own perverted desire for validation from the state, had no choice but to send my writing in, unadulterated except for a note on the bottom explaining my situation. When the results came, I opened them with dread.

My fears were unfounded, as I received a 4.0 on both essays, which was a perfect score. I made copies, and anonymously stapled one on Mrs. Thomas's chalkboard. I slipped one into our principal Mr. Newton's mailbox. There was silence from both.

I became a sort of legend, a cautionary tale that still gets told today. My MEAP story has become like an Urban Myth, except it's true. People still hear my name there, and before she retired Mrs. Thomas wouldn't suffer my name to be mentioned in her class. Years later she would still fly into a rage if someone so much as BREATHED the name "Derek Birch" in her presence.

The story spread even further. A handful of kids transferred to other districts, and told the story there. Once, in Ann Arbor, someone started telling the story in my presence, and even mentioned that he "was pretty sure it's made up." He went to highschool on the opposite side of the state.

People still ask my brother, soon to be a senior, if he's related to me. He usually replies with pride that he absolutely is.

I swear on my Dog's and mother's lives that this is 100% true, and that I've taken creative liberty with none of it. I also apologize for the length, but I wasn't leaving anything out.