Wikipedia, for most, resides on the Web like a neighbor we see and interact with often, so we may be surprised to learn that this seemingly friendly presence has caused all kinds of trouble with schools. Some teachers and even a few institutions have considered banning their students’ from having a relationship with Wikipedia at all.

Banning is pretty serious. Is Wikipedia that dangerous for students?

As some of you may know, I am a teacher and writing researcher at Drexel University. I have been involved with several research projects over the past few years that try to see, basically, how well students write. Two large studies of Drexel undergrads showed us some interesting things. Let me ask you this: What writing area do you think seems to cause the biggest struggle for the thousands of students we studied? Grammar? Creating a good main idea/thesis? Organization?

Nope, nope, and nope.

We found that the most difficult challenge the students we studied came up against in their writing projects was using evidence and research. These bright students write clearly for the most part and have good ideas, but they have real trouble supporting their thoughts with evidence. This is not (just) about correct citation — “Where does that comma go again?” — but about thinking how to support claims and ideas.

This might surprise you until you really think about it, because making a good evidence-based argument is very difficult, and where are good models in our culture for students? Advertising? (“Wear these shoes and you’ll jump higher and people will like you!”) Political campaigns? (I don’t need to say much here, do I?) Marriages? (Perhaps the true hotbed of non-evidence-based argumentation in human history: To quote the dad in A Christmas Story, “You used up all the glue…on purpose!”)

When students Google just about anything, Wikipedia pops up first. It’s just so easy to use to fill in that little research requirement part of a paper. So teachers can ban students from citing it, but in doing so, have they taught them a darn thing about why and how it works?

They need to see that it’s a wiki, which means people can edit and change information on it. Yet all information has some kind of gatekeeper, and they also need to understand that Wikipedia has some remarkable editorial controls built in. As a teacher, I wondered how I could have students think hard about Wikipedia so it just wasn’t forbidden fruit. Working with fellow teachers Andrew McCann and Dan Driscoll, we developed some assignments to try to help students do just that.

First, we asked students to search Wikipedia and find something worth knowing about that is not on the site. This turns out to be incredibly difficult, because Wikipedia has marvelous scope. Try it some time. If they can’t find something, and most don’t, then their task is to look at a Wikipedia entry about something they know a lot about and evaluate how accurate and comprehensive it is. Is there anything they would add or change?

However, if they did find some gap, something not on the site, they could write up, just for our class, a “stub” of a Wikipedia entry. This was a good experience. But here’s what’s cool: If they desired, they could create a Wikipedia account and, for real, try to add their entry. For instance, this Wikipedia entry, about the specific building that served as the U.S. “Capital for a Day” during the War of 1812, was created by a student in my class who happened to live near Brookeville: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookeville_Academy. This student added a little piece to the knowledge of the world as represented by Wikipedia.

Students learned a lot from this experience, but perhaps the most remarkable thing was an awareness of how Wikipedia’s gatekeeping function operates. Above all Wikipedia entries is a little “View History” link. You probably never clicked on it, but that “History” provides a record of the commentary about that article by Wikipedia’s editors and contributors. I knew Wikipedia had a massive, vigilant network of editors, (check out this great article by writer Marshall Poe, which describes his efforts to create his own entry on Wikipedia), but even I was shocked at how quickly editors began checking in on, for instance, the Brookeville Academy entry. Within hours, there was a conversation about the validity of this entry and what it needed to be officially published.

So it comes down to not being afraid of Wikipedia or frustrated with it, but, instead, taking a critical look at how it works and maybe even getting involved ourselves.

As I teacher, I don’t ban Wikipedia. Despite its vast controls, it is still an open wiki, so I don’t want to see direct references to Wikipedia in student papers. But where else can you easily go for the remarkable neutrality that Wikipedia represents on so many topics? Why can’t students read a Wikipedia page and use it to move into further research, perhaps encouraged by Wikipedia’s normally pretty expansive list of references for many entries? In fact, after we’ve talked it over, I encourage them to use it as one of many places they could get or build on a good idea.

Because I think Wikipedia can be a great place to get started, but you just don’t want to end there. If we understand that, the digital natives and their teachers will get along just fine.

Early in 2011, New Jersey instituted rigid school anti-bullying laws that require schools to follow strict guidelines about HIB: harassment, intimidation, and bullying. While the intention is good, HIB’s over-zealousness creates a stifling bureaucracy for educators, and these blanket regulations, in their effort to eliminate the child bully, are perhaps empowering other types of bullies.

Before I proceed, I want to make a few things clear. I don’t want three kids beating up one kid after school. I don’t want 100-pound second graders tilting other kids upside down until lunch money pours on the floor. I don’t want a kid or groups of kids using digital venom to poison another child’s reputation. More than anything, I don’t want children to do something drastic to themselves or others because of unchecked malice. No one wants these things.

However, I do want us to allow educators to educate children. HIB has created a new level of bureaucracy—right in your school, folks!—requiring high-paid, well-trained, smart administrators to spend their days sifting through piles—piles—of HIB paperwork, splitting hairs about issues such as if poopyheads are a protected class of children whose rights are violated when other kids call them “poopyheads.” If the answer is “maybe,” then if Suzy called Jimmy a “poopyhead,” Jimmy and Suzy and Suzy’s parents and Jimmy’s parents could be summoned before the “court” of your school board to sort it all out. Note, that a hearing about this poopyheadedness must happen within a 10-day time frame, which may require special assemblies of the board of education and your administrators.

HIB is regulation run amok. Over-extended, draconian bullying rules create confusion and fear in schools. As a parent and school board member, I am struck by how successful already in-place anti-bullying campaigns have been. Kids I know say the word “bully” with total disdain, almost like “murderer.”

Schools are gatherings of large groups of human beings, a remarkably cussed species, so, yes, we will have bullies. How bad is the problem? A recent Pew study, “Teens, Kindness and Cruelty on Social Network Sites,” found 69% of teens said their peers are mostly nice to each other online, yet 88% have witnessed peer-to-peer meanness or cruelty and 15% have been the target themselves. However, 90% ignored this behavior, 80% defended a victim, and 79% told someone to stop it. The study reports an interesting mix of behaviors. On the one hand, kids are mean to each other — surprise! — and can now be mean using social media. However, without being pummeled by regulation, the vast majority of kids are willing to stand up for what’s right.

Children need to learn to deal with all kinds of problem behaviors. Now, when a kid is insulted, we mobilize an educational bureaucracy to his or rescue. I wonder if we are further short-circuiting children’s ability to deal with adversity.

And HIB laws, in an attempt to ferret out all incidences of one kind of bully, will no doubt embolden another kind, the parent bully. Parents will use HIB to get at others and to, well, bully their schools. You know these people. They already been mucking up the process of running a school, haunting your district’s administrative offices and clogging up meetings with their grievances. The world has been out to get them, and now it’s out to get their children. They are quarrelsome, troublesome, overbearing people, and they will use the mania of HIB to bully school staff out of one of the most precious things they have (and that we all pay for): Their time.

I am not making light of childhood bullying. I wish I could have in some superhero way personally prevented every drastic bullying incident, but I don’t believe HIB regulations will successfully don the hero cape. HIB creates a labyrinthine set of ambiguous or poorly supported rules,  including the requirement that cash-strapped schools appoint an HIB administrator to sort through what will largely be nonsense. At a recent school board training I attended, the New Jersey School Board Association lawyers conducting the training said the state had set up a fund to help schools pay for the required HIB administrators, but no money was actually appropriated to that fund. Check out your school: I bet your HIB point-person is someone who already has five other job responsibilities. (By the way, schools are starting to fight back against HIB mandates on this fiscal point.)

As I close, I want to say how I am struck by the way legislative bodies seem hellbent on micromanaging schools and school personnel. I know public schools must be accountable: They are run with public money. But from astonishingly inflexible budget rules to No Child Left Behind to HIB laws, politicians have used threat and coercion to destroy opportunities for common sense-driven decision-making by school personnel. We hire people in schools to teach children. Let them do their jobs.

(I guess it’s just what people care about. While we’re nattering about HIB, some urban schools remain cauldrons of violence, as was well documented in The Philadelphia Inquirer’s recent “Assault on Learning” series. I guess it’s easier, and maybe more politically advantageous, to go after those “poopyhead” haters.)

Overregulation distracts schools from their core mission: Educating children. U.S. schools are certainly not the better for these layers of regulation. In fact, the way that legislators lean on schools makes me think of one thing: Bullying.

Novels about academia have never held a strong appeal for me; there seems very little at stake in the tweed-clad genre except for tenure, which doesn’t make for the most riveting reading. But in Alex Kudera’s debut satirical novel, Fight for Your Long Day, there is a lot more on the line for the protagonist, Cyrus Duffleman, than mere tenure: his very life, it seems, is doomed to extinction as the world around him erupts into a frenzy of violence.

Cyrus is a breed of university Everyman known as “the adjunct.” If you’ve ever stepped foot in an English 101 or an Introduction to History class, you have seen one: rumpled and coffee-stained, adjuncts are usually in a mid-career or mid-life slump, or in Cyrus’s case, a state of perpetual ennui. [Full disclosure: I am an adjunct, but I make an adequate attempt to wear clean, ironed shirts, and I take St. John’s Wort capsules to stave off any impending mid-life crises.]

Duffleman sees himself “as a foot soldier on the front lines of America’s knowledge-based economy.” And soldier he is, for on this Thursday, when he teaches not only four courses but works as a tutor and as a security guard to supplement his middling pay, he will come across numerous varieties of that higher education anomaly known as the “disturbed” student: one who has a psychic breakdown in Duffleman’s first class; another who sends him inappropriate — and near threatening — emails; yet another who leaps to his death from the roof of the dormitory. And in the midst of all this, a renegade armed with a bow and arrow is killing wildlife in Fairmount Park, an act of barbarism that has the media fear-mongers agitated.

What’s an underpaid adjunct without any medical benefits to do? If you’re Duffleman, a committed teacher — remember those? — you simply do your job. But that’s becoming increasingly impossible in this discordant world, as Duffleman must act both as psychiatric counselor and General Nanny to the uproarious, unfocused, aggressive and all-but tuition-exploited students enrolled in his lower shelf classes.

The educational institutions in Kudera’s novel are education factories, more concerned with dollars and high student enrollment than in providing quality and affordable education. The tenured class, those with the puny administrative power, comes across as revoltingly grotesque and yet ultimately, recognizable. Kudera’s jabs are shockingly effective:

“From the daily papers, he knows one professor murdered his wife and another was convicted of testing the date-rape drug on  a research assistant. A third came back from Southeast Asia with a laptop full of seven- to twelve-year-old smiles, torsos, and bare behinds, and a master of library science was caught in the hidden corridors of power with a male specimen aged eleven or fourteen. There were rumors scrawled on bathroom walls of ssecret Facebook agreements to exchange fellatio for A’s in freshman seminars.”

In one telling scene, when Duffleman, genuinely concerned for the student’s welfare, reports to his superiors about the student who melted down in his class, their only intentions are to make sure that neither professor nor student intends to sue the university. (Penn State, anyone?)

Meanwhile, as Duffleman plods through his day, the bow and arrow hunter has opted for a taste of human flesh; the United States Undersecretary of Homeland Security Defense is arrowed in the brain during a university speech at Liberty Tech, and the entire city of Philadelphia goes bonkers. Every Left Wing and Right Wing and Centrist nutbag erupts. Protests and counter-protests emerge; while the cops insist on palpating every sack and satchel within reach, as though this were another dress rehearsal for 9/11.

The closing scene involves Duffleman and the bow and arrow sniper.  Duffleman becomes achingly alive in this moment, a moment that may or may not be too late for him and us.

I struggle to find contemporary comparisons for Kudera’s satire. Palahniuk perhaps, but less salacious and juvenile; at times, David Lodge, but with much more meat. But the ultimate compliment I can give to this campus romp is that it bears no resemblance to any other novel that I can think of. Kudera, an English instructor, obviously knows his subject intimately. Fight for Your Long Day is hysterical and sobering, and Cyrus Duffleman one of the great anti-heroes in recent fiction.

They are enthusiastically for elimination, these chilly, sodden folk who gather at my doorstep. Eliminate debt, eliminate taxes, eliminate property, eliminate poverty, eliminate wealth and the wealthy too and once in a while, publicly eliminate on the sidewalk. Who claims they lack coherence? They Occupy Wall Street and Main Street, meaning they reside there; sleeping rough, eating roughage and are roughly handled, so they complain, by the authorities, the media, the neighbors, business, academe and above all by harsh and increasingly cold Reality. I depart from most of the critics of the Occupiers however. No, their problems are not strictly speaking in their heads. There is, actually, an underlying, unifying rationality among the commies, hippies, dippies and loons. Finally polling has investigated our modern Bonus Marchers and found a diagnosable malady; not just debt but student debt.

All debts are NOT created equal, not lately. There are headlines across the land that express shock and horror that total accumulated student debt has crested one trillions dollars, edging out credit cards. This is appalling, apparently, but for reasons opposite to those I would submit. For one thing, generally credit card debt is at a much higher rate than secured student debt, that is loans for which you and I are the co-signers, willingly or not. More than this though we must examine for what purposes the debt was allegedly encurred. Credit card debt is accumulated for any number of purchases; some small measure of which are business related or yes, even educational but for the most part your credit card bill itemizes your consumption. Food, clothing, whimsical things of dizzying variety best described as “entertainment” constitute the charges on your outstanding balance. Student debt however is not supposed to be any such thing. In America an education is considered to be and sold as an investment in future employment opportunities more remunerative than would otherwise be available. The best exemplar and worst offender is certainly the law school market. When the inevitable question is asked of the undergraduate pursuing his BS in Melanesian Pottery; just what are you going to do with that degree? a ready answer presents itself. I’m going to law school.

And who can argue? That industry is one of our top three: Doctor, lawyer, indian chief. And admissions are notoriously NOT based significantly on undergraduate credentials but mostly on standardized tests. It is a chance for the truancy artist who muscled through their degrees on raw test-taking ability to extend what has perhaps become an easy life style of posturing, drinking and fornicating in that order. Do not look to the financial aid office or admissions at an level to discourage this view. Quite the reverse. It should not be surprising that the education industry sees its wares as the cure to all ills. What is surprising and dismaying and, as we see now, utterly destructive is that a credulous public, led by its government and governing elites has agreed that “education” is a commodity, like platinum or pinto beans, to be measured by weight, distributed by fiat and financed by public debt.

It has long been the assumption that almost any debt incurred in the pursuit of almost any “education” is the most certain of investments. Like the mortgage industry, the student debt industry has therefore been targeted for extraction by Leviathan government. Sallie Mae is a newer addition to Your Federal Family and she accomplishes a similar task to Fannie Mae which is to expand the total market for debt by making it less risky and less expensive for the lenders who remain, at least nominally, private institutions. What has happened with these step-sisters is identical and identically predictable. As the housing construction and home-loan industries expanded wildly creating our famously popped “bubble” so to has the education industry. The costs of so-called education have exploded even more quickly than medical expenses. Has the quality also improved? The volume certainly has; more people pursue and receive degrees than ever before but in liberal arts undergrads, especially, it seems that if anything the quality is diminished. Here the Occupiers offer their examples which are astonishingly dreadful. Not only do they demonstrate themselves ignorant of the simplest basics of history, government, law, finance and grammar they offer not even the most modest proclivity to critical thinking, self-awareness or practicality. Even Marxism is ill served by these minions and although the groups are small, as far as media can reveal, they are pretty representative of their generation and demographics. No, they are far from 99% of the populace but in their inchoate rage, ignorant entitlement and self-serving myopia they are a plurality of graduates and near-grads.

In short, these twenty and thirty-somethings are children. This is an indictment and exoneration in one. In the recent past a boy became a man in fairly rapid order, either through back-breaking labor or the rigors of war. No one longs for these days to return but in their absence we rely on education to take up the slack. This, to put things mildly, has not happened. In part it is because the education establishment high and low is no longer concerned with such things as civics or long division giving way instead to fashionable concerns of historical revisionism and moddish aculturation that seeks to stamp out bullying or develop respect for two-mommy homes. Development of character is not so much left out of the equation as it is perverted to political ends. A willingness to recycle is taken as a moral imperative; one that is quite easy to fulfill. Self-reliance is suspect if not profane as it makes the tyke or teenager less tractable. It is the logic of Trophies for All! which attempts to free us from the cliche of discipline and accomplishment. The crush of conformity, supposedly the poison of yesterday’s suburbia, is enforced and reinforced to a degree veterans of that time and place can scarcely contemplate. Self-respect is eclipsed by self-esteem; two concepts that could hardly be more antagonistic.

Failing to mature the children remain children and it is no stretch or innovation to describe the Occupation as an elongated tantrum; unfocused, emotional and self-destructive but not baseless. If our young citizens grow to the age of majority without maturation whose fault is that really? Like all children, they only know what they are taught. And what have they been taught? In the field of education they have been taught that falling in line, paying your dues and your tuition will reward one with a degree which is, according to the Edu-mongers, a straight meal ticket. The subject of the degree is immaterial. The doctorate in Bongo Studies is as virtuous as the doctorate in Philosophy or Computer Engineering. Thankfully medical doctors are still held in reverence and their studies quite rigorous but how long before they also claim their percieved right to the same credentials as everyone else who shows up (and even many who do not)? And always the escalating costs are met with escalating debt. Don’t worry about that, you will be earning more than your uneducated peers. But that is now not true, apologies to Herman Cain. Yes there is less unemployment among the college educated than those not but it is still less than necessary to keep the conveyor belt moving. Bacchalaureates are backing up like cartons on a loading dock. The overage has spilled out onto our parks and commons where the students do, unsurprisingly, what they have been taught to do; posture in terms of great aggrievement and demand their due. The authorities have been telling them for decades; pursue your studies of whatever. Seek your star, you can be whatever you want to be, even if you don’t know what that is. If you find a passion for theatre or film or archaeology or ever more commonly, gender/race/poverty studies, there is a productive and rewarding place for you in our society. If you do not find it so, get your masters! The educrats care little and they may even believe their blandishments. Their business is in recruiting paying students… sometimes athletes. And if the odd aspirant can still not find their bliss, there is always education as a career; something the educrats encouraged up until lately. Now the professoriate suffers the same predicament as the bricklayer; too few places sought by too many applicants so those with current positions are not much interested in encouraging their competition.

The time was that a young man or woman could sell their labors speculatively, coming into an apprenticeship to learn skills valued in the workplace or just a good, long-term reference. Many, many the American ancestor was bonded, not for life like the slave, but bonded all the same; voluntarily (if we remove the discipline of necessity) for their passage across the sea with the expectation of a reward in marketability. Benjamin Franklin was a printer’s devil, later to become a devilish printer. The shadow of this model of profitably indentured servitude is much of the logical and cultural foundation for the education as investment model, but unlike the indentures of centuries past, our modern boys and girls, currently experimenting in climate science, are ejected from their pallets by the fire with a debt they have accumulated during their “labors”, not worked off. Further they find that self-righteous dudgeon about the Trail of Tears is no job skill, not even in an indian casino. In fact the only milieu they can reasonably see themselves plying their trade is within the government/academia/media/non-profit world which is well enough but these exist as adjuncts to the world of building and trading which is currently and perhaps permanently unwell. So with debts as absurd for the individual as our national debt is to the country, with little prospect to gain from their “investment” and with nearly no knowledge of the practical world our New Indentures are cast adrift, even bankruptcy is no avail, unlike your accumulated bar tabs on your VISA. What will they do? Whatever it is, much of it will be underground. The debts cannot be cancelled and cannot be outrun but they can be ignored if one can simply live off the grid like a wily raccoon. We have here a new class of the over-credentialed semi-homeless; bound to nothing but their debt which makes any legitimate employment nothing but an invitation to garnishment. Student debt defaults will skyrocket. The co-signers, mostly parents, will also default losing even their homes, meaning the final co-signer, YOU, will be on the hook for another trillion which we cannot pay. New student loans will scarcely exist which means enrollments will collapse and then even the highest-flying professor will be imperiled if not cashiered. “Education” will dissappear in favor of learning. There might even be some wisdom gained, you never know. The road will be difficult but it is already paved, marked and stretched out before the oddly freed but permanently excluded. Still, only they can determine the destination.

Plagiarizing was once clear-cut. Those intrepid college students who drove to a paper mill (which back in the day was a real warehouse full of papers) and bought someone else’s paper — they knew they were cheaters. If someone wrote a paper for you, you knew you were a lazy cheater. Xeroxing a big chunk of an encyclopedia and putting it word for word into your paper: Obviously, cheating!

But today we’re going through this massive, largely uncontrolled, cultural/social experiment, as a generation of children grow up with digital tools. These tools and the practices and behaviors that accompany them provide engines of astonishing human promise while enabling some bad behavior along the way.

One thing the digital enables is perfect reproduction. These digital natives have grown up with it. It’s in the nature of their virtual interactions. Represent yourself on your profile with this clipped image. Take that quote and put it on your status. Cut and paste. Copy. Children today have come of age with easy access to the Web and its words, images, videos, and ideas. Free information at a click, information that is easy to use and easy to copy — exactly.

Then they get to school, and someone says, “You better know how to cite your sources.” But they not only don’t know what to cite, but sometimes they don’t even know what cheating is. What if you use an online article and refer to it throughout your essay but forget to cite in one place that you used an idea from it? What if you can’t find the author of a Website? What if the info you found on one site is really from another? What can inform your ideas — and what’s forbidden? Students grow up with mixes and mash-ups; ownership boundaries are not always clear.

I remember taping songs from the radio when I was younger (believe it or not, I still have these tapes, grainy, imperfect songs with a DJ’s voice chipping in at the start and finish [yep, Pierre Robert was at WMMR back in the 80s]). Now, of course, you want a replica of a song, you can file share it, and you get the exact song. It’s perfect.

The college students I have worked with the past few years have a peculiar relationship with copying. I learned this in an interesting way, when several years ago I had the most passionate argument I’d ever had in a first-year writing class: It was not about abortion, gun control, prayer in schools, or the death penalty. It was about file sharing. I found them articulate but sometimes earnestly convoluted about the ethics of file sharing their beloved music. And so the RIAA has found in its ongoing battles with their generation. Many of them crafted their view so the sharing wasn’t really theft.

They seemed ethically bewildered in the face of the astonishing ease — and peer popularity — of this copying. This confusion of course would carry over to school. Teacher and scholar Annette Rosati, in a thoughtful article about plagiarism co-written with Danielle DeVoss, described how three of her students submitted papers downloaded from the Web as their own. When she announced in class that some had plagiarized and if the plagiarists didn’t come see her in her office, they would fail, the three word thieves were joined after class outside her office door by 11 others; the 11 innocents all asked a version of the same question, “It wasn’t me, was it?” They didn’t know if anything they had done in their papers was wrong too, including one person who wondered if Cliff’s Notes constituted cheating.

DeVoss and Rosati see intellectual property as a lens to help students think about the constraints of borrowing: What have they used, why, and how will that affect the person who created it? Similarly, writer and teacher Dave Saltman said educators need to teach “digital natives how to become good digital citizens”, at least partially by having dialogue about fair use, a sometimes elusive legal standard for copyright, especially in the digital age. (The RIAA I guess deals with so much of this that it has a Webpage called “For Students Doing Reports.”)

Kids start their technology habits early in school. When they make a PowerPoint in third grade, they may not even think about any of this when they clip that picture or that little block of text, when it’s so easy and anybody can search for the thing and find it.

What is the cost of students’ digital research habits? Even if they can’t articulate it this way, do they see their mash-ups, their patchwriting (a term I’m borrowing from Rebecca Moore Howard) not as cheating but as part of the world of knowledge they inhabit — after all, Google’s operation is basically as a gigantic copier of texts, pictures, and documents?

In my classes, informed by those like DeVoss and Rosati and Moore Howard, I encourage students to step back and look at the Web practically, but critically. What’s the purpose of a given document? Why are you writing it? How are you representing other people’s ideas? How would those people feel about that? What are the rules for citing in this case? (For instance, I’m violating all kinds of official rules in my casual linking here. It’s a blog. Is that okay?)

I’m not talking about free passes for cheating, because the outright digital cheating can be numbing. I have seen “cases” in which three or more college students all submitted the same paper. Teachers turned into detectives, tracing a file’s meta-data for last date saved or what computer a document was written on, while the students cooled their heels in separate offices, like interrogated crime suspects.

I don’t think we need much teaching to say you’re a cheater if you buy a paper or let someone else write it for you. It always has been. But there’s also an open digital space. Watching screenagers — whether my students or my own kids — meander through the Web sometimes makes me wonder what we can claim as authentically our own. Once, you could sit in class and write with keen insight about Hamlet’s indecision, and you would never know 120 other students had the same idea in other schools that term. That Web offers ways of reducing that redundancy of knowledge, maybe allowing us collectively to reach higher than we ever thought we could. But it also may show us how difficult it is to be original.

10. “All of this year’s required textbooks are by L. Ron Hubbard”

9. “We’re working with a local prison this year on a new program called ‘Scared Smart’”

8. “So, over the summer, did that thumb-sucking problem ever clear up?”

7. “Good news! Instead of dissecting a frog in Biology this year, we were lucky enough to procure the remains of the recently deceased James Arness!”

6. “Those with head lice, please line up on this side of the gymnasium”

5. “I is your new English teacher”

4. “Today’s lecture on Evolution will be delivered by guest speaker Michele Bachmann”

3. “I’m your gym teacher, and I say that’s what wrestlers wore during the original Olympics: nothing!”

2. “Today, for a change of pace, we’ll be pledging allegiance to the Powers of Darkness”

1. “Your grades will be determined by how well you rub my feet”
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Have any of my currently unknown artistic brethren and sistren out there noticed what nifty little curiosities we seem, to our  acquaintances? I mean, if we won big fat awards or sold something for hard cash, we would be seriously interesting — legitimate, even. But until then, we are breathing diversions; we are, at best, refreshing company, because if we are, indeed, forced to cut the grass to make ends meet, we still refuse to stray far from playing in the backyard sandbox.  And, oh, the little castles we can make! Such delights! Such fun!

Once, at a very young age — I believe she was still in my mother’s womb, in the second trimester of pregnancy, but I may be exaggerating — my sister painted an outstanding piece. One of our great aunts looked at it, and instead of recognizing the astounding quality of the work, she remarked: “Isn’t that cute?” (She’s a professional illustrator now [my sister, not my great aunt, may she rest in peace].)

Cute. That’s the best the lady could do.

But, take heart. We encourage creativity in schools, here in the U.S. of A. Save our music programs! Save our art programs! Why? Kids get better math scores when they study an instrument; they learn to think creatively, which helps them later in life; not, however, because they might contribute some beauty or profundity to an ugly, mundane world. That’s silly . . .

 . . . unless you make a lot of money or win a big award. Because that means success. For instance, it is clear that everyone who has ever won a Grammy is a serious artist.

Anyway, we encourage our kids to be creative so that creative thinking will serve them well on standardized tests — which are F-ing stupid, across the board, says the writer/musician/vice-principal writer of this article — or in solving business-oriented problems when the stakes are real.

Thomas Gradgrind is alive and well — but he allows a creative period per week now, because statistics show creativity breeds augmented normalcy.

But stick with it — keep living the creative life, and you are certainly not despised; you might very well be adored, like a pet rodent. You are, as I said, a refreshing, slightly silly, getting-his-hair-rumpled-like-a-little-kid amusement for those serious adults who stand outside the sandbox with both dress-shoes firmly on the grass, smiling benignly down at you over their folded arms.

I was once playing a gig in a bar. I was in my late-twenties. A friend from high school walked up to the stage to say hello. I hadn’t seen him for years.  We exchanged a hearty hand-clasp. He said: “You still doing this nonsense?”

He was a cop in a tiny town, which meant that, mostly, his job amounted to writing tickets and chasing kids away from keggers in the woods. Do I respect the police? Of course I do. They keep us safe. They risk their lives, sometimes. But do the police respect me? Well, not this one. To him, my musical life was “nonsense.” My passion was “nonsense.” If having passions is nonsense, then people like this guy are certainly quite sensible.

Yet, there he was, my policeman friend, about twenty minutes later, dancing, sweating and giving me the thumbs-up over the shoulder of a grinding girl-pal (who was, if we are really going to analyze this, grinding to my beat and not to his).

I suppose my nonsense made more sense when he got drunk.

Chris Matarazzo’s ARTISTIC UNKNOWNS appears every Tuesday.

10. Fart History

9. Print Journalism

8. Forensic Reflexology

7. Fax Machine Repair

6. Congressional Ethics

5. Ufology

4. Competitive Dwarf Tossing

3. Farrah Fawcett-Majors

2. American Economics

1. Grifting
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

What is it like being a kid in the standardized testing labyrinth of American education? I wonder if those of us who aren’t kids ask that question enough. I also wonder if kids themselves understand their own feelings about being tested, understand that it isn’t an inevitable aspect of being educated.

So many people comment on the unfairness of the standardized testing juggernaut, the money being made by those who run it, and the way it frustrates most educational goals. But how often do we hear from the victims, the students, about their own awareness of and reflection on their experiences? What would we have if did get more of a perspective from the kids themselves about what being testing feels like or if we provided platforms to communicate those feelings?

When I talk to my Drexel students about standardized testing, they respond with eye-rolling exasperation — I mean, who likes tests? — but testing to them has moved into the realm of death and taxes: Inevitable and unchangeable. (Also, to be fair, the students at Drexel are smart and in general have done extremely well in school and in tests. In some ways, they are the winners in the standardized testing rat race.) In our conversations, it rarely dawns on them that many people involved with their learning hate these tests too. Or maybe they know but have given up worrying about it, and why not?: Most of the folks in my professional spheres — especially my colleagues who run writing programs — are furious about standardized testing, but our conversations about testing sometimes enervate me. As thoughtful as these dialogues can be, we don’t seem to end up doing anything. So when I, just one little professor, try to share their frustration with testing, they are like, “Yeah, but what are you able to do about it? Nothing. Let’s get on with it.”

They don’t think about the fact that their human potential, broadly speaking, is being measured from when they are young. As Don Peck, in a recent article in The Atlantic, “Can the Middle Class be Saved?”, says, “Among the more pernicious aspects of the meritocracy as we now understand it in the United States is the equation of merit with test-taking success, and the corresponding belief that those who struggle in the classroom should expect to achieve little outside it. Progress along the meritocratic path has become measurable from a very early age. This is a narrow way of looking at human potential, and it badly underserves a large portion of the population.”

They don’t think about the fact that while they are encouraged to engage in outside-the-box thinking we keep trying to find ways to measure that skill by filling in bubbles.

While they don’t articulate what they think because the testing environment is probably so transparent now, the effects aren’t. I see them, even in my own writing classes. These smart Drexel kids come in having been drilled for years in writing formulaic five-paragraph essays. They are great at it. But when they have arrived in a college writing course and you ask them to add a sixth paragraph, suspicion and doubt arise. They look at me skeptically, wondering where this mysterious sixth paragraph might go. But any annoyance and frustration they feel is more directed at me than the tests that have made them this way.

So most of them don’t think about any of these things; they are too busy competing and surviving to reflect. But some do. A few students created this video gem, “Love Letter to Albuquerque Public Schools“  (for those worried about time, it’s only two minutes long). These students express a collective outrage at the way they are ranked, judged, metricked, counted — largely through the testing to which they are subjected. It’s a bitter cry of social protest.

Maybe one day we will test someone literally to death. Then the kids, who can organize now faster than ever, might rise up, en masse, a class, a school, a whole district, and say “no” to the tests. If they did, could we look them in the eye and tell them their rage — although simmering and unvoiced — wasn’t justified all along?

10. The “Registrar’s Office” is actually the back of a ’56 Buick

9. The school motto is “Truth, Justice, Tuition Hikes”

8. The school cafeteria is just a candy vending machine

7. You first heard about the college on the back of a pack of matches

6. The college asks that you pay your tuition up front, in cash, no large bills

5. The History professor teaches how the ‘Good Guys’ lost the Civil War

4. George W. is on the cover of the yearbook

3. All the professors are on some sort of work release program

2. There are no Asians anywhere

1. The school library has only three books, and two of them involve finding Waldo
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.