Of pens and #2 Pencils. . .

August 6, 2010

Oddly enough, writing utensils were on my mind most of the morning. Considering that it’s a Friday (the second hardest day for a crossword puzzler) and that I now have to report to the “real” world by 7:30, it was important that I could quickly access the appropriate “gaming” pen in order to make some early-morning progress on the puzzle. In addition, this morning was Allison’s Readiness Days gig at Lincoln High and I knew I needed a really nice pen to sign all those checks and forms.

All those inky thoughts made my mind wander to the pen’s lesser cousins-- #2 pencils-- whose lives seem to circulate around nothing more important than a standardized test or two. And then, in the circuitous route that my feeble mind so often makes, I found myself recalling the Emergency Broadcast System spiel: “This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. Had this been an actual emergency, you would have been told to take shelter. . . ”.

How interesting that most tests require the taker to use an erasable pencil rather than a beefy, brave pen. It’s as though the folks who put these tests together are calling “uncle” and admitting that their tests don’t really matter. After all, if a test were real life, we’d be using pens, not pencils.

So, why is it that we stress so much when taking tests, which are, ultimately, nothing but cheap imitations of our real, inky lives? Why is it we so often lose sleep over them , take prep classes to bump up our scores on them, write notes about them or stuff the answers into our shoes when it’s a test? We certainly don’t exert the same energy when the topic is real life.

It’d be nice if education could find something better than a #2 pencil and a bubble sheet to determine what it is that a person knows. We teachers—and our students—already know that these are false intellectual thermometers, yet we seem to lose our voices when the test date approaches. What we need are more pens and fewer tests in schools. We should remind ourselves that, ultimately, “This is a test. . . had this been an actual emergency, we would have been told where to take shelter.”