You can End-of-the-year- test this!

The end of the school year and weary North Carolina teachers pull the wagons in a circle while administrators and whining parents apply stress to the besieged educators. There will be accusations of some child left behind even though the village that was suppose to raise the little darling was too busy to attend parent/teacher conferences. But the ultimate stress maker is the flawed EOG or End of year/Grade test.

A teacher and a child’s school career depend on this one test—an academic roll of the dice. According to the Raleigh incompetents ( RI’s) running the NC Department of Public Instruction the EOG alone, given at one moment in time and ignoring the rest of the year, accurately measures the entire year’s performance of the teacher and student. You may as well plan a teaching career by looking at tea leaves. When determining if a child should advance it would be as accurate to just roll dice. Other tests are apparently just for giggles.

By the time your child’s schooling is done they will have endured the EOG, SAT, COGAT and possibly the EPA, a CATSCAN, U2 and the 3 Dog Night.

Recently after talking a stressed teacher down from off a high kitchen countertop and asking her about the EOD (End of Day meal) I decided to offer an equally reliable alternative to the EOG.

So I sat down with three bags of pork rinds and a diet cola and developed an exam to replace all the others. This should allow me to sell a five pound study guide, hit the talk circuit and make a boat load of cash. I call it the Standard Annual Information Test for Youth or SANITY.

Here are a few sample questions:

1.Which of the following is true about the American Civil War?
a.Rhett Butler was bipolar
b.You can say what you want, but they wore great hats!
c.The Ken Burns PBS special was better
d.For the first time the word “Duck!” was not used to describe water fowl

2.What is meant by the phrase “She broke my heart”?
a.The surgeon was an angry woman
b.There will be no EOD today
c.The woman knows how to use a baseball bat
d.Menopause can be a bear

3.Edgar Allen Poe wrote stories pertaining to the darker side of human emotion. Historians now believe that he:
a.Scarfed down tons of anti-depressants
b.Wrote “The Raven” while simultaneously inventing the game “99 Bottles of beer on the wall”
c.Egged the house of his friend Usher
d.Invented Halloween

4.The equation 2 (x+y) = 2x + 2y is indicative of:
a.Stuff
b.What-- I’m a calculator now?
c.I was never very good with angles
d.You should never mix numbers and letters—you don’t know if you should read or do math

5.350 x 570 x 800 = 800 x 570 x a. “a” has a value of:
a.Don’t know but it was a lot more in ‘05
b.Yea, like I’m Einstein
c.I always hated geometry
d.Soooo—you read this or just do the math?

6.What was the “The Great Depression”?
a.The pothole that was recently fixed at the Crossroads Shopping Center
b.Louisiana after hurricane Katrina
c.President Obama’s latest speech
d.That Tuesday your dog died, the IRS called, your momma got ran over by a train and you opened the medicine cabinet and found you were out of Lexapro

So contact your state school officials and suggest they try SANITY. I’m sure they’ll be delighted.