Kevin has one of those jobs that sounds made up. He grades standardized test essays for a living. Not teaches – grades. He sits silently, reading essays written by seventh graders under test conditions, and scores them against a rubric.
The rubric expects the basics: a theme, introduced and supported, wrapped up with a conclusion. It also expects the writer to have been introduced to a verb at some point.
Kevin’s job is to sit there, hour after hour, measuring reality against those assumptions. To stay sane, he started scribbling the best lines down on little scraps of paper.
He finally handed me the stack. Or, more precisely, I swiped the stack off his desk why he was yelling at the TV during a Michigan football fiasco. And I have to be honest with you: if these essays are a representative sample, the biggest threat to this country isn’t the deficit, the weather, or whatever the news is panicking about this week. It’s seventh graders.
Consider this one. I have no idea what the writing prompt was. I just know a child was handed a blank page and a pencil, and this is what came back:
One time I went into the kitchen + there was the funnyest thing ever. It was a big huge baby dipper it stunk so bad that I fainted, then it was funny that I laughed my heart out.
Then, right beside it was a big baby with no dipper on and that baby needed a bath but, I wasn't going to give it to him/her. Then, it had a little accident on the floor the whole house was stinkien the dipper had a poo-poo in it and mom made me clean it up so unfare.
So I did, then I took a bath.
The baby was the fartenest baby I have ever seen. I wasen't going to touch it not even for the world because the baby had to poo-poo all the time grose,
the baby didnt care because it was his poop."
Maybe I could see a young child who was very excited telling this story, but not a 14-year-old kid actually writing it as an essay. However, I do think his conclusion was a good one, “the baby didn’t care because it was his poop.
One day a 1/2 lion 1/2 zebra escaped the circus he came to are school he killed my friend joey we unfortunately had to feed him to the wood chipper and flush his bits down the potty! And then the animal got shot. The End.
You know your 5-paragraph essay has some problems when it is only 3 sentences long and one of those sentences is “The End.” Here are a few other quotable quotes taken from some fine essays.
"On my 7th birthday, thats when I turned 7."
"He smells like an unflushed toilet."
"It was as wild as a child with ADD."
"I saw a man on a bueatiful hore." (Hopefully he meant horse)
"I was laying there like a retarded kid."
"I was in Idaho at the beach."
"I fell to the hard grass."
"A 1-foot booger rope."
"I had a bad day because I fell in some dog crap."
"We was weaker than a bear who got shot 2 times."
Kevin gets paid to read these all day. I got to read the highlights for free, and I still feel like somebody owes me money. But the rubric demands a conclusion, so here’s mine: the baby didn’t care because it was his poop, Joey deserved better, and we as a nation are weaker than a bear who got shot 2 times. The End.