All Tests All The Time

"How's the leg," I ask Jessica, a student who'd been limping after being hit by a car.

"The leg?" Puzzlement.

Why can communication never be straightforward in this country?

"The car accident. Bang. Owww." (Miming.)

"Ohhh. My mouth is hurting."

Mouth?? What the heck? I was convinced it was her leg that was hurt.

But by dint of perseverance, I am able on this exceptional occasion to make sense of the matter. Turns out there was a second accident -- a taxi she was riding in collided with another taxi. The leg injury is ancient history.

I told her I predicted she wouldn't make it to 2001.

By the way, I believe doctors should give patients the bad news.

I was meeting with a student the other day who mentioned that my upcoming test would be the first that students in the freshman year had been given all semester.

Really? It seemed somewhat surprising that other teachers, over six weeks into the semester, wouldn't yet have administered a test. But she was unequivocal.

When I later mentioned this to a friend of hers, the friend contradicted the information, insisting they'd had several tests already. Slightly exasperated -- so sue me, I'm human -- I was pressing her on this as the first girl reappeared. Now I had the two conflicting sources together before me.

Oft have I been advised, in vain, to be more amenable to going gentle into that good night.

I highlighted their inconsistency to them and waited, my enduring faith dimly burning, for the unaccountable to be accounted for. Chinese expostulations were exchanged for a minute or two. Then the no-test girl told me: "But Stan (another teacher) told us he'll be giving us a test every Wednesday."

I put it to her point-blank: "Irrelevant."

She then presented a potential definitional problem: they'd had a few things she did not regard as "tests" which were marked only as pass or fail.

Maybe that accounted for the conflicting info. It wasn't clear whether the other girl regarded those as "tests." But a sense of futility was descending over me. The inquisition was consuming time. How much potential insight did it hold? I surrendered and bid the girls a fond adieu.

"Hey Uriel -- mid-East war, suicide bombing in Yemen -- what kind of 'happy messages' were you referring to exactly in your [October 17] note?"

But are these things really so unpleasant? The reality leaves something to be desired, clearly. But does the viewer watching that TV anchorman feel especially bad? Aren't the solemnity and drama kind of fun? I don't think many are getting up and turning off the set; and I doubt people are forcing themselves to watch something unpleasant just because it's the right thing to do. After all, when it's not "news" they're watching, it's fictional characters being shot and blown up.

Almost all our messages are "happy" because they're constructed to be that way. Our information sources aren't communicating for the hell of it, they're focussed on selling and making money. In serving that goal they have no objection to stroking you any way you want to be stroked. Like facile friends who automatically take your side in a dispute, they have no wish to oppose any inclination you might have to avoid seeing things in your own life and world that are displeasing.

It seems people mostly fall into one of these categories:

• The movers and shakers, who take it for granted that deluding people is part and parcel of success and leadership;

• The deluded, who don't even want to know how much they're being lied to because it'd be too upsetting and it's already enough of a struggle to be cheerful and optimistic;

• The cynics, who don't believe anything and mainly hope to maintain what personal comfort they've achieved.

There is a basic error in the way most people judge the motives and aspirations of politicians, business leaders, celebrities, other famous and successful people, and corporate enterprises. They think of the people they know personally. They are confident they know something about human nature -- which traits are normal, which traits are atypical and thus improbable in people they are not personally familiar with.

The error is akin to making inferences based on a biased statistical sample. The people at the top do not represent a random sample of the population. They are generally there precisely because of an abnormal thirst to be there. There is no reason why "normal" human traits should apply to them. The avidity for money, power and fame is on a different scale. And, while I do not suggest that any blanket rules apply, one can hardly deny that if a person is willing to lie, cheat and steal, he has a definite leg up in the game.

I am not preaching cynicism.. I'm just weary of credulousness. Why can't we all just get a little more rational? Involve the brain a little more in forming conclusions? That's one of the motives driving my teaching here. I want to see a little skepticism and critical thinking in these children.

I have a vague sense that much of their prior schooling has been shrouded in the kind of arbitrariness and ambiguity I've been encountering in my life here. Hence the disinclination I've seen to even question things that are puzzling or inconsistent. In teaching comprehension of texts that have a clear meaning, where there is an undeniable right and wrong, I am striving to counter this by creating conditions under which they are completely in the dark -- unless they resort to intellect.

Beyond literal language, comprehending Western texts also involves the Western way of thinking. Western readers tend to seize on a slew of elements like cause and effect, motivation, grievance and redress. I can hardly imagine any other way of thinking, but I'm not convinced it isn't different in this culture (I'm still trying to figure it out), so I take nothing for granted.

Incidentally, I am being favored with much better attentiveness in the classroom after having shifted gears: all tests all the time. This understandably has a tendency to induce occasional misery, but I think the students see the benefits. It's analogous to China's switch to a more market-oriented economy. As students observed in a class discussion, in the past, everyone just did their job and got the same pay regardless. Now you have to work harder and you don't have job security, but you can get more money for better work, and the goal of the system (general economic prosperity) is better served. They all approve this. Similarly, the class is now making better progress towards the goal of education.

Following readings like "Hailed as a Surgeon General, Koop Criticized on Web Ethics" (NY Times, September 4, 1999 -- available at http://search.nytimes.com/search/daily/), my tests pose questions such as:

Suppose you are sick, and DrKoop.com says drug XYZ can help you. Will you trust the recommendation more or less if you learn that Dr. Koop has a business relationship with the company that makes XYZ?

Or:

The word "partner" is used because (A) it's more accurate; (B) people trust a "partner" more than an "advertiser" (C) "advertiser" is an incorrect term for business relationships (D) you can have many advertisers but only one partner.

Or even:

Critics say Dr. Koop has done nothing illegal. Can critics be trusted when they say this?

(Answer to the last one: Yes. If a person does something bad, his critics will want to point it out.)

We generally discuss the right answers immediately after the test so they're not left with lingering misconceptions from my tricky wrong answers. During the discussion I have the students scoring each others' papers -- easy, since it's multiple choice. (I slightly reduce the temptation to help friends by having them identify themselves with only ID numbers, not names.) All I have to do is record each student's total score.

There is a fair amount of cheating going on. With a room full of students, it's hard to stop wandering eyeballs from alighting on neighbors' papers. I was amused to see a colleague attempt to combat this by devising a detailed seating plan to separate friends. This is a bit troublesome for my taste. But without being too heavy-handed, I am letting students know I'm not being fooled. In the after-test discussions, when I ask a specific student about a question he's correctly answered on the test, I often find he does not even understand the question. This is a bit awkward for the student -- as intended. I predict the cheating will diminish as awareness dawns that it's futile. And in the end, I can do whatever I want with those scores.

Right near the Shooting Hotel are a couple of big parks -- "Eight Sites" and "Fragrant Hills" -- with rolling mountains, lots of woods, lovely views -- comparable to the beautiful Mohonk mountain preserve north of New York City (west of Poughkeepsie). These mountain parks also offer the decided convenience of a chairlift to take you all the way to the top, though signs warn it's not for everyone: "For passengers having difficulty getting about and suffering from high blood pressure, heart problems, mental diseases, etc. please do not ride."