When I am King: No Child Left Behind Left Behind

When I am King...

There will be testing testing.

The U.S. government decided recently that the “No Child Left Behind” policy of the former administration wasn’t working. Perhaps it should have been called “Many Children Left Behind” or “No Child Left Behind, but Many Run Over by the Bus,” because it clearly wasn’t making the grade.

Maybe it was the fact that it was a system designed by America’s favorite C-student president (“I pledgify my allegiance…”). Or perhaps the kids in the failing schools are just plain dumb, and no amount of attention focused on those schools can compensate for their willful thickheadedness. Or maybe it’s just time to try something new because that’s what governments do.

But I think the problem is rooted in testing.

In order to judge whether schools are failing, the children in those schools take standardized tests. Schools with enough children who pass the tests are considered okay, and the teachers can get back to work beating some sense into the children. Schools without enough passing children (a.k.a., “dummies”) are considered failing, and the spotlight of shame is focused on the school to inspire fear and educational prowess.

This system of ritual embarrassment is apparently not succeeding. Of course, anyone that was ever ridiculed in school for doing something unusual could have told you as much; taunting only benefits the ringleader and the laughing onlookers, not the victim.

But how can you successfully test all children on what they’ve learned in a systematic and consistent way across the whole country? What tests will you use? Who will create them? Will they need #2 pencils? Will they test the children’s ability to fill in the circles completely? Will they allow for bathroom breaks? Will there be more “C” answers than “A” because it always seems like cheating to have the first multiple-choice answer be the right one?

When I am King, there will be a focus on testing. In particular, we need to make sure that we have qualified testers to create and administer the tests. We need an entire system designed to test the people that write the tests, to make sure that their testing skills are tested. Testers that succeed can go on to give other tests to testers. Those that fail will be mercilessly teased, and can then apply for a job at the local Department of Motor Vehicles.

This system of writing tester tests, testing testers, and grading tests taken by testing testers test-takers, will result in a progressively more refined testing environment with the best testers we can produce. But in the meantime, teachers can get back to actually teaching and children can focus on learning. Or taunting the weak ones and taking their lunch money, which is what school is really all about.

Little Joke for Thursday

I wonder:

Are those people that aren't on some kind of reality TV show called the unwatched masses?

Video: Chet Does Nerdcore

I wrote this geeky music video piece for a recent tech conference about the product I work on. It's about people and product-related things you've probably never heard of, but I'm hoping it's funny anyway.

When I am King: Fashion Tips

When I am King...

Button-up shirts will be tucked into pants that fasten at the waist.

Somehow, while I wasn’t paying any attention, it has become a fashion trend to untuck those button-down dress shirts that men wear. I think it’s supposed to give the wearer a look that says, “I care enough about what I look like to spend money on a nice shirt, but not enough to bother tucking it in.” It also has that casual, slept-in-my-clothes look, combined with a feeling of having forgotten to tuck back in the last time you went to the bathroom. All that’s missing is some toilet paper stuck to the shirttails.

I’m having a hard time dealing with this development. For one thing, I can’t get at my pockets anymore because they’re covered by these shirt tails hanging around like last month’s cold. But even worse, there’s this loose feeling of my clothes not being completely on that I just can’t adjust to. The shirt is wafting around, open to the elements, and I’m not liking it.

Then I realized; the men’s shirt has become a blouse. Maybe if we wore bras, things would feel more secure and cozy in there.

Meanwhile, the pants have become looser and ride lower than the waist, showing a part of the body that is only attractive on about 2 people in the world.

The strangest thing about it is the disparate origin of these fashions. Untucked shirts come from the world of Large. Instead of tucking in shirts, men trying to hide their gut would untuck and let the shirt fall straight, like covering a nuclear arsenal with a camo tarp. Instead of seeing who could stand to miss a lunch based on the size of their middle, you’d just have to look for the untucked shirts. This worked like a charm until this new fashion trend where everyone seems to be untucked. Maybe it’s a conspiracy by the Large-ish Association of People (LAP); by forcing the trend on the rest of us, they can now hide in public.

The low-riding pants fashion, conversely, comes from the usual place: the world of Thin. This fashion mistake is brought to us by supermodels who haven’t fully digested a single meal in years. The pants look great on them because they add a third dimension to an otherwise 2D body. But you put them on a real person and everyone looks like a plumber in mid-repair.

Shirts that hang out, pants that don’t come up to the waist: It’s like a married couple going through a midlife crisis. They’re having a trial separation and playing with their lifestyles. Maybe the shirts are going to start seeing other articles of clothing, maybe even other shirts. And the pants are just sinking lower into depression. I just want to shake some sense into them, “You’re shirts and pants! Get ahold of yourselves! And each other!”

When I am King, shirts will tuck in again. And they’ll do so into pants that cover all of those parts of the body that should never have been seen in public in the first place.

When I am King: Hello, My Name Is...

When I am King...

Everyone will wear nametags. Always.

You meet someone at a party. You introduce yourselves, you shake hands, you exchange meaningless conversation about the weather and the essential pointlessness of human existence, and then you return to the buffet table to add more guacamole directly onto your waistline.

A week later, you see them again. You say hello and realize that you haven’t a clue what their name is. It’s not the right situation to ask them, so you get by without it, just avoiding any sentence that requires using their name. If you’re with someone that you should introduce to them, you rudely forget so that you can avoid admitting that you don’t know their name. If they’d forgotten your name too, it would have been fine. But they said your name right off the bat, so you couldn’t launch into the proactive, “I’m Bob – we met at that party?” and hope that they’d pay you back in kind.

You see them again the next week, and then frequently after that. And you never remember their name. Years go by and you now know them pretty well, seeing them at local barn burnings and gun rallies, yet you still never recall their name. You just get by with such timeless phrases as, “Hey, you!” and “Hey!” and the classic “Yo!”

Meanwhile, there are other people that, no matter how many times they’ve met you, consistently forget not only what your name is, but that they’ve ever seen you before. There are probably people that you know at work like this. They sit near you, they work on a related team, and you pass them several times a day around the department. Yet eventually they will end up talking to you and will say that you haven’t met and they’ll kindly re-introduce themselves. It’s not so bad having your name forgotten, but to have completely passed through their consciousness without registering a blip is a bit of a letdown. Especially since you slept with them. Twice.

When I am King, we will all wear permanent nametags. In fact, given the current trend for tattoos (a trend that follows a 40 year cycle, which is the amount of time it takes for a tattoo to turn the color of bile and sag that pretty butterfly design into a cobweb of horror), these nametags will be tattooed onto our foreheads. This will prevent the awkwardness of not knowing someone’s name because you can always look straight into their eyes, or slightly above them, and read it. It will also prevent the embarrassment of you being forgotten by people. Not that they won’t still forget you as soon as they blink, but at least if they can read your name they may skip that awkward re-introduction that otherwise inevitably ensues.

That’s my plan. My name’s Chet, by the way. And you were…?

Little Jokes for Thursday

I wonder:

If “fat intake” is what you eat, does that make puking a fat outtake?

Why do pregnant women drink “virgin” mixed drinks? Isn’t it too late for that?

Is incorrect use of lower case a capital offense?

Things I Believe

The apple may not fall far from the tree, but neither does the bird poop.

Cruel and unusual punishment sounds bad. But cruel and usual punishment sounds worse.

Sunset: A Haiku. Or Two.

I was pleased to see Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's former CEO, tweet a Haiku as his resignation letter:

Financial crisis
Stalled too many customers
CEO no more

It's brief, it's to the point, and it's probably all that the Oracle lawyers would let him say on the subject.

Given his exit package, I figure that resignation is worth about a million bucks per syllable.That's probably more money than all poetry has earned total since Early Man rhymed "Oog" with "foog" in a sonnet to his love, before clubbing her on the head and dragging her back to his man-cave.

But somehow, this CEO-poet's final words didn't quite do it for me. I feel the need to amend his Haiku with some of my own:

Customers all gone,
Sun blames the economy.
Oh excuses, excuses.

Economy downturn
Causes Sun to get acquired?
That's not the whole tale.

High tech implosion;
Old business plan gone awry.
Time to get acquired.

Sun needs umbrellas:
Employees must weather the
New Oracle reign.

Sun disappears in
Clouds of ruin and despair.
Rain, Oracle, Reign.

When I am King: Spelling Beegone

When I am King...

I will do away with the Spelling Bee.

Last week, I spent an evening at a Spelling Bee for fourth and fifth graders. I don’t like to admit it, but I was emotionally overcome by a sense of, well, horror.

A Spelling Bee is like a death match with letters. There is no team to win or lose with. There is no score or grade. Instead, play continues until only one child is left. The last one standing in the puddle of tears must by definition be the winner.

A girl steps up to the microphone and the judges say the word, “psychoanalysis.” She can ask for it to be repeated, derived, defined, and used in a sentence. These are all good stalling tactics and you can see their mind whirring around thinking, “I have no idea what that word is.” Meanwhile, I’m in the audience thinking, “Does that 9 year old really need to know that the word is a combination of roots from French and Celtic?” Then the girl spells the word, haltingly, knowing that everyone is watching and listening to every letter. And since everyone in the room is either a competitor or the parent of one, they are all secretly hoping she will fail.

And she does, eventually, because every child except one does. The judges let her get to the end of the word, while everyone else in the room knows that she was dead as soon as she said “P-H”. After she repeats the word at the end, signaling her completion, the judges ring a bell. it’s a small bell, a friendly bell, and it means YOU FAILED. Each child will remember the sound of that little bell for eternity, listening for it in the auditoriums of life waiting for it to ring out and tell them that they have been judged and found wanting. That they are a Bad Speller.

The girl waits politely at the microphone while the judges tell her what she should have said, and all of the parents and other children nod knowingly, “I would have spelled it the right way.” One of the parents served as the failure committee, greeting each losing child with a goodie bag so that the kids can remember losing. She gives the girl her bag, pats her on the back, and sends her, slowly weeping, toward her parents. Then the failure committee mom goes back to the box of shame to get another goodie bag, because there’s another kid stepping up to the mic, and they’ll probably lose, too.

When I am King, there will be no spelling bee. It obviously doesn’t go far enough in training these children that it’s every man for himself in this world. Instead, children will be locked in a hot room with a single juicebox. Then we’ll see who’s got what it takes. But at least in this competition there will be no roomful of people witnessing each child’s unique failure, no goodie bags of shame, no sweet bell of doom. There will just be a prize, a winner, and a roomful of straw-gouged runners-up.

Little Joke for Monday

I think this would be a good name for a religious mortuary for couples:

Hymns and Hearse