We are fast approaching the moment we all live for. Everything we do from the moment we wake up until the time we go to bed is meant to prepare ourselves for this grandiose event. It happens only once a year, just like Christmas, the Westminster Dog Show, your birthday, or the day you find that lost sock behind the washing machine.
There is no need to fear the FCAT, though. Students have been bubbling their ignorance away since the third grade. They have become experts at designing masterful patterns on the answer sheet. They welcome the chance to be able to sit quietly for a few hours and to enjoy the feeling of a world devoid of the constant buzzing of their phones alerting them that “OMG, Joey dumped Katie. LOL.”
Unfortunately, this may be one of the last times we are administering the FCAT. Millions of students have taken it over the years. Some of those students may even have an actual job today. Millions of tax dollars have been given to publishers and “testing companies” that produced beautifully designed graphics and data that could be compared to art, in the sense that one can appreciate its beauty without quite understanding its real purpose. So, as we are getting ready to submit our students to this rite of passage, let us not forget that we owe it to ourselves to bask in the FCAT’s glory, to worship its magnificence, to give thanks to its grand priests, to recommend our souls to its makers, and to forever remember that we were there for the students when they needed us the most, giving them a freshly sharpened, untouched #2 pencil just as theirs had broken under the added pressure of test anxiety.
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