Testing, Testing ... 1, 2, 4

           The other night, I dreamt that I was sitting in my high school gym, hunched over a desk with a number two pencil. I was trying desperately to finish some very important test, but all the numbers kept moving around on the page and the words looked like gibberish. 

            Yep, it’s that testing time of year.

            Today, my third graders began taking a series of standardized tests. When I look at the results in the fall, I know some of the scores will be surprise me.  Undoubtedly, there will be a few students who I thought had mastered the math curriculum or were reading way above grade level. And yet, their scores didn’t show that at all.

            I’ll have to remind myself what I saw today when I looked through the tests and watched the children fill in the circles.

            First, the reading passages can be very simplistic and the questions, tricky.   For instance, in one of our prep packets, there was a poem about a girl who likes to sit and read in her favorite chair. As she reads about faraway lands, she sees “moving pictures” in her head. The children are asked to define those “moving pictures.” Are they thoughts? Movies? Dreams? The correct answer is thoughts.  But do we really see thoughts? What’s wrong with calling them mental “movies?” Besides, wouldn’t the best answer be “images?”

            A second passage tells of a little boy who doesn’t listen to his mother and is captured by a giant. He manages to escape by tricking the giant’s wife.  One question asks how he feels at the end, and the correct answer is happy because the story says he “lived happily ever after.” But couldn’t he also feel a little scared? After all, he did just escape from the giant. Or even worried since he did disobey his mother.

            And that’s just the reading.

            Then there are the suffixes and prefixes that must be identified.  Okay, most third graders don’t need reading glasses, but even so they have to look very carefully to decide which letters are underlined.   There are the references to holidays they’ve never heard of. Or my favorite research question: Where would you go to find information on whales? The internet, obviously. The correct answer is an encyclopedia. 

            You’d think the math would be more straightforward.  But in one math the kids are shown a portion of a grocery receipt with the total cut off.  They’re asked which operation they would use to find out the change from a $20.  Well, there’s no total on the receipt, so they’d have to add. But the correct answer is subtraction, because that’s how you’re supposed to make change from a $20.  Unless, of course, you add the coins up.

            Then there’s the fact that testing doesn’t always bring out the best in everyone.  Some children race through the packets, making careless mistakes.  Others get stuck on a difficult problem and don’t manage to finish.  And some just find themselves looking out the window on a rainy day, wishing they were somewhere else.

            So what do they really mean?

A Normal Heart

            Last week, I lost a friend of 42 years. 

            We met in college when Nixon was president, the Vietnam War was still raging, and answering machines along with laptops, i-pads and cellphones were all figments of the future. We were teenagers then, younger than our own children are today, and we had no idea of what shape our lives would take – of who and what we would become.

            For most of the past 42 years, Elyce and I lived in different cities, a few hundred miles apart at least. But we talked and emailed often, sharing the details along with the gist of our lives and offering each other what comfort and support we could.

            Even during her last awful illness, Elyce didn’t want to talk just about her own pains and woes. No, she also wanted to hear about me, too. And if anything, she seemed a little embarrassed by all the attention and concern. She never let her disease define her.  Instead she took control and learned as much as she could; fought as hard as she could; and lived as fully – and as meaningfully – as she could. 

            She just wanted to live a “normal” life.  But I don’t think “normal” is the right word to describe someone who was beloved not just by her family and friends but by the medical staff that cared for her. 

            As her husband said at her funeral over the weekend, hospital hardened nurses and doctors – even surgeons! – were moved to tears by Elyce.

            How did she find the strength to carry on? According to one of her three daughters, Elyce said:  “Well, I wake up every morning and say, ‘Okay, I’m still alive!’”

            And live she did, without wasting time sweating the small stuff or wallowing in self-pity.  And though it all, she kept her gentle, witty sense of humor, finding ample reasons to laugh. In April, her hospital bed doubled as a seder table, and her youngest daughter asked, “Why is this night different from all other nights.”  Why indeed!

            On another occasion, her daughter called, scared and teary over her own health scare. Her mother coaxed and soothed, and then finally said, “Come on, sweetie. Try to pull it together.  I’ve got to go glue on my eyebrows now.”

            Just last month, I mentioned that a dear friend was dying a few months short of her own 60^th birthday. I think I made the point that making it to 60 – and beyond – is hardly something to bemoan, but a gift to enjoy.

            Well, I realize now that I was wrong. Not about the gift of 60, but about my friend. Yes, Elyce had exhausted all chemotherapy options and her condition was indeed terminal. But even so Elyce wasn’t dying so much as living, living until the very end with courage and determination, love and dignity.

            As her friend, I feel lucky to have known her and so very sad to have lost her.

What's The Story, Grandpa?

           I don’t know much about my grandfather’s early years except this:

            Abraham Lilienthal was born in New York City in 1884 or thereabouts. (His records were lost in a fire, so he was never certain of the year.)  His parents had immigrated here, one from Minsk and the other from Pinsk. (Don't ask me which.)  His father owned a factory at one point, but then lost it all.  Grandpa was an excellent student, and as he passed his two older brothers in school, first one, then the other dropped out. He went on to graduate not only high school, but college and then law school.

            Grandpa was a garrulous man and loved to tell stories about his life. But the only stories I remember all took place after he was grown up and married to my grandmother.

            And that’s a problem for me now.

            Because not so long ago, my aunt was sorting through some boxes in her basement when she came across a medal that my grandfather had won for a “Prize Short Story” in February 1914.

            The medal is a small piece of silver, roughly the size of a silver dollar, and on the front are the initials, RSS NY.  If you Google RSS, you come up with Rational Response Squad, Radiation Research Society, Racing Rules of Sailing, Reconfigurable Radio Systems or my favorite, Really Right Stuff.  None of these – or the dozens of others – can possibly be the organization that awarded the prize.

            But even if I could decipher that acronym, I'm sure it wouldn't lead me to a copy of Grandpa's winning short story.

            What could he have written about?

            World War I started in 1914, but later in the year. (Not that my grandfather fought in it.)

  According to historyorb.com, the following all happened in 1913:

•         The Hudson (the first sedan) was introduced at the Auto Show

•          Jim Thorpe was signed by the New York Giants

•          In Manhattan, Grand Central Terminal and the Woolworth Building both opened

•       Civil War veterans from the Confederacy and the Union got together for the Great      Reunion of 1913

•         Arabs attacked the Jewish community of Rechovot in Palestine, and the Hebrew language was taught in schools for the first time.
•           President Wilson said the United States would never attack another country
•         Charlie Chaplin began his film career, earning a whopping $150 a week

            But what are the chances that a 19-year-old boy wrote about any of those events?  More likely he wrote about falling in or out of love or coming of age in the early 1900s when there were still pushcarts and gas lamps and no TVs or even radios.

            What I wouldn’t give to read that story now!

            Which brings me to a confession: My grandfather  told me once that he used to write short stories. 

            “I’ve got my stories all stored away in a box. And if you want them, they’re yours.  I’ll give them to you to do with what you want,” he told me once.

            At the time, I must’ve smiled or given one of those noncommittal teenage grunts. Obviously, I didn’t show enough enthusiasm for Grandpa to bother getting that box down from the shelf in his hall closet or to bother telling me what his stories were all about.

            But Grandpa, I'd sure like to read those stories now!