Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Pop Quiz





It is times like this…

Had I known this before…

What I wouldn’t give…

Hungrier than a woodpecker with a headache…


 Those tests where you are to select the one thing that doesn’t match the others always start off easy and as you progress through the test it becomes increasingly more difficult to isolate the one thing that doesn’t belong.

And story problems - as a writer you’d think I’d like story problems but actually I don’t.  Come to find out they are nothing more than math problems disguised as cute, little stories with drab endings.

The math portion of my brain has always lagged a little behind the rest of my brain.  It’s like that 9/8 % of brain is actually handicapped, or numerically stunted.  By all rights I should be allowed handicap parking in front of all Math stores.

What in particular does testing really tell us?  A professor stands before his or her class and says, “You may begin.”

Heads look down and pencils go up, the room gets very quiet.

Some students will breeze right through the questions while others struggle with each one.  Some gaze off into the distance contemplating the importance of the #2.  Why is it always a #2 pencil?  From there their thoughts stray to pens and the mechanical actions that poke the ballpoint portion out for writing and in for storage within a shirt pocket.

Perhaps visions of some spreading blue stain on what was once a nice and fairly expensive dress shirt pop into their head, resulting of course from a failed pen mechanism.

It is somewhere during the mental image of the sewing required for the intricate shirt construction using the odd shaped pieces of material when the student hears, 

“Time’s up, pencils down.”

They have yet to put their name in the upper right-hand corner, let alone answer a single question.

What does this tell us?

A.             He or she is a daydreamer
B.              Not enough time was allowed for the test
C.              Shirts are hard to make
D.             Sometimes Life just hands you #2










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