by Hap Rocketto
IT WAS AN INTELLIGENT THING TO DO…
The dust covered box had lain in a corner of my basement as untouched as the inner most burial chamber of an Egyptian pharaoh’s pyramid for what seemed like the same span of time. Millennia have passed since I last read any of the notes carefully inscribed in the many spiral bound notebook that filled the cardboard sarcophagi of my formal education.
As a graduate student I studied for a degree in special education. There were courses on behavior, psychology, reading, management, curriculum and testing. Of the subjects covered testing was the most intensive, probably 20% of all the class and practical work focused on evaluation. I soon learned that testing and evaluation is an ongoing, if not Sisyphean, process for children in special education programs. It is the quantitative base line for planning a child’s Individual Educational Plan.
I soon became adept at administering and evaluating a myriad of what were called “assessment tools.” Educators do love big words. They were standardized tests that measured large group and individual achievement, functional behavior, cognition, manual dexterity, and intelligence.
My classmates and I spent long hours administering the tests to each other for practice. The evaluations we wrote from the data collected were meticulously checked by our professors. The results were interesting. We found out, to our amazement, just how educationally disabled a group of seemingly bright college graduates we were. I am not sure, but it may have been at this point in my education that a seed of doubt, which quickly grew into a full sized tree, was planted. But I digress.
Each of us was assigned a particular “evaluative instrument” to research and report on to our peers. Oh, how I love the pomposity of educational jargon. I drew the grand daddy of all intelligence tests, the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales which ushered in the modern field of intelligence testing. Little did I know when I started just how much I would come to treasure the assignment.
By way of background the Stanford-Binet test was created in 1899 by French psychologist Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon at the behest of the French Government, so that it might better classify the students in its massive centrally controlled public school system. The fruit of their labor was known as the Binet-Simon Tests. Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman revised the test in 1916 and published it as the Stanford Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale. It quickly became known as the Stanford-Binet, perhaps one of the few occasions on record where the educational and psychological establishment didn’t use either an ostentatious title or an indecipherable alphabetic acronym. The end result was that poor Theodore Simon was tossed upon the midden heap of psychology where he was soon forgotten.
I came to grow quite fond of the test because of one question which had been part of the protocol, another great pretentious educational term, when the United states was a more rural and agrarian nation.
The assessor was to read to the subject the following:”You know, do you not, what it means when they say a gun “carries 100 yards? It means that the bullet goes that far before it drops to amount to anything.” The directions then told the test administrator that, “All boys and most girls more than a dozen years old understand this readily. If the subject does not understand, we explain again what it means for a gun ‘to carry’ a given distance. When this part is clear, we proceed as follows: “Now, suppose a man is shooting at a mark about the size of a quart can. His rifle carries perfectly more than 100 yards. With such a gun is it any harder to hit the mark at 100 yards than it is at 50 yards?”
After the response is given, we were to ask the subject to explain his answer using the following rubric-another bloviating educational term. “Simply to say that it would be easier at 50 yards is not sufficient, nor can we pass the response which merely states that it is “easier to aim” at 50 yards. The correct principle must be given, one which shows the subject has appreciated the fact that a small deviation from the “bull’s-eye” at 50 yards, due to incorrect aim, becomes a larger deviation at 100 yards. However, the subject is not required to know that the deviation at 100 yards is exactly twice as great as at 50 yards. A certain amount of questioning is often necessary before we can decide whether the subject has the correct principle in mind.”
This was a question into which I could sink my teeth. I could even give the student extra credit if he told me that, to make the school solution viable, you also had to come up six minutes from 50 yard sight setting to get an elevation zero at 100 yards with a 22 caliber rifle. How sad I became when I later found that this most important question had been dropped from the test, most likely because the culture had become less familiar with firearms in general or perhaps because the ‘Chattering Classes” who run the educational-psychological complex deemed it offensive to their delicate sensibilities.
I eventually earned my degree and spent over 30 years in the classroom, but not in special education. Rather I taught students science in what we used to call the “below average” track. For me special education had lost its allure and real value when it became so regulation riddled as to interfere with teaching, so taken with itself that it had to develop its own self-important jargon, and-most importantly, abandoned the shooting question in the Stanford–Binet.
