Top Five: number 4 - The Stud

As promised, here's "more later" (Harwell, you ain't getting anything done today).

So, this would be #4 in the Stupidest Students Top Five: The Stud. And before you go getting the wrong idea, believe me, this isn't nearly as sexy as it sounds.

The student in question was a sophomore, let's call him Shane. Shane was a Chatty Cathy of a student; constantly talking with those around him about anything that wasn't class related. But it wasn't his fault. You see, Shane had ADHD / ADD and, as any education professional can tell you, that means nothing is his fault.

It's his condition, you see.

Anyway, Shane, as I mentioned, was constantly talking, which meant Shane was constantly not paying attention. This would be evidenced in his quiz and test scores, which were perpetually in the low double digits (as in 15, 18, 23...)It was also evidenced in the document that landed him here at #4, his To Kill a Mockingbird essay.

We had just wrapped up reading Huck Finn and Mockingbird back to back. It gave the students an interesting look not just at literature, but at the evolution of race relations in America. In keeping with that idea, I assigned the students to write an essay, focusing on the theme of race relations / civil rights, etc. One of the suggestions I made was to compare either Huck or Atticus Finch with a significant real-life figure in the civil rights movement.

Shane liked that idea, apparently. He liked it so much, he did it twice. More on that in a moment.

The other directions for the assignment were straight forward enough: five paragraphs, 500-700 words, use evidence from the novel to back up your point. All spelled out at the top of the assignment sheet in BIG BOLD PRINT. Perhaps, I should have used fewer words because, apparently, the ADD monster kept Shane from reading all of the directions.

If only the ADD monster could have saved me from reading his essay.

It was there, in the middle of the stack of thirty some odd essays I had to grade, tucked between two his classmate's neatly typed and printed works. One handwritten page. At first I thought perhaps an essay from another class had accidentally gotten mixed in with my stack. One written by a paraplegic, clutching the pen between his teeth, scribbling out the words as best he could.

No such luck.

It was one page, but more importantly, it was one paragraph. All about Atticus, supposedly, though there was no mention of him or the novel after the first two sentences. Instead, the paragraph went on to discuss the heroic similarities between Abe Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. From what I could translate of Shane's hieroglyphics, Abe and Martin were both heroes. Sworn enemies of racism and its inherent evils (my words - his were something like "They both hated the Klan and rednecks"). They both worked to right injustice wherever they found it ("They helped negors" - his spelling, not mine). But neither of those were Abe or Martin's greatest contributions. No, Shane had found one far, far greater. So great, he repeated it 15 times throughout the essay, virtually word for word every time.

"Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr stud for black people."

OK... um.... well... Oh... I get it. Stud = past tense of stand.

My bad. I thought he meant... well...

yeah.

I showed that essay on the overhead projector, as I always do with student essays, to my other two sophomore classes (I remove the names so nobody knows who the idiot is). And as bad as Shane's idiocy was? Even worse was that only four kids out of 62, even got that there was anything wrong with Shane's sentence.

Guess that's what you get with No Child Left Behind. Thank God we've got George Bush to stud for the youth.

OUT