In case anyone’s wondering why I haven’t yet commented on the CB’s release of sample questions…

I will eventually.

Test aside, it’s just that for now, reading David Coleman’s vapid, repetitive, bloated prose makes me physically ill.

It is quite literally some of the worst writing I’ve seen in my life. “College and career readiness proficiency?” WTF? You can have proficiency in a subject, or in a field, or on an instrument, but you cannot have proficiency in readiness. Proficiency is readiness.

This is nonsense.

Dry and boring is one thing, but this makes my skin crawl. I’ve actually been mulling it over, trying to pinpoint just what it is — textually speaking — that’s eliciting this reaction. As far as I can ascertain, it’s something about the juxtaposition oftouchy-feely metaphors (heart of algebra! “digging into” problems!) and otherwise soulless, mechanical style that strikes me as downright bizarre. It’s the worst type of edu-speak, one that pays lip service to the romantic ideal of education as a stimulating, imaginative process while simultaneously turning it into something dull and dry and utterly utilitarian.

Or perhaps I should call it zombie writing — it has letters and words and sentences combined in recognizable ways, and it conveys an idea (THE NEW SAT TESTS REAL WORLD SKILLS), but it lacks an inner spark of consciousness, so to speak. Every single sentence: subject – verb – object, subject – verb – object… College and career readiness, readiness for college and career, skills that students will apply in college and in the workplace… On and on and on. It’s like reading something written by a mechanical doll — you know, the kind that speaks when you pull a string in its back.

I may do a close reading of it at some point, just to see how internally contradictory it actually is, but that would of course actually require that I read it closely.

Clarity and transparency (or at least the illusion of such) are certainly admirable goals, but someone seems to have confused those qualities with redundancy.

Call me histrionic, but I don’t think I’ve ever had quite so visceral a reaction to any piece of writing in my life.

The only good that’s come out of this whole thing is that it’s made me remember what I love so much about reading and words and language — the “humanity” part of the humanities. Paradox, irony, subtlety, wordplay, metonymy… Oh, what unspeakable relief!

It feels like a revolt.

Now if you’ll excuse, I need to get back to The Shock of the Ancients: Literature and History in Early Modern France.

Sentence completions out, founding documents in

From Federalist Paper I (chosen at random)

To the People of the State of New York:

AFTER an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the union, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world. It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.

This idea will add the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism, to heighten the solicitude which all considerate and good men must feel for the event. Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good. But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected. The plan offered to our deliberations affects too many particular interests, innovates upon too many local institutions, not to involve in its discussion a variety of objects foreign to its merits, and of views, passions and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth.

Among the most formidable of the obstacles which the new Constitution will have to encounter may readily be distinguished the obvious interest of a certain class of men in every State to resist all changes which may hazard a diminution of the power, emolument, and consequence of the offices they hold under the State establishments; and the perverted ambition of another class of men, who will either hope to aggrandize themselves by the confusions of their country, or will flatter themselves with fairer prospects of elevation from the subdivision of the empire into several partial confederacies than from its union under one government.

What was that about eliminating “arcane” vocabulary from the SAT again?

And let’s not even get started on the syntax.