Bringing back my favorite tag!
So you prompted me to do some investigation.
- “The Story of the Rabbit and the Eggplant
Once there was a race between a rabbit and an eggplant. Now, the eggplant, as you know, is a member of the vegetable kingdom, and the rabbit is a very fast animal.
Everybody bet lots of money on the eggplant, thinking that if a vegetable challenges a live animal with four legs to a race, then it must be that the vegetable knows something.
People expected the eggplant to win the race by some clever trick of philosophy. The race was started, and there was a lot of cheering. The rabbit streaked out of sight.
The eggplant just sat there at the starting line. Everybody knew that in some surprising way the eggplant would wind up winning the race.
Nothing of the sort happened. Eventually, the rabbit crossed the finish line and the eggplant hadn’t moved an inch.
The spectators ate the eggplant.
Moral: Never bet on an eggplant.”
So as it turns out, New York State paid a test preparation company to create standardized tests, and the standardized test company paid Daniel Pinkwater to use the above excerpt as a part of their tests.
And in between, someone underpaid and underappreciated attempted to turn the above into a multiple choice test with predictably Kafka-esque results.
Moral: No Child Left Behind.
It's definitely a lesson in not overthinking things, right? I mean the pineapple had no chance yet the animals made some grand assumption. Sometimes things are exactly as they seem.
I mean it's still a dumb story, and provides no level of assessment in regards to scholastic achievement. If anything the story speaks to the inadequacy of the standardizing testing system that has seemed to grip the nation...