Bob Shepherd: The Six Hundred, a Riff on Tennyson
Our reader Bob Shepherd has his own blog. As you may have deduced, I’m just wild about Bob.
Here is a wonderful parody of Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” who was writing about the British troops who blindly followed orders in the Battle of Balaclava in 1854 in the Crimean War and perished.
Bob calls it “The Coring of the Six Hundred.”
My generation memorized the Tennyson poem. Thanks to the Common Core, this generation will be lucky to encounter any poetry.
Here is the beginning. Open the link and read it all.
Row on row, row on row,
Row on row stationed
Sick at their monitors
Sat the six hundred.
“You may now type your Username”
Said the test proctor.
Set up for failure
Sat the six hundred.
“Enter your password key!
“Mercy upon you!
“During the testing
“No one can help you.”
Someone had blundered.
The unspoken truth. But
Theirs was not to make reply,
Theirs was not to reason why,
Theirs was but to do or die,
Theirs was but to try and cry.
Set up for failure
Sat the six hundred.
Text to the right of them
Complex, out of context,
Bubbles in front of them,
Plausible answers,
Tricky and tortured,
Boldly they bubbled and well
Though smack in the mouth of hell
Sat the six hundred.
This is what reading means,
Now that Gates/Pearson
Has reified testing
Far beyond reason.
Pearson not persons.
Plutocrats plundering
Taxpayer dollars
Spent to abuse.
The children are used.
They bubble and squirm
To reveal their stack ranking
And never again
Will know joy in learning
Never again
Humane joy in reading
And writing, no never again,
Not the six hundred.