Dora Malech: I’m Dora Malech, and this is PoetryNow. This is a poem that has been a long time in the making. In the short term, I wrote it over the course of a few weeks in early May 2019, after the May 7th shooting at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado. And that school is less than 10 miles from the site of the massacre at Columbine High School.

(READS POEM)

Standards-Based Assessment
 
I.
 
Nothing happened here.
Meaning it was done.
 
Over counts itself among
the studied synonyms
 
but beyond
those round mouths
 
opening for answers
done is the opposite of over.
 
II.
 
What is the sum
when you add
 
cut flowers in cellophane
to teddy bears and prayers
 
and the difference  
when you take away
 
and take away
and take away?
 
Show your work.
Attend to precision.
 
III.
 
The students are gone.
It is not summer.
 
The classroom snake
that fled its shattered tank
 
the long shadows
draping themselves over
 
the overturned desks
and the red pen fallen
 
to the floor will count
as symbols on a different
 
subject test. Let them be
innocent in this world.

* * *

The first image for me that opened this poem up in my writing was that image of an empty classroom. I wanted there to be the sense of emptiness that occurs after this kind of violence.

(QUOTING FROM POEM)

The students are gone. / It is not summer. // The classroom snake / that fled its shattered tank

When I was growing up, there was certainly testing in school. And it was certainly a cause of stress. But I don’t think it compared in any way to what students have been facing in school in the decades since then. I think testing looms so large. And I think there’s a sense that society at large feels that they can judge students and communities and schools by those tests.

(QUOTING FROM POEM)

Show your work. / Attend to precision.

That line, “Attend to precision,” it’s one of the standards for mathematical practice from the Common Core State Standards Initiative. I just wanted to drop it there and let it kind of echo there a little bit in a different context.

In a sense, the friction at the heart of this poem is the sense in which we as a society, or as adults, are asking our students to explain themselves, to justify themselves, to prove their worth academically through testing, all the time. And yet, I think it’s more than fair for students, for young people, to turn to the adults around them and say, “What have you done for us? How have you made our schools safer? How have you allowed us to learn in a way where we can concentrate on what you’re supposed to be teaching us?”

Katie Klocksin: That was Dora Malech and her poem “Standards-Based Assessment.” I’m Katie Klocksin and this is PoetryNow, a production of the Poetry Foundation. For more about this series, go to poetryfoundation.org/poetrynow.