"After a 16-year hiatus from teaching, last August I took my pension and returned to my old high school to teach Latin again. You know Senge's story about the frog in the pan, in which the frog is cooked before he realizes he's heating up? I knew something had changed the minute I met my kids.

"They are brighter and smarter than I remember high school kids being, but their learning is much more channeled into predictive patterns. Throwing Latin at them and expecting them to learn the 'stuff' of it—vocabulary, syntax—really did run counter to their patterns of learning. I think this is largely because so much of their instruction tends toward predictable responses—albeit and ironically—in the name of higher-order thinking skills or some such thing.

"It really hit the fan on May 1 when I discovered, without warning, that for all practical purposes, the instructional year was over. So many of my students were taking two, three, even four AP courses and were being tested the first two weeks of May that their pleas for rest were legitimate. No homework during that time. Then, the Maryland tests jumped into the calendar, and I had another two weeks of deference to the testing regimen that my students confronted.

"The AP exams, of course, display a school's 'challenging curriculum,' so questions about the value of the approach or assumptions about students' quality learning in other subjects are not to be addressed. It is a cruel joke.

 "The state's HSA's are equally perverse. While they are supposedly exit exams, the drive is to get the kids through them as early as possible, setting aside all the developmental work in the meanwhile. I have no doubt that my top Latin I students will have passed all or most of their HSA's … and that this fall, in Latin II, I will have to reteach most of the last quarter's Latin I because the students simply could not handle it all.

 "At the end of the school year, when I told my principal how disappointed I was in the mandated finals my students had taken, he told me, 'Don't worry about it, they're burned out.'

 "So, as excited as I was and am to return to teaching, I am more troubled than ever at the miseducation of public school students. The test that is really being flunked is the test of common sense, good judgment, and balance in ensuring that all our kids learn."

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