NY State has canceled the US history exam, claiming that there was some content in the exam that, in light of the mass shooting in Buffalo of mostly black people by an actual white supremacist, will traumatize the high school students of New York.
If you are “traumatized” by an exam question…I don’t know what to tell you. You’re soft. You are emotionally and psychologically weak, and we have all failed you. I doubt the vast majority of students will have their “trauma compounded” (as Emily DeSantis from the NY state education department said), but if you do, then you need to fix yourself, and the sooner the better.
I have no idea what material was on that exam that was so “triggering”, but it’s a US History exam, and they’re citing a white supremacist mass murderer, so I imagine something to do with shootings or racism. News flash. Shootings and racism both existed and exist, and will continue to exist. The world is much safer today than it was fifty or a hundred or a thousand years ago, but horrible things will never completely cease to be.
The world can be a beautiful place, but it can be an awful place, too. More awful than many of you will ever know or experience. And historically, it’s been many, many times more brutal for almost everybody. Unbelievably so. And not just human-on-human violence; mother nature also wants you dead. Winter does not want you to live. But you live in a house, with a thermostat, so you’ve forgotten about how brutal winter is. You’re at a comfy 68 degrees, always. And if you’re not careful, you’re going to turn so soft that a question on a test is going to “traumatize” you.
And not for nothing, I have students who have been through literal wars, and they are laughing at you. To be clear - they are not laughing at, or minimizing, the racially-motivated massacre in Buffalo. They are laughing at you for hiding exam questions from NY students en masse because a bad thing happened somewhere in the state. You who think that’s a good idea: you’re soft, and it’s funny.
I’ve been teaching, for the majority of the past 15 years, African Americans & immigrants/refugees, and something tells me the demographic who are most worried about test questions “traumatizing” kids ain’t them. It’s more likely the same people with “In this house we believe in…” signs on their front lawn. For those people, it’s all about them, their unexamined claims, their unearned moral superiority, and their self-indulgent indignation. They’re weak.
This is also the same state that insists that child survivors of war sit for fifteen hours straight of standardized testing (9am until 12midnight) with graduation on the line (something I’ve seen multiple times myself), but have no problem with canceling the entire exam because a question may “traumatize” a student.
For the record, I don’t think Regents exams should be a criteria for graduation. I think it narrows the scope of what we teach, boxes students out of opportunities, and fosters poisonous levels of metric fixation. They should be optional. However, this is not the message we want to be sending to students. Weakness is not a virtue.