Last week, eight graders in New York State taking the ELA exam encountered “The Hare and the Pineapple,” a fractured fable somewhat freely adapted from a section of Daniel Pinkwater’s 1990 novel Borgel. (If you somehow missed this, you can get all the facts here.) In the story, a pineapple (originally, an eggplant) challenges a hare to a race, loses the race and is devoured; it’s blissfully meaningless, as liberatingly subversive as the best of Pinkwater’s work, and belongs, I would argue, on a bookshelf in every American home. Where it does not belong, however, is on a high-stakes standardized test—and the absurd multiple choice questions accompanying it made that even clearer.
So the usual news sources and blogs went nuts with the story (Pinkwater even wrote a column), and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott called for greater rigor (whatever that means), and parent and teacher groups howled about accountability while Pearson, the corporation responsible for the test, remained essentially silent (despite their 32 million dollar contract with the state). As for me, I was in ecstasy.
See, Daniel Pinkwater has been one of the towering figures in my reading life since I first began to realize, at 7 or 8, that there was a world outside my parents’ house. His books taught me that the most meaningful education is the one you seek out on your own—in strange neighborhoods and public spaces, used bookstores, libraries, art house movie theaters and midnight beer gardens—and that no matter how much of an outsider you are, you can always find strength in the community of likeminded weirdos. Pinkwater laces his books with oblique references to both high- and counter- culture, depth charges that exploded years later, when I first encountered Mozart, Ram Dass, Yiddish and the Illuminatus Trilogy. Even as an adult, some of my closest friendships have their starts in discovering a shared love of the great man’s books.
So for the ELA to have been even partly derailed by “The Hare and the Pineapple”—it was…delicious. Like the Dadaist events staged by the heroes of Pinkwater’s Young Adult Novel it seemed like an example of lunatic poetic justice. And it reminded us of the equally lunatic, though more insidious, importance given to the 8th Grade ELA exam and to all the other broken instruments of assessment whose results, when plugged into formulas with margins of error of up to 50%, largely determine whether or not a teacher, or a school, has a future.
Even more powerfully, I was reminded of another story– Harlan Ellison’s dystopian classic, “‘Repent, Harlequin!’, Said the Ticktock Man,” in which all human activity is regulated by a draconian master schedule, and where man’s only hope of freedom lies in the Harlequin, a ”japer of jabberwocky and jive” who, in a famous scene, floods a busy commuter space with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of jellybeans.
It was great fun to watch the Department of Education’s slidewalks grind to halt, gummed up by Pinkwater’s Zen koan of a Dada fable, and to think: This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a pineapple.
Eventually, the proper corrections were made, the questions discounted and the slidewalks returned to speed. Now, a week later, everything’s back in place and nothing seems to have changed.
EXCEPT– now, in our collective memory, there’s a story about a failed test, a story so utterly absurd that we will invoke it with every new study that reveals just how flawed the DoE’s reliance on testing is. Some testmaking Harlequin, intentionally or not, threw a pineapple into the works.
And it’s worth remembering, I think, that in World War II, “pineapple” was slang for grenade.
Len Schiff: In Verse Operations 