I teach in Washington State, where the standardized test being used is theWashington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL). On the Web site created to provide information about this test, Dr. Terry Bergeson, Washington's Superintendent of Public Instruction, tells readers that the WASL is "an important part of the state's ongoing work to improve our public schools and better educate every student for today's fast-changing, global environment."

Now, I have met Dr. Bergeson, and she is an intelligent and interesting woman. She is an experienced educator with innovative ideas. But every year about this time I wonder if the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction is holdingDr. Bergeson as a hostage in some back room while Larry, Moe and Curly develop the WASL test. I'll explain why.

I have been an English teacher in Washington State for 14 years. I am also a writer (as I hope you have discovered by now), and teaching writing is what I consider to be my specialty. I love teaching kids to write with ease and pleasure and strength. I have developed some ideas I originally lifted from Peter Elbow, and now have a program that is pretty effective. The problem is that like virtually everyone else in the industrialized world, I write and teach my students to write using computers. You know, the information age and all.

Unfortunately, Washington State, home of Bill Gates and those Microsoft outlaws, has apparently not discovered the fact that for almost a decade virtually all human beings with electricity communicate using computers. That's right folks, in Washington State, the standardized test used to determine if our students are able to write at an acceptable level, the test used to find out if our students are prepared for "today's fast-changing global environment," is taken, not using computers, but using that venerable standby- the #2 pencil.

As Dave Barry says, "I am not making this up." This year, something in the neighborhood of 80,000 Washington tenth grade students will be forced to set aside the computers they have been using and learning to write on for most of their personal and academic lives. Those kids will be forced to walk into a room, will be given a pencil, and told to write paragraphs and essays using that pencil. If they do not write well enough using what for them is a strange antique technology, they do not get to graduate from high school and take their place in "today's fast-changing global environment." I am not making this up. Washington State tests its students' competence for life in the information age using pencils.

Marc Prensky argues that our students are what he calls "digital natives," people who grew up using technology. For our students, computer-based technology is the most common and powerful means of communication. Those of us who are geezers, who grew up before computers, are what Prensky calls "digital immigrants." We try to understand and participate in the culture of technology, but it will never be as familiar to us, and we will never understand or use it as effectively as the students we are teaching.

I can only imagine what convoluted process resulted in a bunch of digital immigrants forcing our digital natives to use pencils to demonstrate competence in a global world during the information age.

Will someone go to Olympia and set Dr. Bergeson free? Otherwise, Larry, Moe and Curly will be testing 80,000 tenth grade students next week to see if they know how to use pencils.

Published March 20, 2007