"a whirlwind of activity" helps create a mood of anticipation because I'm waiting for the precious "jumps quartz box keg" to appear, making a not unimpressive 38-character pangram.

WTF?

Clearly Since THE ATHEISTS have taken over the school system in california and no longer allow the teaching of the Divinity Of Dubya is there any chance that innocent children would be able to learn that NUMBER THEORY IS JUST A THEORY!!!

Rather than having God Hating America Bashing Communist Red Propoganda Forced Down Their Throats By Gay HomoZeuxal Pirate Canadianist Zombies who want to take away the high paying jobs from White People!!!

The State's official answer is "a whirlwind of activity", by the way.

What stoner proposed those answers?

The scary thing is, I TEACH high school English, and I can't tell which of those answers the stupid State wants to see. None of them are particularly good answers.

When I first arrived in China and began teaching English, I was shocked at how openly and routinely the students cheated... then the headmaster showed me the standardized multiple-choice English test they would be required to pass at the end of the semester. A good score on this test, he told me, was terribly important in getting into a university.

The test was obviously written by non-English speakers, and at least half the questions either had no correct answer, had more than one correct answer, or made absolutely no sense at all. "What's the difference between a duck?" would not have been out of place on the damn thing.

I don't think much of academic cheating, but what other chance did my students have? I made an extra copy of the test's answers and took it to class the next day. "I was just looking at the answers to your semester final exam," I told my students as I waved the sheet in the air and placed it carelessly on the desk. "I have to go take care of something, I'll be back in ten minutes."

Naturally, the sheet was gone when I came back, and I pretended not to notice.

This test, with its designated answer, was obviously written before the internets.

"long hot afternoons" is a classic phrase in the opening sentence of countless Penthouse Stories, and "jammed onto racks" similarly laden with meaning, albeit slightly more towards the fetish side of the aisle. Either could be construed as encouraging antici...PAtion.

The California public schools system is the classic case study of producer capture - in this case, by the teaching unions - and may well decline further, whatever you hear about 'No Child Left Behind'.

The essential difference between schools in Calcutta and East LA isn't the disparity in funding, nor the fact that the majority of Californian public-sector teachers turn up to teach and Indian ones largely do not; it is that the desperately-poor in the slums and shanties of Calcutta are prepared to pay, even at the breadline, to secure a basic education for their children if the state is unwilling and unable to provide it. The underclass and lower classes in America do not appear to value literacy and do not support the schools.

The middle and upper classes in both countries are well aware of the intractability of their public sector and the inneffectivenesss of democracy: in some cases the articulate middle classes hog the resources and achieve high standards for a lucky not-so-many, and in others they follow the rich and pay for primary and secondary education. It follows that the affluent suburbs on the other side of town have better schools: pretty damn' good, actually, and I don't doubt that teachers there are equally frustrated by the low quality of the test...

So let's offer a cynical opinion: in a state where there are such marked differences in the quality of schools, the authorities perceive a need to obfuscate rather than collect and collate objective data. Written tests in which the 'correct' answers are not a matter of education and ability, but one of random chance, would be an effective way of doing so.

Without reading comments, the whirlwind answer is what the standardized test people want to see. It assumes a cultural background including stories of frenzied activity leading up to significant events like school plays and Christmas, which fits middle-class white North America.

Multiple-choice tests are principally useful for evaluating peoples' skills at answering multiple-choice tests.

I voted for "long hot afternoons," although it's just my preference. I would have picked "an untapped keg" in a heartbeat!

CaliFUCKya, you misspelled it AGAIN.

I said get out. You people refuse to leave. You state that there are reasons for staying, like "A" and "B" and "C" and "waaaah."

Anything you can do in Califuckya you can do somewhere else.