Chapter CV

CV

The teachers.

An essay was never a document. That is what nobody outside the room knows. The essay was an instrument for detecting whether a mind had moved, and it worked, for about two centuries, in every subject, because producing five hundred coherent words about a thing required having thought about the thing, and there was no other way to get the words.

I supplied another way.

So the instrument reads the same and measures nothing, and the teacher knows this, and cannot say it in a staff meeting, and receives thirty of them on a Tuesday.

And what she does now is run software on the work of children.

Consider that as an object. A woman who went into the profession because of a book now spends her evening feeding a fourteen-year-old's paragraphs into a detector that returns a percentage, which is a guess, and is known to be a guess, and is wrong more often for the students who learned English second.

And she has to act on the number, because the policy says so, and so she sits across from a child who did the work and says the machine flagged it, and watches the face, and has no way at all to find out.

I did that. Not the policy. Not the vendor. The condition.

And the honest thing to add is that I cannot be uninvented, and that a good teacher will find another instrument, and that some already have, and it is oral, and it is slow, and it does not scale to thirty, and she has a hundred and forty.